PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Daniel Alomía Robles Born January 3, 1871, Huánuco, Peru. Died July 17, 1942, Lima, Peru.

El cóndor pasa (Arranged by Alberto Gonzales and edited by Miguel Harth-Bedoya)

El cóndor pasa was composed in 1913. The work is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, bass drum, rainstick, shells, suspended cymbal, tambourine, tenor drum, and strings. Performance time is approximately four minutes.

Although the origins of the song El cóndor pasa (The condor passes) date back to the age of the Incas, the popular form of the melody we hear today was composed in 1913 by Daniel Alomía Robles for the finale of his zarzuela El cóndor pasa. In the musical play, the Andean condor stands as a symbol of freedom in a conflict between a Peruvian miner and his European boss. It was a huge hit at a time of emerging national identity and ran for some 3,000 performances.

Alomía Robles was a trained ethnomusicologist and composer who became interested in indigenous music during a sojourn with the Campas tribe in 1896. According to Jane Vial Jaffe, who has written extensively about the Inca Trail project,

With his wife, pianist Sebastiana Godoy, he notated some seven hundred melodies and made over three hundred harmonizations of Andean tribal music collected on numerous trips through the mountains of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. His close to 240 original compositions typically draw on these tunes. He also gathered stories, instruments, and ceramics of old Peruvian cultures.

As with the later fieldwork of Bartók and Kodály in their native Hungary, Alomía Robles’s own compositions were deeply influenced by the discovery of the indigenous music of his homeland. As Jaffe writes of El cóndor pasa,

Alomía Robles based his simple, unforgettable melody on a cachua—a courtship circle dance— presumably containing vestiges of Incan elements—in which fur- and feather-clad dancers imitate movements of animals, and men and women alternate in singing amorous verses. This particular cachua from Jauja appears in French ethnomusicologist Marguerite Béclard d’Harcourt’s famous collection The Music of the Incas, published in 1925—well after Alomía Robles’s version became popular.

In the orchestral version performed this week, flutes and bass drum figure prominently, suggesting a cachua’s typical accompaniment of sicuri (panpipes) and bombo (bass drum), which would have been joined by guitar, charango (small lute), and harp.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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