Musicians in 17th Century Bogotá didn't need electric guitars and shiny drum sets to get their audiences moving to the beat. Although the music of the Renaissance and early Baroque--and particularly church music--is often regarded as austere and inaccessible, much of it belies this image.
To prove it, a group of spirited young musicians from the Colombian capital played a program of early Latin American music in September at the IDB's Washington, D.C., headquarters that kept toes tapping in the overflow audience.
Called Música Ficta ("ficta" referring to the Renaissance practice of using accidentals to prevent intervals that were prohibited for harmonic or symbolic reasons), the seven-member group was making its first United States performance after Latin American and European appearances. The IDB concert was presented by the Bank's Cultural Center.
Lively church music? "Think of it as gospel music," says Música Ficta director Carlos Serrano. The pieces were often played at processionals, where their strong, often syncopated rhythms, kept the churchgoers moving. Once inside the cathedral, parishioners would occasionally even get up and dance.
The Church couldn't afford to have dull music, according to Serrano. One of Spain's great missions in the New World was to convert the indigenous people to Catholicism, and music was a large part of the Church's appeal. In fact, the Spaniards instructed the Indians to play and make musical instruments, just as they taught them to paint religious scenes.
So too Serrano and his group are making converts of modern audiences, which are drawn to the exotic sights and sounds of the replicas of early instruments his group uses. Against the beating of a hide-covered drum, the dulcian, a precursor to the bassoon, lays a base line while a guitar-like vihuela sets down the chords. A double reed shawm and a pair of high-pitched recorders trade solo parts with the singers.
Mastering these quirky instruments can be a challenge, as can finding early music scores. Although Serrano lives only a couple of blocks from the Bogotá cathedral, one of Latin America's finest repositories of original material, he has had no luck in gaining admittance. Most of the music his group plays comes from United States archives, particularly from the collection at Indiana University in Bloomington, where the group is studying at the Early Music Institute.
The early music movement was pioneered in England and the Netherlands and then spread to the rest of Europe and North America in the 1970s. Argentina is the leading Latin American center for early music, followed by Brazil and Mexico.