INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR MUSIC EDUCATION

XXIV INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, Edmonton, Canadá, July  2000

Speech delivered at the Plenary Session, July 23rd. 2000.

The Panel for the session was chaired by Patricia Shehan Campbel (USA) and integrated by María del Carmen Aguilar (Argentina),
Selete Nyomi (Ghana) and Yosihiko Tokumaru (Japan) 

HERITAGE: THE SURVIVAL OF CULTURAL TRADITIONS IN A CHANGING WORLD  

by María del Carmen Aguilar

Two subjects call for our attention today: the results of access to the world's cultures through the media, and the problem of preservation of cultural products in the frame of changes and migrations. Let me focus on the first one.

ACCESS AND RESPECT

In our globalised world, the access to the greatest amount of information seems to have become a positive value. Enclyclopedias, libraries and museums burden the internet with an unapproachable amount of items; hundreds of TV shows take us on journeys around all the corners of the globe; huge recording companies recycle their catalogues, using material taken from the previously absorbed small regional companies. In this mix of business and good intentions, we' are going to reflect today on the importance of the access to the life and art production of the cultures.

Thanks to technology, big portions of the world, which yesterday were distant and blurred, seem to be closer today. The celebration of the Millenium, broadcast during more than 24 hours by an almost whole global TV network, tried to show us representative images from each country, region and city. We watched many different things, from stylised ballets, specially prepared for the event, to crowds drinking in the light of fireworks; from naive songs talking about universal friendship, to copies of singers in fashion transplanted to the antipodes; from ancestral rites performed for the cameras to those new rites, such as rock concerts, born from and for the entertainment industry. Did we learn something about these cultures? The answer is not clear. What is clear is that the millionaire figures involved in the event were able to mobilise the will, effort and skills of many peoples and institutions, to such an extent that organisations like UNICEF or UNESCO would envy. This shows that human beings have the talent to organise and understand themselves, for which it is enough to find the adequate motivation and sponsorship.

Which matters are involved in this game of showing your own culture and having access to others'? Human individuals tend to identify themselves by their belonging to a group: family, clan, race, region, country, religion give individuals a psychological feeling of safety, which says that insiders are worthy of trust and outsiders are threatening. Maturity, either of individuals or peoples, involves the development of the skill of recognising values in others and accepting their differences. Fear can stop this process at several stages: from considering the others"exotic", and adopting a patronizing attitude, to trying to eliminate them or take advantage of their weakness to do good business.

Not all cultures wish to show themselves to others. The Mapuches, an aboriginal group living in the south of Argentina and Chile celebrate the Nguillatun, the rite of begging for the earth's fertility, in the strictest possible secret and don't allow anybody alien to the community to participate in their ceremony. On the other hand, other Argentine aboriginal groups, such as the Wichis, pose a different problem. When their youngsters attend school they end up either forgetting their mother tongue or giving up studying altogether. Therefore these people fight for a bilingual education, so that they can learn, preserve and transmit songs, narratives and mythes of their culture in their own language.

Who should be in charge of showing a cultural phenomenon? When some of the TV travel shows get to the corner of the world you live in, you realise they show a selective, incomplete, innacurate image, sometimes distorted by the maker's or sponsor's values and interests. It is well known that the presence of a single foreigner at an event imposes an inevitable distortion on the event itself. On the other hand, each observer molds the event according to his own ideas: on many occasions, the selection of material and the way of showing it speaks more about the eye that watches it than about the event itself.

It seems, then, that it would be desirable that the "owners" themselves should be the ones to show a cultural event. The thing is they don't usually have the resources to do it. In this globalised world the deep inequality of opportunities among peoples and regions is more and more clear . As long as Third World countries have to pay millions of dollars per day for their external debt, as long as the fate of a community is in the hands of three or four international investors, who are here today  and tomorrow may decide that it is more profitable to move away, people can hardly be protected, not only in terms of preservation and diffusion of culture, but in bare terms of survival.

But if the "owners" of a culture don't have the resources to show it, somebody will sell it. A cultural event can be sold, and also can involve a great deal of money. Carnival, the medieval feast that proposes three days of giving loose rein to passions and desires before the forty days of Lent, was transplanted to South America by the conquerors. In Brazil, especially in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Carnival was, for many years, a genuine popular feast: three days and nights of dancing on the streets, the vital explosion of a people who lives subdued by the hardest life conditions. Nowadays, this million-dollar business, planned exclusively for the tourists and the TV, designed by choreographers, stage directors, intelectuals and politicians, sponsored by money of a dubious origin, enriches everybody but its legitime owners.

PRESERVATION AND RENEWAL

Let me go on now to the second subject: the preservation of cultural products in a frame of changes and migrations.
No cultural tradition remains identical in time. When UNESCO published its collection of records in the 60's we became acquainted with some musics that aren't heard anymore. Frozen forever in records, they joined the family of "one sample of its species", like an electronic work, or a song sung by The Beatles. But, if our interest is focused on living music, daily produced by each culture, we see that a number of music species are about to become extinct. What shall we do? Shall we rescue them for the museum? Shall we help them survive? Shall we let them fuse into the mainstream of the dominant culture? Shall we let them die away?

Latin America has been, for five centuries, a melting pot of cultures and traditions. Aboriginal cultures, survivors of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest, African traditions, preserved by slaves as a means of preserving their identity, and European traditions, got mixed in different proportions, following a process, often painful, that brought about an enormous variety of music styles. Loans, mixes and fusions generated by the need of expression have given birth to cultural events that people consider to be traditional. Let me give some examples.

Candombe is the name of an Africa-rooted music, which is played during the celebration of Carnival in Uruguay. As I mentioned before, Carnival is a European feast that never had anything to do with the African tradition. But in the XIXth century, descendants of slaves decided to take part in the feast, playing their drum ensembles. Today their performance is considered the most authentic expression of the feast.

Carnival in Bolivia includes the famous Diablada de Oruro, which is the Dance of Devils in the town of Oruro. This tradition started in 1920, when a group of university people decided to bring back to life an ancient indian miners' rite. Miners used to offer a sacred animal, a llama, in the depth of a cavern to El Tio (The Uncle), the spirit of the mines, which Christians identified as the Devil. So, this rite was transformed into a magnificent parade of masked devils, who dance and fight against legions of angels. This parade is considered today the most important part of Carnival celebrations.

To go on with Carnival, in the city of Buenos Aires this feast was forbidden during the last military dictatorship (1976-1983). So, together with the feast, the murgas disappeared. Murgas were community groups in which children and adults of all ages joined for inventing songs and dances and performing them during Carnival. The lyrics of these songs used to be satyrical and full of social criticism. When democracy came back, a group of young musicians started giving murga workshops for youngsters, and this allowed for a slow rebirthing of murga groups. Today each neighborhood in the city has its own murga group, wich is regularly invited to take part in school and civic celebrations.

Let me mention the tango, the music of my city, Buenos Aires. It was born at the turn of the XIXth century, during the time of the great European immigration to the city. The tango took its name from an African drum. It is played on a German instrument, the bandoneon, it is sung in Spanish, but in Italian style, it is danced in a sensual way that could be called 'Latin American' and it represents and identifies the city of Buenos Aires and its people.

Cultural events also happen to suffer from the attack of the dominant culture. In the high valleys of the Andes mountains the anual cycle of festivities devoted to Mother Earth, fertility, death and rebirth of life is still alive. The harder the effort the participants have to make, like walking for hours along difficult mountain paths, the better the celebration survives. On the other hand, the celebration tends to lose identity for different reasons. When located in more accesible places, people start to think that technology is equivalent to progress, and dominant culture is better than their own tradition, and soon audio devices and recorded music replace traditional songs and instruments. It also happens that politicians turn up and try to take possession of the event by organising festivals, parades and contests, so as to attract tourists, or even perhaps, recording producers may turn up, trying to introduce changes into music, so as to make it sell better. This process seems inevitable, although in certain cases, the educational efforts of local musicians and teachers have been successful in getting the respect of people for traditions and then keeping them alive.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

What can we learn from the cases mentioned above? First, people want to express themselves; second, cultures interact, but power inequality among them can be deadly to the weaker one.
Ecological awareness is waking up in humankind. It says that biological diversity is essential for life on earth, and the only way to preserve it is to take care of the enviroment. In the same way that people organise themselves to protect dolphins or whales, we could organise ourselves to protect cultural diversity. How can this be done?

I can think of two different kinds of answers. The first one focuses on the problem from a social point of view. Cultural diversity can be protected by protecting the people that produces it, by granting elementary survival and education means to them, as well as freeedom of expression, not subject to pressures or interferences. Each individual or cultural group should have the right to develop and value his own culture, and decide freely about keeping it unchanged or not.

The second answer focuses on the matter from the educational point of view. Although the media offer a fragmented and distorted vision of the cultures, they are there, within our grasp. Urgently, education needs to develop the ability to process information, so as to transform passive receivers into active and reflexive doers. In this way, each individual or culture will be able not only to process information, but also to use the media to produce it.

Finally, I believe that the most important thing we can do from the educational point of view is to revise our educational guidelines. We should learn to consider ourselves the heirs to a certain cultural heritage. Each one of us should understand that our own values were generated by belonging to a culture, and also that this particular culture is just one among the infinite expressions of the human spirit on earth, that is, we should humblly study our own culture in depth in the frame of humankind. In this way, perhaps each one of us will wish to respect and preserve our own culture, as well as approach others' with an open mind, in order to live together with differences, and to respect and celebrate them.