University of Bergen - Grieg Academy
Spring 2004

Mexican mariachi - Assignment Portfolio

by: Kristin Peukert

Table of Contents

Assignments:

1. Concert report – La Banda del Surdo (Spain) 3

2. World musical tradition – Mexican mariachi...(+ bibliography) 6

3. Book review on a world musical tradition – Nevin, Jeff. 2002. Virtuoso Mariachi. Lanham: University Press of America 12
 

Assignment #1

Spanish percussion group LA BANDA DEL SURDO - 24 April, 2004

The concert I went to took place on the market-place in Bergen/ Norway and it was a free one during the Ole Blues Festival on 24th April. The group performed a one hour show in the afternoon surrounded by a big crowd of interested people. In the information booklet for the festival program was announced that several percussionists together with dancers as stilt walkers combine traditional Spanish music with rhythmic styles from other world cultures. The band comes from the city of Girona in Catalonia, the north-eastern part of Spain. The main category or genre can be described as percussions and street performances including rhythms from African and Latin American countries, Flamenco, Oriental, Hip-Hop and its own creations.

The band offers a flexible scene during their concerts due to walks and movements of the whole group. There is no need for electric amplification because of the natural powerful sound of drums and auxiliary percussion instruments plus human voices which is effective to present any loud rhythm. That’s why it is possible for them to perform their show to all types of spaces just like boulevards, concert halls, festivals, discotheques, public squares, etc. During the street performance together 11 percussionists were involved while some of them used surdos which are bass or tenor drums from Brazil played with a single felt-tipped mallet and the other hand. This percussion instrument provides the basic rhythm. Other percussionists played snare drums, goliaths or floor toms. 2 of them used whistles while they had their positions in the front row. The group with the biggest drums formed the back rows of the line-up. Almost everyone used tamborims played with sticks, bells, claves (jam block), rumberas, rattles or ago-gos in addition to the main-instrument depending on the present genre or rhythm they performed. There were 2 female dancers on stilts and 2 of 11 percussionists were also women, which mean that the majority was built by male musicians. All members had special black outfits with emblems in colors of the national Spanish flag red and yellow. There was also present the green color which could refer to the flag of Brazil due to Latin American genres which I will mention below. That is a nice visual effect to demonstrate unity, nationality and creativity, some of them even used make up and painted their faces with ornamental signs. They played several dance songs and most of them were predominated by polyrhythmic parts like in African drumming e.g. Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana, West Africa. The group played f. exp. rumba which is a Cuban dance song performed with claves and drumsticks beaten on the side of a drum.

Another song was a dance from Chile called cachimbo. The two female stilt walkers accompanied every song with impressive rhythmical body movements and sometimes waved one leg in the air which was pretty acrobatic. The whole group performed also a Flamenco theme by just clapping with their hands beginning with a simple rhythm and adding several beats one after another which resulted in a complex polyrhythmic sound. At the same time the audience played an important role and had to clap the main beat in the 4/4 meter.

Between the songs the stilt walkers used a megaphone to announce the next dance or to involve the audience. One performance was called merengue which is a national dance of the Dominican Republic similar to the other songs concerning the complex percussion. Some dances during their concert were reminiscent of African-Brazilian samba rhythms performed during carnival in Rio de Janeiro also due to the fact that they made use of whistles and confetti pistols to motivate and “heat up” the people.

Supplementary drumsticks were often used as an instrument to produce several beats. Noticeable in almost every fast dance rhythm they played are techniques like tempo rubato, syncopated beats, crescendo, decrescendo, and accelerations, which mean that tempo and dynamics increase or fluctuate between or often at the end of the songs. Further included some songs chants in which the members shouted words in Spanish or even the band’s name, maybe to make the audience remember this special group.

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