The year is 1978, in full Cold War, and I am going traveling to the Soviet Union with my mission penciled on a scrap of paper. I'm on a quest to find those haunting eyes and a connection severed by war and history that only music can redeem. This is the true story of how I found myself behind the Iron Curtain with a Costa Rican choir, searching for -- and singing to -- Bertha, my Lara (of Dr. Zhivago fame).
Music credits (in order used)
* From Russia With Love,  Gájer Bálint / Matt Munro 
* Lara's Theme from Dr. Zhizago, Lev Zabeginsky, balalaika
* vocalise, Chamber Choir of the Costa Rican National Symphony Orchestra 
* O Costa Rica (trad. Costa Rica)
* 1812 Overture (clip), P. Tchaikovsky
* Mi Vida Es Cantar (clip), Celia Cruz
* The Star Spangled Banner 
* Costa Rica National Anthem, sung by Coro Lirico Herediano
* Romeo and Juliet (clip), P. Tchaikovsky
* La Guardia Morada (trad. Costa Rica), sung by the Chamber Choir of the Costa Rican National Symphony Orchestra

To Russia with Love:  A Musical Memory and Cold War Story

40-min. Spanish-language feature based on my 12 min English-language piece with Alejo Torrejón (track on this Soundcloud page), produced in 2022n by the makers of the Argentine podcast series Fugas. With just a soccer ball and a knife, 72 Bolivian political prisoners locked away on the island of Coati overpowered their jailers, commandeered a fleet of rickety boats across Lake Titicaca, trekked by night into Peru, and escaped unscathed from the clutches of the Gen. Hugo Banzer regime to safe haven in Cuba. The 1972 escape from the Alcatraz of the Altiplano exposed the Bolivian military's repressive round-up of its leftist opponents, as recalled 50 years later by its aging protagonists.
* VIDEO (in Spanish with English subtitles)Buenos Aires, May 2022:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5b7Iax-XFo
(English subtitles do not correspond exactly to English transcript)
* PHOTO GALLERY:
https://www.revistaanfibia.com/web-stories/fugas-la-alcatraz-del-altiplano/?fbclid=IwAR3s7BcTNa4xmmrCFsdvuBismMpvEKUBGAHN2GSCWMjCvtThyReHpaXgFD8

La Alcatraz del Altiplano (40 min. Spanish version by Fugas podcast)

In honor of Indigenous Day 2022,  La Raza Chronicles (KPFA 94.1 FM) rebroadcast this 2016 interview with Mapuche songstress Beatriz Pichi Malén. 
The singer-songwriter takes her inspiration from traditional Mapuche music, singing in Mapudungun. 
Interview conducted in January 2013 in Santiago, Chile. 
Song selection taken from BPM's albums: Plata (2000) and Añil (2005).
Originally  aired on La Raza Chronicles, KPFA 94.1 FM, Tuesday, June 30, 2015. Updated to include snippets from her Oct 2 presentation in the Victor Jara Memorial Festival, marking what would have been the 90th birthday of the slain protest singer, killed 49 years ago by the Pinochet regime. (The concert took place in the stadium where Victor Jara was killed, and that now bears his name.)

Mapuche Songstress Beatriz Pichi Malén (Festival Victor Jara, 2022)

I'm a singer in the San Francisco Bach Choir. Our director Magen Solomon asked me to comment on our Tesoros Dorados concert because I've had the good fortune to visit some of the churches where this music was written, then lost, then rediscovered, and now restored.  

I lived in Latin America for many decades, and there was never a time there that I was not singing in a choir -- or two. Works from the cathedrals and chapels of what had been the Spanish colonies in the Americas were becoming a staple of Latin American choral repertory. 

I recently read a comment by a scholar that "it can be tempting to think of Latin America Baroque music as something recently rediscovered, an exotic add-on to the story of 'Western' music. But it is nothing of the sort. A Bolivian orchestra playing the music of Domenico Zipoli in the heart of the jungle is part of the same tradition as English choral societies singing Messiah."

The eastern part of Bolivia known as the Chiquitania is awash with the sounds of Zipoli, who is always a featured composer of the biannual music festival held there, and whose works are part of our program.

I attended the festival in 2008 and I had the opportunity to interview Father Piotr Nawrot, a Polish priest and musicologist who was living there. He had already painstakingly restored 27 volumes -- and counting -- of music composed by European priests and their Indian acolytes, and played on instruments that they built themselves.

The manuscripts had been left behind in dust bins and church balconies when the Jesuits were expelled by the Spanish crown in 1767. Others were in the possession of ordinary people who had safeguarded them in boxes in their homes. 

Here's what Nawrot told me that people would tell him: 

"Father, if this is lost — if it dies, this tradition — we are all lost. We will die together with this manuscript. You see, this music was not just music, it was sacred music." 

I guess that's what you'd expect a priest to say, no? 

For me, I love the fact that this music has a home-grown, American history. We sing hymns in Nahuatl  and processionals in Quechua to Diospamaman. We sing a saucy invitation to a divine husband from a cloistered nun who was the first Latin American feminist. 

There's nothing in this music to suggest that terrible things were happening outside the cloister walls -- things like cultural erasure, subjugation, and the rest. This music was written to evangelize,  but it is the same music that convinced the colonizing Europeans that the "Indians" in their power were not animals, as professed --  but human... and divinely inspired.

That's what I love about our Tesoros Dorados concert.

What I love about the San Francisco Bach Choir's Tesoros Dorados concert

Bolivian Mission Towns Revive Baroque Legacy
Broadcast on NPR May 15, 2008
At an international Baroque music festival this month, strains of Bach and Vivaldi are stirring in the same mission towns that the Jesuits established in the 17th century. The festival takes place in an area known as the Chiquitania — a World Heritage Site that is home to the Chiquitano Indians, the original inhabitants of the region in eastern Bolivia.
Its eight mission towns not only have restored their original churches but have reconstructed thousands of pages of original musical scores from the Jesuit period that began with the 1691 founding of the San Javier mission.
The towns' children are keeping the musical legacy alive. Over the last decade, youth orchestras have sprung up in every mission in the lush, steamy lowlands, reviving interest in Baroque culture.
Father Piotr Nawrot, a Polish priest and musicologist, has painstakingly restored 27 volumes of music, a treasure trove that he calls his "second conversion."
Among his discoveries was that, while the Jesuits used music as a tool of evangelization, the indigenous populations transformed it into their own.
"I believe we should never call these Jesuit missions. They should be called Chiquitano missions....The mission would belong to the people," Nawrot says.
Ariel Suarez, a 16-year-old violinist from the Orchestra of the Mission of San Jose de Chiquitos, is part of that legacy.
Suarez and his fellow orchestra members perform in bare feet and simple garb to express their indigenous lineage. He says the young musicians feel the music of their ancestors "in their heart" and the stormy rhythms of their tropical climate in their playing. Their musical tradition is a cross-pollination of the cultural impulses of Europe and the indigenous traditions of the Chiquitano.
Musicians in the San Jose Orchestra keep a grueling schedule, rehearsing four to five hours a day. But director Santiago Lusardi says they also possess an innate talent, passed down from earlier generations, that startled Europeans when they first learned of the Indians' musical prowess.
"In Europe, they really were surprised. They were discussing if the [Indians] were people or animals — but they were playing like people. So that's why they say, 'They can't talk but they can play like people, so they are people.' It's incredible, but it was like this," Lusardi says.
The Spanish Crown ordered the Jesuits to quit the South American interior in 1767. They left behind thousands of manuscripts, now restored, that make up the largest Jesuit collection of music in the Americas and Asia. It's stored in the Mission of Concepcion, the nerve center for Chiquitania's musical restoration.
Project overseer Javier Mendoza says he'd rather not know the value of the archive, which has not been assessed — he gets nervous thinking about theft.
Lusardi, conductor of the San Jose Orchestra, gets goose bumps viewing the archive. "This is the magic of music right here," he says. "You can take a piece of paper from 300 or 400 years ago and bring it alive again by playing the music that's written on it."
The 1986 film The Mission — with Ennio Morricone's soaring score — stirred interest in the missions that stretched from Argentina north to the Chiquitania.
Nawrot, the Polish priest, says many of the centuries-old musical manuscripts he reconstructed were in the hands of ordinary people who had stored them alongside precious heirlooms in simple boxes. Other scores turned up in dust bins in forgotten church balconies.
But Nawrot says people more commonly safeguarded the music and would tell him, "Father, if this is lost — if it dies, this tradition — we are all lost. We will die together with this manuscript."
"This music was not just music, it was sacred music," Nawrot says. Even today, the missions' young musicians say it makes them "feel closer to God."

mplates/story/story.php?storyId=90321843

Bolivian Mission Towns Revive Long-Lost Baroque Musical Legacy

It's the most spectacular jailbreak you've never heard of. Like so many other great Latin American escapades, it started with a soccer match.  The game took place on an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca, the inland sea between Bolivia and Peru.  It's an island that once housed the Virgin Brides of the Inca. Tourists know it as the Island of the Moon. At the time, it was home to scores of political prisoners -- young revolutionaries in the Che Guevara mold. They knew it as Coati, the Alcatraz of the Andes, a prison from which there was no escape.  Until one day, a well-placed kick of a soccer ball propelled its 72 inmates into freedom.
*****
PHOTOS: Map of escape route; postcard from Island of the Moon; Alejandro Torrejón, with photo of the plaza of Sucre, and with a candidate for the Chuquisaca Senate. Is it intentional or coincidental that "el Profesor" has coati hides like trophies on the wall?
* * * * *
ENGLISH VOICE: Yvan Iturriaga
* * * * *
MUSIC

Viva Mi Patria Bolivia   
Benjo Cruz 
https://ww.youtube.com/watch?v=qIR4ciOqeU0

Lamento Boliviano
Viento Andino
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jSQTYCdnSg

Altiplano
Fiesta Aymara (1975-Maya)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W06jdXxmgmg

Kamaq
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7U_tnxdPq8
 
A Cuba 
Victor Jara
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGXk0iPxvAI

La Internacional
Partido Comunista de Uruguay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRrS71dKhi8

El Regreso 
Matilde Cazasola
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYe8VcdkldM

Viva Mi Patria Bolivia 
A. Camacho (sung by Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whnWON6Tvzk

To Russia with Love: A Musical Memory and Cold War Story

Lezak Shallat

Related tracks