"¡Yao!": Encountering Q-Pop

After reading this article on BBC Mundo by Alejandro Millán Valencia a few weeks back, I’ve had the pleasure of encountering the musical artist LENIN, stage name of Lenin Tamayo, the 23-year-old Peruvian singer who is at the forefront of Q-Pop (Quechua Pop). Having embraced K-Pop (Korean Pop) as a source of camaraderie as a marginalized youth in school, he now combines that genre’s sounds and aesthetics with Peruvian elements rooted in traditional, indigenous Andean culture: clothing, dance, customs, and the Quechua language.

Photo Source: https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/peruvian-singer-aims-to-introduce-q-pop-/7231045.html

According to a 2021 AP News article by Franklin Briceño, the Quechuan language lies at the center of long-standing tensions in Peru that have social, economic, and ethnic ramifications. Quechua had once been the lingua franca of the Incan Empire, but following Spanish colonization it became heavily discriminated against, outlawed in the 1780s following an indigenous uprising and intensely villainized during the atrocious civil war that began in the 1980s.* This prejudice has persisted and intensified to the point at which today Peruvian Quechua speakers have internalized “linguistic shame,” a mechanism that Ingrid Piller states is directly linked to the normalization and acceptance of oppression.** For this reason, LENIN’s macaronic songs, featuring lyrics in both Quechua and Spanish are a significant expression of cultural identity, a counterargument to the current state of the language and culture which celebrates love and fun, self-expression and cultural roots.

The song ¿IMAYNATA? hits a lot of these themes. The verses in Spanish drip with swagger and self-confidence, declaring in a declamatory style, “I live without fear of walking / Only love and freedom,” and “I tell you in Spanish, in Quechua, or in English / the language doesn’t matter one way or the other” (translations are mine or Google Translate). The pre-chorus in Quechua, however, is a slow build in a higher vocal register, resonating with a gnawing doubt, “What are you looking at / When your heart is dead?” The chorus, still in Quechua, has few words, all confidence, answering the question “¿Imaynata? [How do you do it?]” with syncopated exclamations of “¡Yoa!” and “¡Walk!” weaved through a somewhat pirate-esque riff.***

Valencia’s BBC article includes an interview in which Lenin expresses some of his views on singing in Spanish versus Quechua. He says that a language like Spanish is full of innuendo and double meanings, offering more room for hypocrisy. Quechua, on the other hand, has less equivocation and is more direct in the way that it connects the speaker to the world. In Lenin’s view, this means that a Quechua speaker has first-hand contact with emotions and nature. This comes across in the song KUTIMUNI which contrasts distorted, mechanistic, or anxious sections in Spanish with sudden shifts to luminous and tranquil parts in Quechua where one can almost hear the whisper of birdsong.

Photo Source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/144071069/Inca-Kola-Murales

Perhaps the most summational demonstration of the message of indigenous cultural revival and celebration is the song INTIRAYMI (which happens to be my childen’s absolute favorite to sing with and dance to). The title translates to “Sun God Festival” and is in reference to an Incan festival that celebrated the winter solstice, which has since been revived in several South American contexts. Lenin taps into the joy of this festival with a rousing Spanish/Quechua chorus: “It’s Inti Raymi / Let’s go dance / It’s Inti Raymi / Let’s go dance / Because the night is young / Everyone sing / Because life is one / It’s a festival!” His music video goes further with images of the sun / Inti, the offering of sacred cocoa leaves, performances of the ancient scissor dance mixed with modern break dancing, Aya Huma masks, a mural by Adriana Hiromi and Jade Rivera in the Barranco district of Lima that declares “Hagamos un Perú que nos dé gusto [Let’s make a Peru that gives us pleasure]”, and a crowd of young and excited people celebrating in the streets.

I’m still discovering the riches of LENIN’s music and especially look forward to exploring it with my children who can’t seem to get enough… Cuando Estoy Aquí and AMARULLAQTA deserve a listen. It also has me wondering about genre hybridity and minority languages. While a conservative approach to the matter of music + minority language tends to stick to strictly traditional styles, futuristic approaches consider how old and new might be combined to create something thrillingly alive. While some genres seem to require linguistic conformity to English, others seem well suited to and even encouraging of linguistic variety. Afterall, the genre of K-Pop (Korea) interacts not only with Q-Pop (Quechua), but also J-Pop (Japan), C-Pop (China), and T-Pop (Thailand). And heavy metal’s proclivity for sub-genrification and theatricality provides lots of room for linguistic variation; Swiss folk-metal band Eluveitie sings some of their songs in Gaulish, a nostalgically dark / darkly nostalgic act of cultural revivification. Perhaps there are other ways that hybrid genres can encourage singers in minority languages to imagine a future where, to quote LENIN’s song INTIRAYMI, “the sun comes every moment ever closer.”

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*Briceño’s article mentions an interesting incident in which Peruvian Prime Minister Guido Bellido delivered a speech to Congress in Quechua, prompting some strong reactions from those in power who largely could not understand him. Translated, his message was equally stinging: “We have suffered for five hundred years. We walked slowly through hills and snowy peaks to arrive here in Congress, and have our voice heard… It’s time to change. It’s time for all of our country’s residents to look at each other as equals, without discrimination.”

** This pattern of dehumanization is all too common in historical narratives of colonizers attempting to erase the culture of the colonized, often through linguistic shame taught to children in (often forced) school settings: Scottish Gaelic in the UK, Tahitian in French Polynesia, all Native American languages in North America, Spanish in California, etc.

***This is the song that instantly became a favorite of my kids as the chorus is very easy to sing and has such a sweet groove. Plus the Quechua word for “walk” is “puriy,” which we initially mistook for “booty,” and who wouldn’t want to shout that out while driving in the car as an elementary school kid?

Giving and Taking with Ukrainian Ethnic-Chaos

In the Winter and Spring of this year, I was teaching two overlapping classes: “Survey of World Music” at Westmont College, and “Introduction to Music Studies: Music and Society” at UCSB. Then the Russian-Ukrainian War broke out, and despite the analysis by Kurzgesagt Labs that war at a national scale is no longer in fashion, this one seems full-blown, atrocious, and persistent. In response, I developed some lectures and projects for my courses that considered the intersections of music and culture to contextualize the current conflict. In my deep dive of Ukrainian history and music – which included some fascinating topics such as guilds of blind bandura and lira players (kozbars and lirnyks); nationalistic-minded, bourgeois folklorists such as Mykola Lysenko and their cultural agendas; Soviet power struggles over the arts and their own cultural agendas; and Project Polyphony’s contemporary recording of polyphonic singing (gurtoyoe penie) – the most wonderful thing to come out of it all was the band DakhaBrakha.

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DakhaBrakha means “give and take” and is a musical quartet featuring Marko Halanevych, Iryna Kovalenko, Olena Tsybulska, and Nina Garenetska. According to their website, the group seeks to create “a trans-national sound rooted in Ukrainian culture,” expressing a musical and performative character that is at once theatrical, eclectic, and powerful. They see themselves as cultural ambassadors, both for the international community, as well as fellow Ukrainians who continue to search for a unifying national identity. They call their musical genre “ethnic-chaos,” a perfectly apt name, given the melange of instruments and uncompromising hybridity of their pieces. The backbone of their instrumental sound consists of a cello (played by Nina in a unique tuning and originally bought at an antique shop) and drums (played by Olena). Vocally they typically contrast the voice of Marko (which runs the gamut from gravelly throat singing to Bobby McFerrin-esque falsetto) with the core three-part gurtoyne penie polyphony of Iryna, Olena, and Nina (all three have backgrounds in ethnomusicology and have done field work). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Each song is somehow its own entity. Here are a few that stand out to me.

Sho z-pod duba: This piece is a gem! Nina’s pizzicato cello groove is joined by Olena and Iryna on the drums and then Marko adds syncopated jabs on a saxophone (on album recording) or accordion (in live concert recordings). The music stops and Marko lets out sort of call to attention in scat: “Boppy boppy bibala doppy!” (It is this feature which has my kids requesting that we listen to the “Boppy boppy” song.) The groove continues, now with the three women singing the words to a folk song called “From Under the Oak”. It cryptically tells the story of Ivanko who leads his horse to water but cannot get it to drink. In frustration he beats the animal, only to have a Balaam’s donkey situation in which the horse pleads for mercy. As enigmatic as the words are, the overall vibe of the music is consistently upbeat, jaunty, and energetic, returning to the “Boppy boppy” exclamation and bursting with percussive riffs. Perhaps the horse knows better than Ivanko and has its own source of water and happiness?

Kolyskova: A lullaby called “Oh dear cat” opens this piece. The words have the quality of a folk riddle, casting images of a cat, a cradle, a child, the colors gold and white, and always the question of whether one “has enough”. The song is rendered simply and intimately. Recorded sounds of a crying infant are added to the mix, as well as a slowly rocking piano riff in the bass register before Marko sings English words in his falsetto range, weaving a tapestry of a silvery moon just out of reach and fragments of “there’s a time for everything” from Ecclesiastes. Nina’s cello enters with a melody while scintillating piano strikes echo from the upper register like nighttime stars. More lullaby lyrics arrive adorned in a different, more wide-ranging melody and sung with a slightly more urgent vocal quality. These lyrics, while still soothing, confess the care-giver’s fear, expressing the worry caused by caring for children in the midst of the precariousness of poverty. Seemingly out of nowhere another far-off voice begins, putting words to what had previously been an instrumental, pentatonic countermelody, but now energized with a bouncy vocal style that puts me in mind of Chinese folk song. All these elements weave in and out of each other, ending with the crying baby and solo lullaby.

Vanyusha: Beginning nightmarishly with an atmospheric combination of harshly whispered maledictions, a raw sustained synth tone reminiscent of a piercing headache, and menacing glissandi on the amplified cello, this piece eventually finds its feet with a rather urgent cello groove overlaid with a darabuka rhythm that sounds like a cantering horse. Iryna’s vocal line has a monotone or restrained quality, although the agitation begins to mount through a dramatic rendering of the words. The lyrics tell of a man named Vanyusha whose cruel mother wrote to him telling him that his wife Kateryna had wastefully squandered all of his possessions while he was away. He comes home and beheads her, only to realize that his mother had lied. He then beheads his mother. Following Iryna’s solo rendition, the ballad is repeated as the tempo increases, this time with Olena singing a strident countermelody and, eventually, Nina wailing a descant over the top. This brutal piece fades away into the same frightening mist with which it began.

Oy za lisochkom: “Behind the wood” starts in sepia as it were, the folksong sung a cappella as though recorded on the field in the early 1900s and played back on a crackling LP. An accordion with a tango-ish quality and drums establish the groove as two contrasting melodies — women with a poignantly soaring one, and Marko with a jumpy, declamatory one — take turns. The cello has a rhapsodic quality here, sustaining long notes and indulging in ornamentation, putting me in mind of Kayhan Kalhor playing the kamancheh. The piece ends with a sudden spike of energy, the drums working double time, the accordion punching out tone clusters, and the cello going off the rails with sounds reminiscent of a chicken being plucked.

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Last week Jess and I had the very great pleasure of hearing DakhaBrakha live in Sonoma. Already loving the music, it was incredibly powerful to see the performers in the flesh, to experience their impressive light and visual display, and to hear them speak about their belief in a free Ukraine. For an encore they played Baby, one of the all-time favorites of my son for its wicked harmonica sections. “Baby, show me your love…” Hopefully we can catch them again when they come back to the Bay Area next year.

The Sleepers Shall Rise

This last academic year I have had the personal and professional pleasure of working with Dr. Grey Brothers as the accompanist for Choral Union, the freshman choral group he founded and directs at Westmont College. Years back as an undergrad, Grey was my choir director, voice teacher, and musicology professor, and this year he retires from Westmont to (presumably) spend more time with his impressive collection of berets. In honor of my friendship with Grey and in commemoration of his time at Westmont, I composed a piece entitled “The Sleepers Shall Rise” for Choral Union, which was premiered at the Vocal Chamber Concert in April.

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Lyrics

George MacDonald

For the text of “The Sleepers Shall Rise” I used a four-stanza poem by Scottish poet and mystic George MacDonald (1824-1905):

Illustration by Arthur Hughes of the elder Princess Irene at her spinning wheel for the 1908 edition of The Princess and Curdie.

“The stars are spinning their threads,
And the clouds are the dust that flies,
And the suns are weaving them up
For the time when the sleepers shall rise.

The ocean in music rolls,
And gems are turning to eyes,
And the trees are gathering souls
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

The weepers are learning to smile,
And laughter to glean the sighs;
Burn and bury the care and guile,
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

Oh, the dews and the moths and the daisy red,
The larks and the glimmers and flows!
The lilies and sparrows and daily bread,
And the something that nobody knows!”

— George MacDonald (1883)

This enigmatic poem appears within MacDonald’s children’s fantasy novel The Princess and Curdie (1883), the sequel to The Princess and the Goblin (1870-72). In Chapter 8 “Curdie’s Mission", the young protagonist, a miner boy named Curdie, makes his way to the highest tower of a castle which he knows to be the workroom of the elder Princess Irene, an uncanny and mysterious “wise woman” character who has summoned him. (MacDonald has a penchant for these powerful yet unsettling female figures, from the good fairies of his fairy tales to the Wise Woman of The Double Story (1875) and the title character of At the Back of the North Wind (1868-71).) Curdie finds her at a spinning wheel, which flashes with light as it turns, impressing upon Curdie through its rhythmic movement a soul-stirring, emotional transcendence that he struggles to make sense of.

“Then the lady began to sing, and her wheel spun an accompaniment to her song, and the music of the wheel was like the music of an Aeolian harp blown upon by the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Oh, the sweet sounds of that spinning wheel! Now they were gold, now silver, now grass, now palm trees, now ancient cities, now rubies, now mountain brooks, now peacock’s feathers, now clouds, now snowdrops, and now mid-sea islands. But for the voice that sang through it all, about that I have no words to tell. It would make you weep if I were able to tell you what that was like, it was so beautiful and true and lovely. But this is something like the words of its song...”

Highly influenced by German Romanticism, MacDonald writes in a way that is simultaneously overwhelming, musical, childlike, and even alienating. The first stanza uses metaphors of spinning and weaving – a folk culture activity with enormous symbolic capital in Romanticism – and metaphorically connects them to the shifting, spinning, swirling phenomena of stars, clouds, and suns. The spiritual import and mysteriousness of nature continues into the second stanza as MacDonald anthropomorphizes the ocean, gems, and trees who are in the process of developing, growing, evolving. Actually it is unclear whether it is the natural world that is “becoming” or whether Curdie is merely becoming more aware of something that has been there all along. In the third stanza, MacDonald the preacher comes to the fore by focusing the processes of growth within the human soul, with a nod to the restorative Psalm 126:5 (“Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy”), and a characteristic emphasis on the holiness of laughter. In these first three stanzas, the final line speaks of the time or day “when the sleepers shall rise”, which reminds me of one of the central themes in MacDonald’s last major work of fiction, Lilith (1895). In the final stanza the poem erupts into a childlike list of objects; while it appears almost nonsensical, it can be interpreted as vitally meaningful, suggesting deep connections in a series of evocative images. The poem remains open-ended to the end, replacing the last line about waking from sleep with a “something that nobody knows”. (This reminds me of German poet Friedrich Klopstock’s Das Rosenband (1752) which states “I felt it well, and knew it not” [Ich fühlt' es wohl, und wußt' es nicht.]). As the narrator of Curdie and the Princess states, the words of the poem are a pale reflection of the deeply affective experience that Curdie is having in the presence of Princess Irene, and their literal meaning is almost ancillary to the expression of their power.

My Additional Stanza

My setting of “The Sleepers Shall Rise” includes an additional stanza inserted between MacDonald’s third and fourth verses, which I wrote myself:

“In the rainbow’s nest lies the key of gold
To the land of the shadows grey.
Oh, dear brothers, oh sisters, love is the whole
For those who believe and obey.”

I sought to match MacDonald’s elusivity, in part by stitching together several themes from his other writings. The reference to the “rainbow’s nest”, the “key of gold”, and the “land of the shadows” come from one of my all-time favorite MacDonald fairy tales, The Golden Key (1867), which begins with the simple lines: “There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunt's stories. She told him that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key.” From this simple beginning, MacDonald sends two child protagonists into a dazzling world of mystical symbolism that moves beyond time and space.

The line “love is the whole” was lifted from the first line of Love is Home (1855), a five-stanza poem which rhapsodically addresses Love, finding it everywhere, particularly the diversity of nature and the longings of the human heart. The first stanza begins, “Love is the part, and love is the whole; / Love is the robe, and love is the pall; / Ruler of heart and brain and soul, / Love is the lord and the slave of all!” Again, we see MacDonald’s penchant for uniting dichotomies: part-whole, life (“robe”)-death (“pall”), heart-brain-soul, lord-slave.

Lastly, for MacDonald the concept of “believe and obey” was vitally important, though perhaps easily misconstrued. In many ways they signal his view that true maturity or progress necessitated a return to the simplicity of childhood, to a state of being that merely believed in the reality of a loving God and that merely obeyed whatever “still, small voice” prompted actions that brings that love to space and time. Such an idea crops up often in his children’s fantasies and pseudo-autobiographical novels, and is presented on the one hand scathingly in his Unspoken Sermons (1885), especially “The Truth in Jesus” from Series Two, and on the other hand in a disarmingly elementary dialogue in the poem Willie’s Dilemma (1855).

Illustration “Foamless Sea of Shadows” by Ruth Sanderson from 2016 edition of MacDonald’s The Golden Key.

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Music

Folklike Tune

I wanted the music to have a face-value simplicity to it, but in a way that leaves the door open to mystery and suggestibility. Each verse therefore makes use of a lullaby-like tune in 6/8, which appears with subtle variations each verse. For all the MacDonald stanzas the tune is in the Dorian mode, minor and with a rather Pirates of the Caribbean-esque lowered seventh, but shining with unexpectedly bright major IV chords like flashes of light glancing off of Princess Irene’s spinning wheel. It is at the penultimate verse (of which I wrote the poetry) that the mood of the piece changes, as though a key has been turned and the rainbow is shining with new, never before seen colors. Here I use the warmer Mixolydian mode, nestling the melody in the altos before fragmenting with staggered entrances at the words “Love is the whole”. The final verse shifts back to Dorian, but now modulated up a whole step and delivered in a more pressing and rhapsodic manner.

Spinning Wheel

The image of Princess Irene using her spinning wheel as an accompaniment to her singing provided inspiration for my conception of the collaborative piano part. There is a rich history of pianistic depictions of spinning wheels, such as Franz Schubert’s 1814 Lied “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, Albert Ellmenreich’s pedagogical standby “Spinnliedchen” (ca. 1863), and Scottish composer Erik Chisholm’s “Spinning Song” from his 1944 collection of preludes “At the Edge of the Great World”. At the onset I imagined the wheel oscillating as if in slow motion, drone-like open fifths rocking slowly between the right and left hands. The writing becomes more dynamic in subsequent verses, with rolling eighth-note arpeggiations in the second verse, and dizzying sixteenth-note filigree in the third. In the fourth (Mixolydian) verse the piano shifts from spinning motion to static blocks: pillars of sound that take Ossian-like strides to new vistas. The final verse returns to the energy of a spinning wheel in full force, the open fifths of the beginning now “power chords” that pound out the “something that nobody knows”.

Gaelic Waulking Song

I have a deep appreciation for folk musics, and decided to intersperse my music with a Scottish Gaelic song entitled Mhòrag ' s na horo gheallaidh [vo:rag sna horo ʝauLɪ]. (Here is a performance by Clannad. Note the variations in words.) This is a waulking song, a work song typically performed by groups of women who sang it while sitting in a circle beating and rotating newly woven tweed against a table to shrink it and make it waterproof. I saw the song as a fruitful connection to MacDonald’s Scottish provenance and complimenting the symbolism of Princess Irene at the spinning wheel as another example of music and storytelling through pre-industrial, female labor. In general waulking songs are highly rhythmic so as to coordinate the movements of the workers, feature vocables such as “horo” or “him ò”, and are sung in Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) with solo verses and group refrains. The lyrics of Mhòrag as they have been written down are enigmatic, describing cattle herding, lamenting separated lovers, and possibly signaling an encoded reference to Prince Charles during the Jacobite Uprising. For this composition I used only the refrain – or sèist – working off of a 1998 edition from a collection by Deborah L. White. The melody appears between verses in “The Sleepers Shall Rise”, coalescing from fragments in the piano to a stirring choral rendition after verse three.

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It was a joy to create this piece, and to work with Grey and Choral Union to bring it to life! I uploaded a full performance of the piece from the Vocal Chamber Concert to my musicking page. Enjoy!

Hallå, Sverige!

This summer the Roys will be saying “Hallå, Sverige!”—pronounced [haˈloː sværjɛ], we will have to practice!—as we travel to Sweden. I submitted a panel proposal to the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) 2019 Congress and it was accepted! I and two other musicologists who are doing pioneering work on music and childhood/children will give papers on the theme of “The Sounding and Silencing of Musical Childhoods;” more on that soon!

Princess Tuvstarr in the Field (1913) by Swedish illustator John Bauer.

I am getting more and more excited about this trip, not just because the IRSCL will undoubtedly be an amazing experience, but because I know very little about Sweden and it gives me a wonderful opportunity to delve into its music, language, literature, and myths. By far the most compelling thing I have found recently is Rosenbergs Sjua (Rosenberg’s Seven), a musical ensemble comprised of four female vocalists and a string quartet. Their second album, R7 (1999) consists of arrangements of Swedish folk songs that are singularly riveting and haunting.

Vocal Polyphony

The driving force behind Rosenbergs Sjua is Susanne Rosenberg: singer, composer, musicologist, and professor in the Royal College of Music, Stockholm. Her arrangements for R7 reflect her mastery of an eclectic variety of singing styles ranging from Swedish folk to Baroque to jazz, as the singers create amazing textures ranging from playful to epic to lyrical. The sixth track “Pris Vare Gud”—a nineteenth-century hymn text written by Johan Olof Wallin—begins with a layering of an improvisatory motif that creates a sort of drone for the mournful melody. Alternately track two “Min Bröllopsdag” alternates between tight harmonies in homorhythm and polyphonic scatting.

Kulning

Another sound that adds a certain northern wildness to R7 is kulning, a vocal technique practiced since ancient times in Scandinavia—primarily by women—as a means for calling livestock in from their grazing pastures in the mountains. Different melodic shapes and timbral colors echo and clash with high-pitched intensity throughout track seven “Jorid Lockrop” and offer a visceral example of female vocal power. This is apparently the function of kulning in Karin Rehnqvist’s composition for two singers and percussion, Puksånger/Lockrop (1989), which Rosenberg premiered. (The link in the recording is not professional, but the rawness speaks for itself.)

Fiddling/Riffing

The string section of R7 simply rocks! In addition to several instrumental dance tracks (four “Artos Julpolska” and thirteen “Nattöga”) which feature a wealth of idiomatic ornamentation, many of the songs are grounded in heavy, syncopated riffs worthy of a metal band. Listen to the first track “Leja Tjänstepiga” or the epic tenth “Balladen Om Liten Karin”. (The whole effect reminds me of the amazing instrumental arrangements of folk songs by the Danish String Quartet in their Woodworks (2014) album.) The contrast between voice and string in R7 —both equally strident at times—has a sort of hi-fi brutality that I prefer when it comes to modern arrangements of folk music.

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Your suggestions for further reading/listening as we look forward to Sweden are welcome! Ha det så bra!