Gypsy Jan
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Mexico City school seeks to dignify mariachi music
From The AP
"Roving bands of musicians chased down cars on one of the city's busiest avenues, leaning into windows to bargain over the price of a song. Black-clad
musicians in cowboy boots then assembled ragtag groups that played out of tune while singers hoarsely belted out mournful ballads about love and
heartbreak.
The aching music may remain one of Mexico's top cultural exports, by which the country is known worldwide, but its fortunes have fallen in its
homeland, with few well-trained musicians and few decent venues to play in.
A new mariachi school in Mexico City is seeking to revive a music that has lost ground over the years and that sometimes seems relegated to commercial
jingles and elevator Muzak. Called the Mariachi School Ollin Yoliztli, meaning life and movement in indigenous Nahautl, the school teaches folk bands
how to play professionally while grooming a new generation of songwriters and composers.
"What this school will do is dignify mariachi music," said director Leticia Soto.
Housed in a former nightclub on the plaza, it's Mexico's first professional school dedicated to the genre. Eventually, Soto said, she hopes to offer
Mexico's first university-level degree in the music. Another school in the western state of Jalisco, the birthplace of mariachi, offers workshops but
not a degree.
The goal is to formalize a music that has largely been passed down among the generations, without formal instruction. Last year, UNESCO recognized
mariachi as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the city has tried to protect that heritage by both cleaning up the plaza and helping set
up the school.
Most of the more than 2,000 musicians who ply their trade at the newly renovated colonial plaza learned to play traditional favorites such as "Cielito
Lindo" and "Guadalajara" from their parents or other relatives. Most of the players there can't read music and run through the songs by ear.
Miguel Martinez remembers a different time. The 91-year-old began playing the trumpet 78 years ago in the Plaza Garibaldi, when there were only five
mariachi groups working there, with only two including trumpet.
He joined the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan, Mexico's top ensemble, in 1940, when the music was featured almost daily on the radio. Hundreds also
packed the Blanquita Theater for shows that included some of the top singers of ranchera, another, more guitar-based genre.
"It makes me very sad to see what these mariachis have done to the music that el Mariachi Vargas did so much to honor," Martinez said. "The truth is
that I would leave this world very happy if I could see that our folklore will continue, because we were losing it."
With that in mind, he called the school "a fantastic idea and something that authorities should have done a long time ago."
For guitarist Arlette Gudino, one of a dozen women accepted at Ollin Yoliztli, playing mariachi music is a passion passed down by her trumpet-playing
great-grandfather.
"There are places outside of Mexico where people get more excited to listen to mariachi than here," said the 23-year-old actress. "I would like to do
something to get people to value the musical treasure we have."
The 102 members of the first class range from a 14-year-old junior high school student to a 68-year-old retired nurse. They started school last week
and are scheduled to graduate in three years with a technical degree.
During that time, they'll learn music theory and mariachi history and be taught how to sing as well as play the trumpet, guitar, violin and the
round-backed guitar called the vihuela.
Trumpet player Raul Rosas, 38, who waits in the plaza for clients, admitted he and the other musicians there could use some training.
"We all should go that school because we don't play the music like it should be played," said Rosas, one of nine brothers who play in mariachi bands.
"We're musicians who play by ear, why fool ourselves?"
The first mariachi bands, in the 18th century, played only stringed instruments and dressed in white cotton fabric, huarache sandals and wide-brimmed
straw hats - the clothing of Mexican farm workers of the time.
Trumpets were added in the early 20th century, and mariachi bands began wearing the more elegant charro, or cowboy, outfits familiar to modern
audiences: a short, embroidered jacket, snug-fitting pants with shiny buttons along the legs, fluffy bow ties and the iconic wide-brimmed sombreros.
By the mid-20th century, mariachi music had become a widely popular symbol of Mexican culture, played by radio stations and featured in charro films
during the country's Golden Age of cinema, from 1935 to 1959. By then, the music had become popular in Central and South America and the United
States.
The 1980s saw the genre fade as radio buzzed with more commercially successful music such as norteno and banda, which includes lyrics about drug
trafficking, or pop music.
Now, few hit songs are done in the mariachi style, and only a handful of places in this metropolis of 20 million feature live, professional mariachi
bands.
The genre's absence in the mass media and intellectual circles also contributed to its decline, said anthropologist Jesus Jauregui, the top expert on
the music in Mexico.
"The place mariachi bands get in movies nowadays is not very dignified because they are usually second-rate characters who are accompanying the
singer," Jauregui said. "Another factor is the contempt with which the Mexican intelligentsia treats mariachi. No historian or sociologist,
musicologist or folklore expert has done studies on mariachi music."
Nonetheless, mariachi retains deep roots in Mexican culture, with many people knowing by heart longtime favorites. Almost every big event in Mexico,
from weddings and funerals to Mother's Day celebrations, includes a mariachi band, and abroad, the music offers a tie for many Mexicans to their
native land. Most of that music is amateurish at best.
The handful of top mariachi stars left can nonetheless still fill auditoriums in Mexico, and fans can catch the best mariachi at occasional festivals.
"In the United States, the music is viewed with more respect and that has to do with the fact that they teach it in junior high schools and in high
schools and that doesn't happen in Mexico," Jauregui said.
Soto's school has tried to turn that around by hiring some of the best musicians in the business, including former members of the group Mariachi
Vargas de Tecalitlan, which continues to tour worldwide, ofn performing with classical orchestras and symphonies.
If anything, the market has shown it'll pay more for higher quality mariachi, said Victor Lemus, 44, who has played violin with Los Emperadores in
Plaza Garibaldi for the last 22 years.
Many in the 14-member ensemble have taken private music classes, and they practice twice a week. That lets them charge twice the average rate of $8
(100 pesos) per song for bands with six members.
Still, on a recent night, none of the Mexican and foreign revelers dancing to the energetic two-step rhythms at the plaza seemed to mind that most of
the bands lacked polish, instead requesting songs until they ran out of money or energy.
"Most mariachis right now just put on the charro suit and go out to the street to play and they forget that after the flag, the mariachi is what best
represents Mexico," Lemus said. "But if the new generations learn to play it like it should be, they will ennoble the music."
This article was distributed through the NewsCred Smartwire. Original article © The Associated Press 2012
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.”
—Mark Twain
\"La vida es dura, el corazon es puro, y cantamos hasta la madrugada.” (Life is hard, the heart is pure and we sing until dawn.)
—Kirsty MacColl, Mambo de la Luna
\"Alea iacta est.\"
—Julius Caesar
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DENNIS
Platinum Nomad
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Good Mariachi doesn't need to be dignified.
Now...on the other hand, there isn't enough dignity in the world to help Banda Music. It should be a felony to make that noise in public.
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Udo
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Mood: TEQUILA!
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The MRIACHI music seems to have bee replaced by NORTEÑo music as well as the narco-music.
Regardless of what Mexico's citizens as well as US citizens think
the MARIACHI music is as MEXICAN country as Hank Williams Sr is to US country music.
Udo
Youth is wasted on the young!
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Heather
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Posts: 370
Registered: 10-31-2002
Location: National City, CA
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I teach at Chula Vista High School, NOB, and we have a great mariachi program. We are a performing arts school, so we have lots of talent, but the
mariachis always excell. The teacher works magic with his students...they perform like professionals, and do put on a lot of paid gigs.
The teacher's name is Fogelquist, a gringo, but you wouldn't know it to hear him sing, or play! I think his dad was a Spanish professor who took the
family to Guadalajara when he was young.
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