Cumbias y Rebajadas

This essay explores negotiations and disruptions that are taking place in Monterrey, Mexico, through the cumbia rebajada, in particular the way in which the cultural adoption of Colombian music in Monterrey has generated a complex and long-standing phenomenon by technological means. The author gives special attention to the way the cumbia rebajada subculture has been a locus to negotiate and resist marginalization.

Experimentation and Improvisation in Bogotá at the End of the Twentieth Century

This chapter explores how experimentation and improvisation became meaningful within the Colombian Western academic tradition. Acosta provides a musicological report of the evolution of experimental composition, interpretation, and improvisation in Bogotá toward the end of the twentieth century. The rise of atonality, electroacoustic and mixed music, indeterminacy, and other avant-garde movements from the late 1950s onward, are sketched as direct precedents for the rise of experimental improvisational practices since the 1980s. These tendencies grew into a rich field within Colombian music throughout the last decades of the century, with the appearance of improvisation/experimental music ensembles in which composers, performers, and improvisers found creative outlets. This process is traced, along with the significant proliferation of performance situations, as well as the reactions of artistic, educational, and governmental institutions to the developing field.

African Legacies in Pacific Colombian Music: A Synthesis

Essentially, a summary of extensive and intensive research with several Afro-Colombian musicians who live in Colombia’s Pacific Coastal region, this article is presented as two major complementary components. Firstly, a multimedia, predominantly, with original recorded music and photographs, as importantly, a separate text with explanatory discussions and analyses, both perform key roles and occupy centre stage. The article demonstrates in audible and visible terms the pervasive and living influences of Africa on the region’s cultures. To do so, the article concentrates on an explicit analysis of the currulao music. It traces the music’s origins to the cimarrones who fled the plantations and mines to live in the mountainous, tropical interior. The research shows that the formerly, enslaved Africans drew on their cultures, for example, their drums and music to accommodate and resist the insistent and usually, enforced colonizing activities of the Roman Catholic missionaries.