La Chacana

Ancient and traditional Andean music

Genesis of the ensemble and the project:
To make his animated film Pachamama, a project that began almost 15 years ago, Argentinean Juan Antin joined forces with French producer Didier Brunner (Kirikou, Azur and Azmar, Ernest and Celestine, The Big Bad Fox...). For the music of his film, Juan Antin wanted a strong and present music, as rich and characteristic as the graphics and colours of his drawing, rich in symbols and cultural roots associating the pre-Columbian and Andean universe and the sound of the renaissance instruments existing at the time of the Conquista. He was about to give up his dream of sound, which increasingly seemed utopian in Europe and even more so in the world of film conventions, when he met Pierre Hamon, an "out of the ordinary" musician, a specialist in ancient music, but also passionate about pre-Columbian instruments and the world of Amerindian civilisations and cultures. Improvising, but without any real experience of composition, and even less of film music, the latter accepts the challenge and immediately the current passes between them: the melodies and aesthetic directions proposed by Pierre enthuse Juan who manages to convince the production to dare this adventure.  The result of this long and fruitful collaboration is a magnificent animated film, Pachamama, in which music plays a fundamental and original role.

The idea of this programme, in small form, is obviously not to reconstitute the original soundtrack but to evoke the roots of the "marvellous and enchanting" sound universe of Pachamama, by combining the historical music of the time or that preceded the Conquista, music that was a source of inspiration, sometimes obvious like the theme of the cantus firmus "La Spagna", sometimes only spiritual and distant, the "magical" universe of pre-Columbian instruments, the first sources of colonial syncretic music (Archbishop Martinez Companion's Trujillo codex), the first collections of traditional Andean music and finally a small suite adapted and improvised from the themes of the original Pachamama music The lutes will be joined by the natural voice and percussive ardour of Ananda Brandao, who was the revelation of the recording of the film's theme song, and who brings her freshness from contemporary music and jazz (drums, percussion, voice), guitars and renaissance harp of the marvellous musicians Bor Zuljan ("the lute incarnate", as the title of a recent France-Musique programme dedicated to him) and Louis Capeille, the magnificent voice and musicality of Clémence Niclas and the breath of Pierre Hamon. 

May 2023