La Chacana

Pierre Hamon, recorders, frestel, double and triple flutes from Medieval Europe and pre-Columbian America, flute and drum and other ...
Ananda Brandaõ, voice and percussion

Taken from the title of the novel by the great Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos is a musical journey in which wind instruments and percussion lead us along the lost paths of the ancient civilisations of pre-Columbian America, as well as of our own European Middle Ages. In Europe, some music has survived but not the instruments; in pre-Columbian the Americas, the instruments have survived but not the music. 

Indeed, whilst we possess written sources on medieval music, these relate almost exclusively to the vocal repertoire. Instrumental music, on the other hand, was very rarely notated. A few precious examples, such as French and Italian estampies, have nevertheless survived. We also know that instrumentalists would take vocal repertoires, transform them, embellish them and freely reinvent them. The first treatises devoted to instruments did not appear until the Renaissance, and we know nothing of medieval playing techniques. Finally, no medieval flutes in working condition have survived to the present day: we therefore have no direct access to their timbre. 

On the other side of the Atlantic, the situation is almost the opposite. Tens of thousands of instruments, some dating back two or three millennia, from civilisations that disappeared long before the Aztec and Inca empires, have been preserved in a remarkable state of repair. However, their music was never notated, and whilst no one today can claim to faithfully reconstruct pre-Columbian music, these instruments – along with their faithful replicas – allow us to evoke its resonances and soundscape.

To uncover some traces of these ‘lost steps’, one must look to the musical traditions of today’s Indigenous communities and to the earliest ethnographic collections for the remnants of a heritage that is sometimes very ancient. But we must also embrace a different way of approaching music: in the Indigenous world, every instrument possesses a soul; the musician must not seek to dominate it, but must allow itself to be guided by it and, through the breath, become the medium for its voice.

From the frestel, the medieval pan flute, and double flutes – the direct descendants of the flutes and auloi of Greek and Roman antiquity – to the double and triple flutes of the ancient civilisations of Mexico; from the three-hole flute and the minstrels’ drum, still practised in several traditions in France and Spain and adopted since the Conquista by certain Indigenous communities, from Mexico to Peru; whether made of bone, pottery, reed, bamboo or wood, hollowed out – like the ‘flutes of love’ of the peoples of the North American Plains – or turned, like Western recorders, all these flutes seem to serve multiple purposes: to entertain or enchant the living, to converse with the spirits, to question the gods, to give voice to the invisible.

This programme thus explores the primal power of music, born of breath and rhythm. Music capable of inducing trance, meditation and jubilation, but also of celebrating the shared experience of musical connection between a father and his daughter.

Program:

Hymn to the wind in the form of a short prelude improvised on a prehistoric vulture-bone flute (copy of the vulture-bone flute found at Isturitz, Basque Country - 20,000 BC)

Hymn to heaven in the form of an improvised ritual dance on a pan flute made of condor plumes

Guiraut Riquier
Creire m'en fach, 13th century, Frestel (medieval panpipes)

Anonymous
Lucente Stella, ballata, Italy 14th century

Anonymous
Sexte estampie royale, France 14th century

Istanpitta
Chominciamento di gioia, Italy 14th century, recorder

Istanpitta
Belicha, Italy 14th century, recorder and drum

Guillaume de Machaut (1300 - 1377)
Se ma dame m'a guerpi, virelai, voice and medieval transverse flute

Anonymous
Lai du Chèvrefeuille, France, 13th century, flute and drums

Ritual 1 / Omaggio Kogui (Colombia)
Improvisations based on ritual melodic and rhythmic motifs of the Wiwa and Kogui Amerindians of Colombia, kuisi (Colombia)

Aa, Sumak Kancakchaska (traditional, Hymn to the Sun, collected late 19th century in Huanaco, Peru) Siku.
*El Baile del Inca, traditional, collected in Copacabana, Peru, by Luis Girault, 1954
*Prayer for Mother Earth, traditional Bolivian Sicuri      

The Butterfly Song (traditional tune from the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico) 
Traditional Nipmuc flute (Algonquin Indians)

Lakota lullaby: Lakota (Sioux) lullaby, voice and drum 

Improvisations on various instruments from the pre-Columbian civilizations of South America:

Small Aztec flute
Ocarinas from the ancient Gulf civilization - Mexico
Quena Chincha (ceramic notched flute from the Chincha civilization - Peru)
Snake-shaped triple flute (Mexico - Gulf civilization)

Improvisation on “Antara Nazca” ceramic panflutes
On original scales from the Nazca civilization (Peru 20 BC / 600 AD)
Whistling vases (Vicus civilization - Peru 500 BC / 500 AD)...