BACK IN QUITO; WEEKEND ENTERTAINMENT; NEWSPAPER ARTICLES
Wednesday, July 26, 2006

After two weeks in the Central Sierra town of Riobamba, Kathleen, Antonia and I moved back up to Quito to run parallel two-week conducting and voice workshops. The trip up on the bus was spectacular because we not only get a good view back towards the smoking Tungurahua Volcano but also clearly see Chimborazo and about four other volcanoes along the Avenida de Vulcanos.

At Hostal Toxa we find a large and comfortable room with bath in the La Mariscal district of Quito New Town - not far from the place we stayed at before. But this time it is much quieter and the beds are more comfortable. We have also learned to bargain and manage to get the price down for a two-week stay that includes the use of the kitchen.

We want to get Antonia back into Spanish lessons as soon as possible and ask around the hostal for recommendations. Leran, a tall young Israeli who is travelling in South America, recommends Beraca Language School just around the corner on Avenida Amazonas. By Tuesday afternoon, Antonia is taking four hours of one-on-one Spanish lessons. Every day she tells us how much she is enjoying it and how much she loves her teacher, a twenty-one-year-old Ecuadorian girl. Kathleen and I need more Spanish lessons too. But, for a variety of reasons (a lot of music work to do in Quito; the need to stretch resources) we decide we will take our lessons later after Antonia has returned home.

The two musical tasks for us here in Quito are to train choral conductors, on the one hand, and to provide voice training for coralistas (choir members). The five conductors who register are a mixed group. Four of them already have choirs and have a fair bit of experience. One has no choir but intends to have one. Nevertheless, they all benefit from instruction in how to improve the physical aspects of conducting (stance, use of hands, entrances, conclusions, etc.) and other aspects relating to different styles of music, choir “management”, choir building, programme planning, and the like. During the conducting classes, the other conductors and a few singers provide the “choir”.

Later in the evening another dozen and a half people arrive in the rooms of the Adventist Church School on Avenida Diez de Augusto where we are meeting. Most of the conductors stay for this too. It covers warm-up techniques and techniques to improve the quality of singing and to make it easier and more satisfying for the people to sing. Then we work on pieces from various eras.

When we are not at the workshops or taking Spanish we try to see a little more of Quito. Last weekend we go down again to the Old Town for a guided tour of the Museo Caamaño (Municipal Museum or Art and History) and then into the Compañia church, i.e. the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) headquarters for Ecuador.

All of the orders of Catholic monks and nuns have traditionally maintained large centres in the capital: Jesuits; Carmelites; Benedictines; Augustinians; Franciscans, to name but a few. The actual number of conventos (convent members) may be down these days but the buildings are huge and occupy a large portion of the surface of old-town Quito. The convent churches are all in the VIIth and VIIIth Quiteño style of Spanish baroque. In practical terms this means basilica-style buildings with an extraordinary amount of gold leaf and sometimes even solid gold. The Quiteño style has added Andean fruits and flowers to the carved pillars.

Despite fire and earthquake damage over the past several hundred years (most recently a huge quake in 1987), Compañia is surely the most elaborate of them all. It is considered the most elaborate church in “The Americas” (by which is meant Latin America, I think). There is barely a surface that is not decorated in gold (frequently the walls are complicated Moorish patterns) and the many altars are also all in gold. Although I can admire the workmanship, my Protestant taste finds it difficult to deal with all this gold along with the statuary and paintings.

There is also a lot of fairly primitive storytelling in the churches – mostly it seems about now various virgins saved Quito at one time or another. That Quito needed saving is a testament to the seismic activity of the Andes. But why it should always be virgins doing the saving is an interesting issue itself. Most of the events seem pretty off-the-wall strange. But, for bizarre stories, Mariana de Jesus tops the list in my books. She was reportedly so beautiful that she was forced to look out on the world from under a veil. Am I the only one who finds this strange? Did men tend to be struck dumb if they saw her naked face, or what? Were they tempted to ravage her on the spot?

But it gets better! When in the seventeenth Century Quito was beset by a series of earthquakes and epidemics, the 26-year-old damsel decided to sacrifice her life in order to save the city. This was after a longer period of self-flagellation, which apparently did not suffice to stop the tremors. (I told you this was bizarre!) After her demise the natural disasters ceased. Her blood was then sprinkled in a garden and a pure white lily grew up there. (Now why on earth, so to speak, would they spread her blood on the garden? And did the lily spring up spontaneously or did someone just happen to have planted a bulb there?)

A true believer, I guess, can connect the dots in this somewhat gory tale and come up with a coherent religious story. It does rather fly in the face of scientific knowledge about volcanoes, earthquakes and the spread of disease. That would explain the credulity of earlier generations. But, even in terms of Catholic belief, does nobody seem to worry that she actually committed suicide, a cardinal sin. The heretics among us may be inclined to think the events were totally random with no cause-and-effect relationships here at all. We might also suspect that the young lady was either worrisomely bipolar and burdened by some mighty serious complexes, or she had a need for attention that was over the top.

After being blinded by Jesuit gold leaf, we see placards in town announcing a concert that night at Teatro Bolívar. It is billed as a tribute to a now-deceased Ecuadorian classical guitarist who died recently in either Venezuela of Guyana (and whose name, despite repeated mention over the evening, I have now forgotten). The theatre itself is very large (1200 seats?) and in the midst of a major ongoing renovation. As usual in Ecuador there is no heating and the night air comes down our necks from the gaps in the temporary ceiling. Given this, the long video about the man’s life and achievements and the immoderate length of the moderator’s moderation begin to seem interminable.

But not only is this a tribute to one person, it is also a patriotic event. Tomorrow, Monday, is Simon Bolívar’s birthday, a big day in Latin America and especially in the Republicos bolivarianos (Venezuela, Bolivia, Columbia, Panama, and Ecuador; there might be more). The Banda Municipale, a city-sponsored brass band, the founding of which goes back well over one hundred years, is on stage; about fifty quite good players and a very ancient conductor. There are also several singers, one of them named Hernan Tomay, who bills himself as the “Tenor de America” (again, America in this case translates to “Latin America”) even though, if he is a tenor, he never once in the evening sings higher than well below the passaggio. He also sings everything with a microphone. Loudly. The first and larger group of his pieces are all patriotic verse songs. The band also plays a lot of Ecuadorian Heimatlieder, although they do eventually play some other things as well. A soprano and a brother-duo come on to sing popular songs to the accompaniment of the brass band, the approval of the audience and the regular interruption of the long-winded moderator.

Billed to start at 2000, there is a line in the street outside the box office when we arrive at 1930. In the end they only ask for a one-dollar voluntary contribution to the concert. As the video starts, the auditorium is much less than half filled. In best Ecuadorian fashion, at least half of the crowd comes late: by 2045 the teatro is fully occupied and the crowd is clapping enthusiastically for each musical offering. We stick it out to the end, which comes at about 2200. The band members are already striking their tents and half of them have left the stage when there seems to be a conference on stage about whether to play an encore for the still clapping public. We learned to our surprise from the participants at the conducting workshop that encores are quite uncommon in Ecuador; clearly the response of the crowd has caught the performers off guard. Like true troopers, the singers (or hams) seem eager to keep singing. We decide that we have had enough, however, and make for the doors. On the way out I notice that half the seats are empty again. Maybe concerts are considered come-and-go events here.

After the children’s-choir festival that we visited in our first trip to Quito, this is the second public event we have witnessed. I can’t say it was really up our alley. But it was interesting to get a slice of Quito popular culture and to be inside one of the local concert venues. The third cultural event we attended was a night-time outdoor performance of La Serva a Padrona by Pergolesi. This is delightfully staged and sung on a stage set up in La Mariscal district. Freddy, one of our conducting students, plays in the 8-man guitar orchestra that accompanies the opera: a good idea that works quite well. Freddy also tells us that this is the first time that such a summertime opera has been staged with the support of the city.

So Antonia’s last weekend in Quito passes full of culture and touristic activities. Did I mention that we also visited the huge neo-gothic Basilica Voto Popular (Basilica of Popular Devotion) with the intention of climbing the tower for a view of the city. Somehow we were too tired to insist upon paying two dollars each for the privilege. I wrote about this church in an earlier blog. Basically, however, this huge stone pile is supposed to be popular expression of the devotion of the people of Ecuador to the Roman Catholic version of the Christian faith. The tensions between conservative Roman Catholic upper classes, on the one hand, and liberals who favoured a separation of church and state and a freedom to worship (or not) as the individual sees fit has been an important element in the political history of the country. Indeed, Moreno, the first president, was assassinated by an opponent because he, Moreno, tried to make Ecuadorian citizenship dependent upon being a Roman Catholic. In other words, if you were a Protestant, non-conformist, free-thinker, Jew or native spirit worshipper, you could not have Ecuadorian citizenship. Imagine George Bush saying you had to be a Southern Baptist to be a real American. Nowadays, fortunately or otherwise, the Ecuadorians have other things to worry about.

Newspaper articles

It is these other things that I have been researching and reading up on. As far as I can tell, the main issues for Ecuadorians are:

§ Economic and racial class divisions inside the country;
§ Unstable (democratic) government;
§ Ecuador’s relations with Andean countries like Columbia where rebel forces basically govern the 40% of the country next to Ecuador’s border and frequently use Ecuador as a safe haven. Open shooting broke out in 1995 on the disputed border with Peru in oil rich Oriente Province;
§ Ecuador’s overall relationship with the U.S.A.; the U.S. “war” on drugs and its “war” on terrorism as carried out in Ecuador and its neighbours. The U.S.A. now has an aircraft base in Manta and is intensely involved in Columbia;
§ And, as a separate but related theme, the impact on Ecuador (especially of Ecuadorian agriculture and Ecuadorian demographics) of regional free trade and so-called “trade liberalization”;
§ The mass emigration of Ecuadorians to the U.S.A. and the E.U. Ecuador has lost about 20 percent of its population of 13 million in recent years;
§ The relative benefits of small farms (as in Ecuador) versus large farms (as in the U.S.A.) Monoculture farming is ecologically unsound, socially disruptive, not really very efficient and produces food that might travel well but tastes bland or even bad; most Ecuadorian farmers till small plots;
§ (As another topic in US-Ecuadorian relations,) Ecuador and the petroleum industry. Ecuador is a major oil country but is in a clinch with the oil companies and the U.S.A. government about sharing profits, environmental protection and the impact on indigenous peoples in the Amazonian headwater regions of the country;
§ Foreign aid and Ecuador. What it’s used for and who is providing it and how much;
§ Volunteering in Ecuador. Who does what; is anybody making money here?

A friend is on the board of a small progressive newspaper in Canada and has suggested that I might want to submit some articles on topics like these. Perhaps the observations and researches I had been making for my own benefit have a wider interest. So, not tourist articles, but essays about serious issues for Ecuador with insights for Canadians, Americans and Europeans.

If the editor decides to go ahead with the articles I shall also post them to the blog. Stay tuned. There will be a quiz on Monday and it counts on the final.