A THOUSAND NEW CHLDREN’S CHOIRS? HAPPY DAYS IN COTACACHI, BACK ABOARD VILISAR
Wednesday, August 23, 2006

A thousand children’s choirs? Happy days in Cotacachi

The two-week workshop to train public and middle-school music teachers to organise and direct children’s choirs ha been, from our point-of-view, a great success. We leave behind a small group of new friends who seem fired up and ready to start choirs.

As usual, we are not quite sure when we arrive in Cotacachi Monday a week ago just what is expected of us. We are exhausted from working hard on careening and painting Vilisar in Bahia as well as from the nine-hour, overnight bus from Bahia back up to Quito. “Reina del Camino” (aka “Queen of the Road”) bus-line supplies a vehicle that is prehistoric, hard-sprung, cramped, noisy, stinking of diesel exhaust, hot, stuffy and packed full of squirming families and carry-on (carrion) baggage. Our own bags go into the rear luggage compartment – thank goodness, since there are no overhead racks inside and, as it is, I wind up holding my jacket, our travel provisions and my mis-shapen Panama hat on my sweating lap all night. We arrive in Quito’s “Terminal Terrestre” at the pre-dawn hour of 0400, the baggage covered in a heavy layer of road dust, our eyes bleary and our legs stiff. The advantages to the red-eye trip, on the other hand, are: there is no music; there are no Bruce Willis or Claude van Damme macho-movies; and, you save the cost of a hotel room. I was able to sleep fitfully as the bus pounded over the unpaved three hours of torn-up rural highway up to Santo Domingo del Colorado (roughly, quaintly and no doubt incorrectly translated by me into English as “Saint Sunday-Coloured-Red”).

In Quito, we hang around trying not to fall asleep in a really grubby bus-station café until we can catch a bus north to Otavalo and Cotacachi. We fall for one of the bus-company hawkers and barkers seeking passengers who says the Tulcan bus stops in Cotacachi. It actually stops a few kilometres outside of town and we have to hire a taxi to take us to the LOCAL Terminal Terrestre where Diego said he would be waiting from 0900. This turns out to be ‘Latin time’. After sitting in the sun for two hours Diego finally shows up and whisks us in another taxi to his house on the outskirts of the little town. No word or explanation for his lateness. I am so bleary-eyed by this time that I can hardly imagine that we shall be able to manage our first session later that day.

The house belonged to his now-deceased grandparents. It is Diego who has organised this workshop. We also meet Nadia, a twenty-five-year-old friend of the family who teaches Spanish and English at a private school in Ambato, and who will be acting as translator for the workshop. Before collapsing into bed for an hour of sleep, we discuss what the workshop is actually meant to accomplish. Like the other workshops we have conducted in Riobamba and Quito, the reality is a little different from the anticipation. But, flexible as ever, we agree on a scheme and hit the sack for an hour.

Arriving at the Museo de Cultura, a “colonial” building which once housed the Cotacachi town hall, we meet Carmen, the Museo directrix, and are shown the wonderful long recital room where the workshop is to be held. The walls and ceilings are covered in trompe de l’oeil paintings to imitate marble and other decorative items. The walls also have large oil paintings of notable Ecuadorians – the ever-present Bolivar, (‘El Libertor’), for example, and Mariscal Sucre along with paintings and photographs of some local heroes. The two largest paintings at the front are of two cardinal-archbishops. The one on the right scowls fiercely at us from under dark eyebrows. The guy on the left, in full red outfit and a spectacular lace surplice, is wearing eye-glasses that are crooked and a toothy smile that seems to be a testimony to his orthodontist or the dental tech who made his partial. Fortunately there is a piano though it is woefully out of tune.

There is a lot of milling about when the participants show up at 1500. Our Spanish, of course, is still far from adequate, and we are mentally a little slow after our last few days. The gist of the confabulation is that:

a) it is summer and the teachers do not get paid in these months and therefore they cannot afford it at present;
b) for those who do in fact want to take part now, it would be better to telescope the two-week seminar (with a daily two-hour session in the afternoon) into one week (i.e. with two-hours sessions in both the morning and the afternoon); while
c) the remainder of the coalition-of-the-willing would take the seminar in its original form in September when we come back.

Re a): We sympathise.
Re b): Fine with us
Re c): It would be nice if somebody would ask us if we even want to come back, indeed if we are able to do so.

In the end, we wind up with six participants for this one-week intensive course. The one girl and five guys are all graduates of the normal school of music teachers and are in their early to mid-twenties. They are all musicians of one sort or another and, in addition to their school-teaching activities (ranging from a nursery school for retarded children to grade school to middle-school adolescents), all appear to be busy playing in a concert band, being instrumentalists and/or singers in cool Latin groups or singing solo with one group or another. They are all musical and some are natural conductors while others are wary and timid to be out front.

In addition to actually learning the physical motions of conducting and how to handle the job whilst on the podium, we put together several lectures about getting (mainly but not exclusively) children’s choirs started and how to manage them once they are operating. They perhaps do not yet realise it, but the non-musical aspects of a choir are almost more demanding than actually conducting.

There is apparently no music or choir-singing in Ecuadorian public schools (private schools are a different matter) although Cotacachi and Otavalo seem to have a lot of music going on. They are both small enough to get a lot of support locally if the people want to. By comparison to other towns and cities we have visited in Ecuador, both communities here seem better off economically, and the people (especially including the majority indigenous populations) seem more upbeat and self-confident rather than shy and beaten-down. All those musicians you see playing panpipes on city streets around Europe, after all, come not from Peru but from Otavalo and region. In fact, one of our participants turns out to have spent three years from the age of seventeen travelling around Germany playing the ‘siku’ (somewhat like panpipes) with a group of his landsmen. He speaks German and English quite well, which is a big help during the seminar.

At the end of the week we are tired but have really enjoyed our stay here. The participants have made excellent progress as conductors and all are fired up to get something started. We have made some new friends and hope that the first few of the thousand children’s choirs needed in Ecuador will have been founded soon.

There is certainly no lack of music in this Andean country. What is missing from the viewpoint of outsiders like ourselves is:

a) a lot of experience with large choral groups (including the discipline involved to achieve a focussed, well-tuned and blended sound); and perhaps,
b) experience with the great choral works.

It is a point worth discussing whether a choir in Ecuador needs to be dealing with Mozart, Bach and Brahms. But, as Zoltan Kodaly wrote, children should be singing the greatest and best music possible. Yes, you should start with your national treasury of folk songs: Ecuador can call on a huge reservoir of local music and there is the whole of Latin American musical resources to tap as well. There were and are composers and arrangers in plenty too: we used some of the songs and arrangements in the conducting class and have come to love them. But no choir can go wrong by singing Bach and Brahms. It will be up to the various conductors to find a focus for his or her choir, to find a hearing for his music.

On the Friday, we started and finished our day’s work early so the participants could take us for a picnic up at the ‘laguna’ in the volcano crater on Mount Cotacachi, an active volcano. Of course, it is not erupting at the moment like Tungurahua several hundred kilometres to the south near Riobamba. But it is classified as ‘active’ and gaseous bubbles come up from the bottomless lake. The place is a national park and it is beautiful. And then again on Saturday, they invited us for ‘plato tipico’ - in this case ‘Carne Colorado’ (beef strips marinated in some sort of red plant (betel) juice and therefore, like the tooth-cardinal and Santa Domingo, coloured red. We left Cotachochi wanting to return and wishing all the best to the aspiring conductors.

Back aboard Vilisar

Since the course in Cotacachi was telescoped into one week, we now have two weeks before we need to be in Machala. We decide to head down to the Vilisar in Bahia de Caraquez. On Saturday afternoon, after our meal of Carne Colorado, we travel by local bus for twenty minutes over to Otavalo where we are to hear Diego’s group (in which two of the course participants also play or sing). In the internet café we run into Katie and Jim Coolbaugh from S/V Asylum in Bahia. Katie is a cellist and in the course of their travels to Otavalo, tried to track us down in Cotacachi to see what was happening. Unfortunately, their efforts were in vain. But here we all are and they come to the concert too, which, as it turns out, is in their hotel. We meet them briefly on Sunday morning again for a coffee when we are passing through the bus station on the way to Quito.

By Sunday afternoon late we are back in our old room at Hostal Toxa in Calle Mariscal Foch, New-Town Quito. The aim is to get our visas extended the next morning (something that is done totally politely. hassle-free and at a total cost of 20 cents for the photocopies of our passports: we are all set now to stay in Ecuador until 19 November 2006). While we are in town we take in ‘Pirates of Caribbean II’: ‘Don’t miss it if you can!’ as someone once said in damning praise. A high-budget bore. The steak dinner we had at a little Argentine restaurant in Mariscal, on the other hand, is the best steak I can remember ever eating. It was our 6th wedding anniversary so we thought we deserved it. Before leaving to catch the 1300 bus on Tuesday down to Bahia we also had a terrific breakfast at the Mango Tree Café, my favourite café in Ecuador.

By contrast to the red-eye drive up to Quito ten days earlier, the bus back down is only half-full and we spread out. It is also air-conditioned and the driver is careful on the mountain roads back down to the coast. And- wonder of wonders! - there are no movies, no Claude van Damme, no Bruce Willis, no rape, pillage and mayhem! Even the recorded music is kept at a low volume. What is the Ecuador coming to?

But the final half of the trip is very slow and very rough since it is over an endless construction site. Even the parts that have been completed are curvy and not particularly fast. The road itself is concrete now where it is finished. But no bridges or tunnels have been built and the road basically follows the old route, snaking through the high hills of the coastal region.

We arrive in muggy Bahia an hour late and in light rain to find no one to take us out to the Vilisar. We usually leave the dinghy up on deck so are dependent upon someone to run us out. But instead we find a room at a local hostal –another one of those five-dollar, wooden-slat beds that make you feel like you have slept on the pavement. But it is a bed and the room is clean and dry. The next morning one of the other cruisers runs us out to the boat and we start washing down the decks of the ash from the Tungarahua eruption hundreds of miles away.