Voices ResourcesA website for the worldwide community around the journal Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy

It's Friday night in Buenos Aires. I'm walking along the streets, a few blocks away from my house, and I hear the rumbling of the drums. The Carnival season is about to start and in each neighborhood there is a "murga" (a band of street musicians) rehearsing.

They are groups of around 20 different drums and almost 100 dancers of all ages who make a great effort to prepare their best performance. In a few days they will be competing with dozens of other "murgas" to get the chance to be, for the rest of the year, the "Kings of Carnival". There are lots of children and teenagers dancing and singing. The sounds impregnate their skin like a tattoo which will last for the rest of their days. I hear those drums and immediately go back to my childhood. I picture myself in my costume, dancing during the Carnival season, sitting on my father's shoulders. Even before I reach to where the "murga" is rehearsing, the sound had sent me back a few decades to revive early experiences.

I keep walking towards downtown. The city is convulsed by the social events that burst about a month ago. I finally reach Plaza de Mayo (May Square), the historical Square, and start hearing a sound which is new in the city. The neighbors, the common people, march down the streets. Some of them with their children sitting on their shoulders, others walking beside their teen-age kids. They all carry cooking pots, spoons or frying pans, which they hit with energy as a way to pacifically, protest against the economical and social policy of the government. It is the sound of the "cacerolazo". Thousands of cooking pots sounding at the same time. It is a new sound that, with great strength, has installed among us like an indelible cultural trail. I watch those kids submerged in the sound of the rumbling metal. Those sounds will penetrate their souls for sure, and they will become an inseparable part of their life history. It's a new sounding framework which itself contains protest, sadness, concern, fright, pride and the leading role that Buenos Aires inhabitants live by these days. It will stay carved in each of us who live in this city.

Something similar must have happened in Prague during the "Velvet Revolution", in 1989. By then, hundreds and hundreds of Czechs burst out to the streets shaking their keys as a symbolic way of claiming to the government for the opening of their borders. A metallic rumbling which turned the course of the policy of a country. I'm sure there were children and teenagers too, holding hands with their parents, submerged in that sonority that, for the rest of their lives will contain, in itself, the evocative capacity of what was felt or lived during those days of the ending eighty's. Some of those kids are now adults, or are about to be. Any Music therapist who gets the chance to work with someone who lived in Prague during those days, will surely have to pay attention to the reactions that the use of metal percussion instruments, or the simple insistent tinkle of a bunch of keys, could recall.

In a few years, maybe one of those kids that walked through the streets of Buenos Aires beside their parents will knock the door looking for a Music Therapist. And probably, in other latitudes, some Argentinean immigrant whose family intended to build a better future somewhere else will be received as a client. Here, there or everywhere the Music therapist will have to pay attention, as he reconstructs the musical history of that person, to the singularities that the sonorous cast of the local culture has written in his non-verbal communicational modes.

If we accept the idea that musical processes resemble psychic ones, we can think that the sonorous -musical history of an individual is a testimony of how his personality structure has been built, and how he has been able to manage in life. A testimony that music therapists can decipher only if they get to know how those sonorities have been written. Lets get back to the sound of the drums. Their sound will evoke different things to someone from Johannesburg, Montevideo, Berlin or Tokyo. Something similar will happen working with metallic percussion in a Music Therapy session held in Boston, Haifa, Buenos Aires or Rome. But it can also happen among people of the same city, who probably share general aspects of the sonority of their culture, but differ in their particular soundings as they belong to different social, cultural or economical subgroups. In all cases, we, Music Therapists, have to pay special attention to the cultural context of the person who is asking for help, in general as well as in singular aspects. They are the two extremes of a road we can't stop traveling, if we pretend our work to be helpful.

How to cite this page

Schapira, Diego (2002) New Sounds in Culture. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2002-new-sounds-culture