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

A couple of weeks ago, the 1st Patagonian Music therapy Congress and 1st. meeting of music therapists from the Mercosur (South American Common Market) took place. It was held in Neuquén, a city used to winds of more than 100 km per hour, and very hard winters, which contrast with the warmth of the music therapists who received us. There were colleagues from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil and also visitors from Spain, Germany and the Netherlands. Each one of them with its own soundings, conforming a very particular musical kaleidoscope. Sixteen hours after their departure from Buenos Aires, two buses full of students arrived, singing with their guitars and wanting to see "what's new" in the Music therapeutic field. No doubt, a very unusual scenario for Music Therapy events in South America.

From the moment I arrived to Neuquén, I had this strange and deep feeling. Although I had visited several times the wonderful lakes of the south of Argentina, I had only driven through this city located at the edge of the Patagonian aridity. And there I was, in the land of the Mapuches, one of the native populations of America, who live in what today is southern Chile and Argentina, besides the mountains of the Cordillera de los Andes, we do not know exactly since when. What we do know is that they have lived there for centuries, long before this continent was "discovered."

Today, the Mapuches live in reduced parcels, called "reservations". The extermination campaign to whom did not address the catholic faith and were "wild and different", also moved by huge economical interests, was denominated as the "Campaign to the Desert". By the end of the 19th Century, it had killed more than 14.000 people. Their territory was taken away. That was the 1st stripping that the Mapuches suffered. Globalization, a century after that, continued stripping them in several senses. In the territorial, it is enough to mention that Benneton, the Italian textile industry, appropriated thousands of acres that have belonged to these people for centuries. There, the company raises the sheep from which they get the wool for the clothes which they then sell around the world. In other senses, it was strange to see a young Mapuchean with an Iron Maiden T shirt, or listening to Coldplay in his Discman. A clear example of the way in which the musical industry, under the wings of globalization, promotes the massive consumption, in which culture can become homogenous, without regional differences, and where the cultural identity can get lost. In spite of that, there was evidence that something was very different in this geography. As I said, it was the first time I was there but I had this feeling of belonging. It wasn't exactly because of the homogeneity, but of what was different. I felt I had a root there.

Although my daughters have a few drops of Indian blood running through their veins, I am a European descendent. I was born in Buenos Aires, but my ancestors arrived to these lands years ago, running away from hunger in Europe. In some way, I come from the side of the "conquerors", although I am at the other side of the street ideologically. But this feeling of belonging to the Patagonian land was very intense, and I was not being able to figure out what was motivating it. Later, as one of the activities of the Congress, a choir sang a Mapuchean song, and I felt that my breath also had that rhythm. There was something linked to identity filling my lungs.

I have been lucky enough as to travel and listen to "live" folk music from different populations. Some of them have touched me more than others. Some of them have awakened my interest from a music therapeutic perspective, and also from an ethno-musicological one. But those sad and intense Patagonian melodies, like the rhythms of the Altiplano, (the region at the northern part of Argentina and Chile, and south of Peru and Bolivia), transcended that interest and opened a sense of shared identity. Although I was in the middle of a congress, in which the schedule marks the time to listen to a conference, or assisting to a meeting, or talking to a journalist, a song can stop the instantaneity and the urgency to which we are usually submitted, a song modifies the usual time we live in and which converts the majority of our daily actions in a vertiginous succession of instants.

We are health workers. Many of us are also teachers of future music therapists. In spite of that, at least in this corner of the world where I live in, we work in more than one Health Center, in one or more universities, also attend our private practice, lecture, pretend to keep studying and learning, we try to be up to date with the musical materials that are part of the Expressive Modes of our patients. And as a result of all that, we some days are more than 14 hours away from home. How can we find identity in this daily marathon?

Alluding to the configuration of actual societies, Jean Baudrillard states that "our private sphere is not any more a scene in which there is a performance of the subject trapped by its objects as much as by its image. We do not exist any more as actors or drama writers, but as terminals of multiple nets." And we can get caught in those nets if we do not pay attention and do not stop the urgency with which we live with.

I traveled to Neuquén to participate in a Congress. I traveled 1400 km to meet my colleagues, some of them from other countries and others which live 15 minutes from my house, to continue building the Music Therapy Community which shelters us, and allows us to keep growing professionally through exchange. I came back with the renewed feeling of being part of this community. I also came back knowing that a song stopped the time and opened my heart to show me that, in that melody there was also a deep root of my cultural identity.

References

Baudrillard, Jean (1987). L'autre par lui meme. Paris: Editions Galilée.

How to cite this page

Schapira, Diego (2005). Sounds of Identity. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 09, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2005-sounds-identity