Andean Music Route

Description Andean Music Cusco Route

With the “Cusco Andean Music Route” tour, you will learn more about the music and ritual calendar of the Q’ero indigenous community, located southeast of Cusco. We will discover their instrumental and aesthetic performance criteria, as well as the functions of Q’ero music, interpreting ceremonial pieces, in addition to having access to audio and documentary films.

Music, being an essential part of festivals and celebrations for the Andean people, is much more than just fun; it is a fundamental component of their coexistence with Nature and the Cosmos. Each instrument and type of music has its reason for being, as well as its time and place of execution. In the route of Andean music, we will learn about Andean music as a cultural fact, we will examine the Andean musical practice, in relation to:

The ceremonial calendar, agricultural seasons and the cycle of plant growth, the cycle of animal reproduction, the cycle of human life, Andean astronomy, cosmology, religion and spirituality: the constellations, the Milky Way and the cycle of the stars will be examined in this section, as well as the religious system, the notion of sacredness, cosmology and ecology, from the indigenous perspective. The type of music we will focus on is not practiced in specific scenarios, intended for a debut, nor is it conceived for a listening public to appreciate and enjoy.

In every known culture there has been some form of musical manifestation, the history of music encompasses all societies and epochs. The intimate relationship between the human species and music has been demonstrated, and while some traditional interpretations linked its emergence to intellectual activities linked to the concept of the supernatural. For primitive man there were two signs that evidenced the separation between life and death: movement and sound, in the so-called prehistoric art dance and song merge as symbols of life while stillness and silence are shaped as symbols of death.

Primitive man found music in nature and in his own voice. He also learned to create sound with rudimentary objects such as: bones, reeds, trunks, shells, etc. There is evidence that around 3000 B.C. Sumer already had percussion and string instruments (lyre and harp). The ancient cult songs were rather lamentations on texts.

ANDEAN MUSIC is a term applied to a very wide range of musical genres originating in the South American Andes. This area includes mainly the Andes of Peru and Bolivia. The term is often used as a synonym for the musical style typical of the altiplano and generally performed by the Aymara, Quechua and other peoples of that region, a style characterized by nostalgic and evocative melodies played on reed flutes and charangos.

MAIN POINTS OF VISIT

• Cusco (3,390 masl)
• Calca (2,926 masl)

Day 1: Cusco – Calca – Cusco

• 09.00 hrs We will pick you up at the hotel to go to the town of Calca, located 51.5 km from the city of Cusco.
• The music teachers are waiting for us to teach us about the Inca cosmovision, since ancient times all the cultures of the world have had to assume a conception, where they explain the existence of the world and themselves. This worldview considered that nature, living beings and mother earth are elements that live perpetually.
• Man has a soul, life, and so does everything that surrounds him (plants, animals and mountains). Man and nature harmonize and adapt to coexist in nature, to form and be part of it. The Incas had their own way of seeing the world, giving answers to the questions that man poses.
• They believed in: Hanan Pacha or the celestial and supraterranal world above (gods such as the sun, the moon, the lightning, the stars, the Rainbow), Kay Pacha or the world here and present (men, animals and plants) and Uku Pacha or the world below (dead, spirits and diseases). Where the expression “Pacha” means earth, related to time and space.
• We will travel through the world of musical notes, rhythms and the spirituality of music through instruments.
• 13.00 hrs In this setting and surrounded by these landscapes, we will enjoy lunch. After this musical journey through time and history, we will start our return to Cusco.
• 15.00 hrs Approximate arrival and transfer to the hotel.

BREAKFAST – HOTEL / LUNCH – AGENCY / DINNER – PASSENGER