Over 2,000 people are known to have died or ‘disappeared’ at the hands of the regime, with countless more forced into exile. Performing in public could risk severe consequences – as could any visible involvement in these undesired creative scenes. A 1992 LA Times feature ( Chileans Make Music Their Battlefield ) interviews members of the group Uraco on their experiences of this era: “ The charango… represented a cultural era that officials wanted to leave in the past…a direct connection to a time when music and art flourished – before the military coup in 1973 that led to 16 years of brutal rule by death squads”. In much of 1970-80s Chile, the instrument was de facto banned by Augusto Pinochet’s US-backed military regime as part of a wider ‘cultural blackout’. “Like many instruments in the New World, combine characteristics of the Spanish guitar with indigenous adaptations…The smaller Andean version used as a courting instrument played by men, made its way over major colonial trade routes: size probably made it a handy companion.” ( Ken Moore, MET Music Curator) Bolivian Charango – unknown charanguista in Agustin Alonso’s La Paz workshop (2010):.They add that indigenous traditions preferred to “strum all the strings…so the melody is always heard against a harmonic drone“, whereas mestizo musicians “also developed involving their right hand thumb & index finger, a melody and harmony line are produced in mostly parallel motion”. Since the 1920s, the charango has also come to be played by urban mestizo musicians”. to mimic this on a normal-scale guitar, capo at 10fr ).Īs described by the Grinnell Collection, this tiny lute “has for centuries been a part of the musical lives of indigenous Andean peoples…traditionally used for courting and to accompany festival dancing. Most have a mandolin-like scale length of around 37cm (=60% of a Strat), allowing for wide positional combinations impossible on larger fretboards ( n.b. The basic construction, devised by Quechua and Aymara peoples some time in the 18th century, combines features of the vihuela (grandfather of the Spanish guitar) with design ideas from their own indigenous cultures – such as using an armadillo shell for the instrument’s body. The charango has a rich, politically-charged history. Sethares also devised his own charan-guitar tuning long before I came up with this one: he suggests removing the 6str entirely). Could possibly be seen as an abstruse variant of Banjo tuning: another re-entrant 5-string instrument invented in the Americas. The four notes form a versatile C6 or Am7 voicing (like Hawaii’s C ‘Mauna Loa’ ) – although the double Gs and Es may offer more natural roots. While an exact charango-to-guitar tuning match is impossible, this one preserves the note order while also offering an ‘ adjacent octave’ (6-5str) to replicate some of the ‘double-course’ timbre. This unusually narrow layout summons a strong resonance despite the instrument’s diminutive size, with further power added by vigorous, dense strumming techniques.īill Sethares notes that the charango’s strings “ do not ascend uniformly from low to high…This makes for some very interesting fingerpicking patterns, since the bass…tends to be syncopated against the beat…the loose wrist of the style is reminiscent of ”. A distant cousin of the guitar, the charango’s strings are paired into 5 ‘courses’ (like a 12-string) – and tuned to cluster within the span of a single octave ( GG-CC-EE-AA-EE ). Mimics a common tuning of the charango: a small 10-string lute found in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and elsewhere in the Andean region.
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