about Flor de Verano
In our program Flor de Verano, we wish to recreate an imaginary day, from the survey of the sun until the disappearance of last star; a journey that reflects the richness and popular environment of the colonies, resulting from mixed cultural traditions.
In the New World, from the XVI century onwards, traditions and cultures like those of Southamerican natives, African and Spanish with their Mozarabic past, blend and transform continuously during the process of colonization.
As represented in manuscripts and drawings from those times, Amerindian people developed their own musical expression adopting spanish instruments, brought to the new lands by the conquistadors, like the guitar, the harp or the violin.
With the legalization of the slave trade, Africans entered via the Rio de la Plata to replace the decimated indigenous population in the mines and plantations.
The memory of slaves was able to preserve their habit to sing while working, songs that evoke a past of oppression, close in their essence to the Negro spirituals, expressing the sorrows and the harshness of their destiny in those lands.
The art of troubadours or medieval pregoneros announces also the legendary and eternal practice of oral tradition, creating a universe of exquisite freedom; melodies which, heard once, become a lullaby or a pregón.
Heard and hawked, tonadas and pregones weave a network of memories transmitting day after day these oral traditions, in order to preserve the popular knowledge of South American people, bound by the same memory, indelible, and whose sensitivity is the mark of the musical temperament in our America.
Flor de Verano expresses thus, through its journey and its temporality, all the eclecticism of the afro-Amerindian cultures, which recognizes its origin and its authenticity, in such music, such expression.
