Music

I have an addiction. I don´t know how to stop collecting musical instruments. And it doesn´t help that I live in Ecuador. I struggle enough with resisting the instruments we´re used to – guitars, horns, violins, drums, etc. – but they have an array of homegrown instruments here that are so attractive I don´t how I´ll be able to leave the country without them.

Two instruments in particular have caught my eye: the zanaphonia and the chorango. The former isn´t too foreign. It´s a pan flute – common in the Andean cultures in both Ecuador and Peru. It has a beautiful wooden, foresty sound – kind of haunting. I think I probably heard it first in Penn Staion in NY, actually. There always seems to be a group playing them in between the entrance to the 1, 2, 3, and 9 subway trains and the booths where you buy tickets for the Long Island Rail Road. A cool thing with the zanphonias is that it can be hooked up to a device similar to a harmonica strap (think Bob Dylan) so that a musician can play it simultaneously with the guitar. I saw this on the bus from Quito today – cool.

I`ve only seen the chorango in Ecuador. It´s kind of like a mandolin with its double strings, but its body is a little smaller. Traditionally the body was made out of armadillo shell, but now they´re made of wood. They´re played wicked fast and the musician only uses the top part of the index finger. A very percussive instrument.

A couple of weeks after I moved to site I started taking guitar lessons from my counterpart´s uncle, Manuel. He´s a good teacher. His deep laugh tells you that he sings second voice in his folk trio, and like most Ecuadorians his knows almost all the national/folk songs of the country. He tends to laugh a lot during our lessons, mainly when I struggle to learn a new strumming pattern. Apart from the fact that I really enjoying learning Ecuadorian tunes, I figure it´d be a real waste to be down here for a couple years and not learn some local tunes.

I guess the point of the previous paragraph was to explain why I bought a classical guitar today. I felt like in order to really jump into the music I had get what the locals have. But it´s the second guitar I´ve bought while down here. The acoustic guitar I got a few months back so I could practice my traditional Irish/contradance music while here so as not to let down Daphne (of the group Daph and Dan). Trying to pick a jig on a classical guitar is as futile as trying to play a mazurka on an acoustic. So, two guitars – fine, yeah? How about a fiddle? I got one of them, too (only $80). I guess I figured two years would be enough time to start to get a bit of a handle on it. And it´ll be an especially important instrument when I move back to the northeast after I complete my PC service.

Hopefully this trend won´t get too out of hand.