WorldView Episode 40: Violeta Parra
Welcome back to WorldView, here on charlottesvilleclassical.org! I hope that you enjoyed the classical marathon, and I’d like to thank you for your continued support of community radio here at WTJU. This episode features more amazing non-European composers, and this post will focus on world-renowned folklorist Violet Parra.
Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval was born in Chile in 1917, the daughter of a music educator and a seamstress. She was exposed to traditional Chilean and South American folk songs at an early age, and began singing and composing at age ten. After several years performing at night clubs in the Chilean capital of Santiago, she married Luis Cereceda and joined the Communist Party of Chile. After their separation some years later, Parra’s compositional career started placing more emphasis on traditional Chilean folk song structure.
Parra collected folk tunes from throughout the country, and began writing her own songs following similar forms. She traveled internationally and amassed a reputation as a prominent Chilean folklorist and ethnomusicologist. In 1966 she wrote her most famous work, “Gracias a la Vida”, which was popularized throughout the Americas by artists Mercedes Sosa and Joan Baez. To date, “Gracias a la Vida” is one of the most covered Latin American songs of all time. The piece also exemplified a then emerging genre of classical music: la Nueva Canción de Chilena (the Chilean New Song). Parra’s collection of over 3000 Chilean folk songs and proverbs laid the groundwork for la Nueva Canción, which flourished as a political and social musical movement in the 1960s and 70s.
The first piece in episode forty of WorldView is Parra’s “Five Anticuecas”, performed by guitarist Jose Antonio Escobar. The work was completed in the early 1960s, and features distinct sections numbered one through five. Along with “Gracias a la Vida”, it remains one of her most frequently played compositions.
WorldView Episode Forty Playlist:
Violeta PARRA, “Five Anticuecas”, {Jose Antonio Escobar (gtr)} - Naxos
Peter SCULTHORPE, “String Quartet No. 12, “From Ubirr” (Earth Cry)”, {Del Sol Quartet, Stephen Kent (didjeridu)} - Sono Luminus
Jose Pablo MONCAYO, “Haupango”, {Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, Maximiano Valdes} - Dorian
Mikhail Ivanovich GLINKA, “Sonata for Viola and Piano in D Minor”, {Yuri Bashmet (vla), Mikhail Muntian (pf)} - BMG Classics
WorldView is a classical music radio show featuring composers from everywhere in the world - except Western Europe. Tune in to hear works by lesser-known artists such as Irving Fine and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and widen your knowledge of classical music. Hinke Younger hosts each week’s episode of WorldView on Mondays at 9AM and 6PM (with a rebroadcast Saturdays at 2PM) on Charlottesvilleclassical.org.