November 2007

Globalized Ronroco

In the late 1960s the incipient movement that would later be known as rock nacional found the experimentations of The Beatles liberating. It stimulated them to do their own experimentations including incorporating folk Argentinean music into their sounds. Arco Iris, lead by Gustavo Santaolalla, was one of those groups. Their music alternated songs in which no traces of anything local could be found with creations based in folk rhythms and sounds.

For forty years now Gustavo Santaolalla has been very active and increasingly more influential in a myriad of areas related to popular music, as band leader, composer, guitarist, and singer, but also as producer and promoter. In a time when the world has become increasingly more interdependent and interrelated, he has comfortably become a nexus, a translator, and a facilitator at the intersections and overlappings and his work feeds from the "tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization" (Appadurai, 295) generated by globalization. Ronroco (1998) is his first solo instrumental album and it is heavily based in folk styles and rhythms. It was also produced for Nonesuch as world music and promoted as a fusion of "conventional styles with a progressive sensibility, in an album of original tunes inspired by traditional Argentinean music and influenced by music of Japan, Africa and eastern Europe."[1] Two previous solo projects-Santaolalla (released for the Argentinean market in 1982) and GAS (for the Latin American market in 1994)-were mainly pop-rock music.

Most of the titles of the tracks in Ronroco refer to places (Atacama, Iguazú, Pampa) or people (Coyita, Gaucho) from Argentina, especially from the northwest, the region where a ronroco or a charango would be most likely to be found in folk music. "The idea was to make a non-traditional album, a sonic landscape."[2] The title of Iguazú, the 9^th track in the CD, refers to the Iguazú Falls, one of the main destinations for tourism in Argentina. They are located in the northeast of the country, far both from Buenos Aires and the Andes. The ronroco is then used to represent a landscape removed from the place where it originated, but close enough that an international audience, and possibly an urban audience in an Argentinean city, would not question the legitimacy of the association.

Style

Half of the tracks in Santaolalla's 1998 album feature the ronroco. Given Santaolalla's predilection for working at the intersections and from within hybridity, it is not surprising that he found inspiration in the ronroco. The timbre and range of the ronroco are in-between the sounds of a guitar and of a charango. It is tuned a perfect fourth lower than its smaller cousin, or roughly a fifth higher than a guitar, but preserving the number of strings and intervals between courses of the charango. This gives the ronroco a distinct character and timbre compared to a charango, but it also makes it closer to the guitar, halfway between Western and folk traditions.[3]

Iguazú is one of the tracks with less folkloric connotations in the CD. In the context of the album it nevertheless sounds folksy because we connect the timbre of the ronroco in this composition with the sounds of other tracks that definitely make use of Andean or Argentinean rhythms. Removing this track from the surrounding of more folk sounding compositions will have interesting results that we explore further down.

Texture-wise in Iguazú Santaolalla makes use of one of his preferred devices: a solo acoustic instrument with the backdrop of ghostly keyboard sounds.

Iguazú is basically a ronroco solo with the sparingly addition of some synthesized [are they?] basses and effects, and with a few overdubbed charango and maulincho sounds as accompaniment and reinforcement of the melody. The center stage is always occupied by the ronroco in a moto perpetuo in subdivision of the beat.

Other than the timbre of ronroco and charango, the allusions to folk music are also in the melody. Despite the prominent and anxious repeated display of the leading tone moving towards the tonic, the melody is predominantly pentatonic during the first section providing a tenuous reminiscence of Andean music. The rhythm is also reminiscent of a huayno, a binary dance.

The microphone is placed very close to the ronroco to emphasize the intimate side of the sound; we can even hear the sound of the fingertips brushing the strings. The sense of intimacy and proximity is framed and reinforced through synthesized sounds that consist mostly of ghostly drones, but which also sometimes resemble breathing.

Iguazú in the global market

For García Canclini the concept of identity is too constrained in that it presupposes fixed characteristics that in reality are never stable, even less so in times of globalization. For that reason proposes to replace the study of 'identity' with the study of the processes of hybridization, interesting both to "the hegemonic and popular sectors of society that want to appropriate of the benefits of modernity." (García Canclini, 10)

By the time Ronroco was realeased, Santaolalla was already a successful producer with one foot in Los Angeles and the other in Argentina and Mexico, working both the American and the Latin American markets. Iguazú is the product of the hybridization of cultures, an attempt to reconcile tradition and modernity combining the lively, intimate and folksy sounds of the ronroco and a contemporary, international frame of electronic sounds. Whatever the connection in Santaolalla's mind between his music and the Iguazú Falls-is it descriptive?, does it allude to the history surrounding them (the natives before the conquest, the Jesuit missions or the banning of them, the movie The Mission)?-the music allows for a range of interpretations and uses, from new age relaxation music to the expression of urgency and change. Furthermore, the timbre of the ronroco, the simple harmonies, the motto perpetuo, the pentatonic, natural, and harmonic minor scales all contribute to varied interpretations reflected in the trajectory of the recording since its production.

Iguazú started Santaolalla's career as film composer (at least in the latest and most successful incarnation):

One day, about six years ago, I received a call from the office of well-known movie producer and director Michael Mann, saying that he was using one of my pieces, off an instrumental record I'd put out, for The Insider. … The music is not traditional sounding Andean music at all. Nevertheless, it's a very peculiar sounding record, and I couldn't figure out how it was going to fit in the movie. But sure enough, it worked great. It [was used] at the turning point in the movie where Russell Crowe's character is trying to decide whether to testify or not, and finally he does, and it's what's called a 'feature cue,' where there's no dialogue- just music for two and a half minutes.

A commentator on a web page says Iguazú fits the scene because it "suggests both urgency and change."[4] Any reference to folk music or to any geography is erased by a simple move. The character in the movie is deciding to go or not to go against a mega-corporation so perhaps some of the popular resonances of the ronroco permeate into the movie. It probably would not be as effective to have a violin or any other instrument that could be associated with the powers to which the character opposes representing his state of mind. But, what is that instrument? Some commentators on the web seem confused: is that a banjo? a guitar played up the neck? In any case, it is a popular instrument and that suffices.

In fact, the second incarnation of Iguazú as film music comes as soundtrack for a TV series, Deadwood, whose soundtrack consists mostly of country music, and which showcases a banjo in the title track. Iguazú does not seem out of place in the new context: the timbre and the motto perpetuo of the ronroco are not too far from what can be vaguely defined as 'banjo music.' In fact, the music seems to be perfect for connecting a distant past and the present by layering the 'banjo' sound and synthesizers.

The connections between different worlds are also the theme of another incarnation of Iguazú as music accompanying images. A Dutch Vodafone commercial (2007?) recycles the music's meaning. The theme of the commercial is, well, globalization: a woman tells us about "a place where distance doesn't matter any more," while we see images of grassy hills, populated by people from different places and iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, the Big Ben, or Sidney's Harbour Bridge. The parallels between the images and the music are striking because we see this landmarks totally removed from their usual surroundings and placed on a hill-the bridge does not even have water under it-just as the ronroco is submerged in a synthesized context. The music could represent any of these places, or better still, represents all of them, it has vaguely ethnic connotations but it is also modern.

The Vodafone commercial producers used the version of Iguazú that is part of the soundtrack for the movie Babel (2006), which earned Santaolalla his second Oscar. The movie is about cultural differences and misunderstandings in a globalized world, quite the opposite message of the Vodafone commercial. Yet, Iguazú still works as a symbol for an interconnected world where events in one place can have ramifications anywhere else.

In all of these instances we can see that whatever the authorial intent, the producers of the images layer or replace those meanings with others. We can think of them as representative of different sectors of the audience, some closer and some further away from culture that created the ronroco, but all appropriating its sounds and creating new connections, prolonging the never-ending process of hybridization. It is not just that the ronroco sounds are used as surfaces and appearances, or as depthless, "free-floating signifiers" to be enjoyed for their meaninglessness and artificiality and stripped from its referential qualities, as classical postmodern theory would analyze them (Manuel 1995). On the contrary, sounds-'ethnic' instruments, melodies, rhythms, or samplings-removed from their original surroundings are used for the associations they provoke in the audience. Andrew Goodwin said that "the technologies of sampling and musical theft are not used only to construct images that speak of fakery and forgery; they are also used to invoke history and authenticity" (Goodwin 1991:175). In the case of Santaolalla's music this applies to sampling but also to the juxtaposition of contrasting elements such as the recording of older tango singers in an electronic dance music context, or the use of distorted electric guitar in an otherwise folk context, or as in the case of Iguazú, by surrounding an already hybrid and ambiguous instrument with an electronic cloud.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Culture Economy, Theory, Culture, and Society 7(2-3):295-310.

García Canclini, Néstor. 2000. La globalización: ¿productora de culturas híbridas? http://www.hist.puc.cl/iaspm/pdf/Garciacanclini.pdf (accessed September 24, 2007).

Holmberg, Adam. Review of The Insider's soundtrack. http://www.filmtracks.com/titles/insider.html (Accessed 11/10/2007)

Nonesuch. Promotional material for Ronroco. http://www.nonesuch.com/Hi_Band/bio.cfm?Artist_Filename=santaolalla.gif (Accessed 11/10/2007)

Media

Santaolalla, Gustavo. 1998. Ronroco. Nonesuch.

The Insider. 1999. Dir: Michael Mann. Distributed by Walt Disney.

Babel. 2006. Dir: Alejandro González Iñárritu. Distributed by Paramount.

Vodafone commercial. 2007? Holland.