The Zaranda Variations

The Zarabanda Variations is a chapbook and digital album conceived at the intersection of poetry, scholarship, and music - a record, in both senses, of a collaboration between scholar-poet Edgar Garcia and violinist-composer Keir GoGwilt and their ensemble of ten musicians convened by the American Modern Opera Company. It was performed at the Clark Art Institute, Lincoln Center, the Peabody Essex Museum, and National Sawdust before finding its fullest form here, on the page and in sound.

The project originates in a question about what we think we know. The Sarabande is among the most familiar forms in the Western classical canon - Bach composed them, so did Handel and Lully. But the zarabanda, from which it descended, was a dance with deep roots in pre-Columbian, Arab, and African traditions that traveled through the Caribbean and into the streets of Spain before being assimilated into European baroque culture. The Zarabanda Variations follows those roots: through the chacona, the folia, the matachín, the huayno, and the llorona - a family of dance genres whose cosmopolitan, transoceanic origins the baroque absorbed and renamed.

Garcia's essays and poems provide the textual and philosophical architecture of the project. Drawing on his work with the Cantares Mexicanos - the great sixteenth-century anthology of Nahuatl song - he develops what he calls "split sight": the capacity to see the projected unity of baroque form and the fractured, migratory reality that made it possible, simultaneously. This is Mesoamerican philosophy as method: not synthesis but double vision, not reconciliation but the ongoing tension of superimposed worlds.

The musicians - GoGwilt, Mariana Flores Bucio, Wilfrido Terrazas, Miranda Cuckson, Carrie Frey, John Popham, Alec Goldfarb, Kyle Motl, Jonny Allen - bring to the project expertise spanning historical musicology, Mexican folk and vernacular music, jazz, and contemporary composition. Their reflections, interspersed throughout the chapbook alongside the poems and archival images, form a kind of collective liner notes: a record of what it sounds like when history is urged back into sound by bodies in a room.