Venezuelan music contains elements taken from just about everyone who landed on its Caribbean coasts over the past five centuries. Cultural interweaving seems to have chosen this wild territory to show how much diversity could spring from a handful of different seeds. Western musicologists would be stunned to find very pure strains of European Renaissance music, almost unchanged, in many popular Venezuelan songs and instrumental forms today. Our national instrument, the cuatro, which accompanies most of Venezuelan music, is in fact a strummed four string Renaissance guitar. This persistence of musical memory is most remarkable in the descendants of non-European cultures. The treasures of African music which came with the slaves give us hundred of rhythmic ingredients which make up the temporal skeleton of most of our music. But in many places the music stayed pure, offering extraordinary opportunities for comparative studies in African musicology with its impressively energetic and complex drumming.

—Paul Desenne

Track List

QUINTETO DEL PAJARO (1981-1983)
Flute, oboe, violin, cello and cuatro
1. Seis por Derecho*
2. Guasa del Borrachito
3. Alba-Vals
4. Periquera

QUINTETO DEL LA CULEBRA (1988)
Flute, oboe, violin, cello and cuatro
5. Pajarillo
6. Bambuco Cruzado

BOTELLA AL GUAIRE (1985-86)
Flute, oboe, violin, cello and cuatro
7. Guasa del 5 y 6
8. Canción de Cuna - Montañas de Caracas
9. El Fulchola

10. COPLAS DEL MANGLE (1993)
Harpsichord, two violins and cello

11. PIZZI-GUASA GALEONICA (1988)
Harp, flute and cello

12. PIZZI-QUITIPLAS (1989
Three celli

Total time: 51:24
Release date: March 28, 1995
UPC: 751758012929

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