Are you an artist, arts organization or venue?

artist

What town do you live in?

Amherst

In which disciplines do you work or exhibit?

Performance, Other

Artist Statement/Bio

Vision Statement

MarKamusic's musical vision is twofold. First the ensemble hopes to debunk western stereotypes of South American music and culture in particular and Latin music and culture at large. By sharing the many musical gifts of these lands in its purest and rawest forms as well as blended with newer, hybrid creations of subsequent artistic, historic and musical developments, MarKamusic portrays the vast cultural wealth from these regions in a cornucopia of musical knowledge. In the United States, profit interested groups have purposely created an aura of mysticism and mystery around the genre and its people. Their efforts, geared to maximize its consumption and thus its profit, have misinformed North American audiences about the poise, representation, performance, accuracy and content of people and music. Pair to their “hunger” for the exotic, North American audiences have been fooled into accepting the stereotype. MarKamusic treats these exquisite musics with the care, respect and love for our roots found in our own ancestry.

The group also hopes to show its listeners that America is larger than the United States: that America in fact stretches from Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. The members of MarKamusic feel that our diverse cultures tied by history and geography but separated by politics and language can most effectively be reconciled by sharing, indeed, by the merging, of our artistic expressions. MarKamusic's musicians, one Peruvian, a Guatemalan, three Puerto Ricans, an Ecuadorean and an Uruguayan represent the potential of this harmonious exchange.

Biography of MarKamusic

MarKamusic Biography
MarKamusic means "Music of the people" in Andean Quechua, the most widely spoken native language of the Americas (about 20 million people). Markamusic is also a high-energy, multi-national musical ensemble that performs Latin music deeply rooted within the folkloric, popular and traditional genres of Latin America, the Caribbean and South American Andean regions. Like its ancestors before them MarKamusic musicians draw from the well of their unique cultural past: Inca, Taino, Maya, African and Spanish/European.
Since 1999, the seven-piece band, MarKamusic has been performing its unique "Pan-Andean World Beat" music before multicultural audiences across the United States. From its conception as a small ensemble of 3 South American traditional musicians almost a decade ago, the group expanded its size to seven members including several musicians from other countries
of the Americas. Western-European wind instruments, African influenced instruments, and jazz drums also found its way into their music complementing the bamboo flutes and diminutive Indian guitars of the folkloric musicians in marvelous, if sometimes
off-beat, ways.

Since then, MarKamusic's repertoire has emerged as a combination of many themes: their own reinterpretations of ancient
Inca, Aymara and Quechua aboriginal melodies; songs arising from the nineteenth-century South American struggle for independence; the rarely heard treasures and sometimes jarring, sometimes hypnotic Afro-South American music such as the Música Negroide of Peru or the Candombe music from Uruguay; of Latin folk-rock protest music-banned in the mid 1970s under pain of death by the military Juntas; and a handful of favorite Latin-American torch songs and high-energy pop tunes
-the kind you might hear blaring out of jukeboxes in small-town luncheonettes and bars in say, Bolivia or Venezuela.

MarKamusic tailors its presentations to the
educational interests of each audience. By varying the length of the informative commentaries preceding each number, a MarKamusic performance can indeed be a guided tour of Latin and South American musical forms or a complete carefree festival of musical delights.

Describe your organization or gallery

MarKamusic has embraced the responsibility that an ethnic artist must have to its own people, history and music but then takes it all together to a different realm. Fussed with the feelings, experiences and creations of younger generations, during its performances, MarKamusic will emphasize the musical and cultural contributions of the four major cultural influences
that have shaped modern, folk and traditional South American music and Latin American music at large: the indigenous, the West African, the Euro-Iberian, and the United States. Traditional rhythms and music forms from these diverse cultures and lands slowly fused over the centuries, creating that which is today's South American traditional, folk and popular musics. MarKamusic's careful choice of repertoire and instrumentation reveals this historic evolution to its audiences.

Deeply moving at times or full of fresh and ancient energy, MarKamusic's music and song calls out to rekindle the senses of our human collective memory, to the doors of our ancient hearts, only to convey and understand the universal feelings that will be shared and enjoyed by the listeners. MarKamusic performances carry the audience across a panorama of musical history millennia. Starting with the sweet delicate sounds of Quechua and Aymara bamboo flute melodies, the wind
blowing through the mountains and rain forest noisemakers. The performance continues with European influenced rhythms and instruments and the power of the African influenced polyrhythm, until it reaches the ballads and songs of struggle against authoritarian rule, spanning the period from the 1830's to the 1970's. MarKamusic closes the performance with very high energy modern day inspired numbers.

Website

http://markamusic.com