First published in 1980 and now available only from the University of New Mexico Press, this classic compilation of New Mexico folk music is based on thirty-five years of field research by a giant of modern music. Composer John Donald Robb, a passionate aficionado of the traditions of his adopted state, traveled New Mexico recording and transcribing music from the time he arrived in the Southwest in 1941.
Cipriano Frederico Vigil is the most important performer of traditional Nuevomexicano folk music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This bilingual panoramic book presents the songs that are his life’s work, spanning half a century of listening, playing, composing, and singing ritual, social, and dance music. New Mexican Folk Music includes much traditional material that has never been seen before or studied by scholars or students. Renowned as a composer, Vigil works in traditional genres such as the romance, the décima, the cuando, and corrido. Like the Mexican group Los Folkloristas with which he apprenticed in the late 1970s, his goal has been to research and master local styles, to introduce new listeners to traditional music, and to build on tradition by creating new compositions that address contemporary social themes. An audio CD accompanies this comprehensive study on the work and music of Cipriano Frederico Vigil.
First published in 1980 and now available only from the University of New Mexico Press, this classic compilation of New Mexico folk music is based on thirty-five years of field research by a giant of modern music. Composer John Donald Robb, a passionate aficionado of the traditions of his adopted state, traveled New Mexico recording and transcribing music from the time he arrived in the Southwest in 1941.
"The Strachwitz Frontera Collection is the largest repository of commercially produced Mexican and Mexican American vernacular recordings in existence. It contains more than 130,000 individual recordings. Many are rare, and some are one of a kind. Although border music is the focus of the collection, it also includes notable recordings of other Latin forms, including salsa, mambo, sones, and rancheras. More than 40,000 of the recordings, all from the first half of the twentieth century, have been digitized with the help of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and are available online through the University of California's Digital Library Program. Agustin Gurza explores the Frontera Collection from different viewpoints, discussing genre, themes, and some of the thousands of composers and performers whose work is contained in the archive. Throughout he discusses the cultural significance of the recordings and relates the stories of those who have had a vital role in their production and preservation. Rounding out the volume are chapters by Jonathan Clark, who surveys the recordings of mariachi ensembles, and Chris Strachwitz, the founder of the Arhoolie Foundation, who reflects on his six decades of collecting the music that makes up the Frontera Collection."--Publisher description.
This bilingual panoramic book presents the songs that are the life's work of Cipriano Frederico Vigil, the most important performer of traditional Nuevomexicano folk music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The story of New Mexico as Lummis found it when he moved to the territory in 1888 to recover his health. As Lummis translates the Spanish title, "poco tiempo" means "pretty soon" the phrase expresses the lack of haste in the lives of the area's inhabitants.
The selection of songs was designed to give players a repertoire of the most common played tunes, as well as examples of the most commonly used techniques. The GUITAR collection contains a classic Bill Monroe tune Big Mon and 24 traditional tunes, ranging from Arkansas Traveler, Turkey in the Straw, Old Joe Clark, Sailor's Hornpipe, and Sally Goodin, to the less familiar Whiskey Before Breakfast and others. The book also contains a CD with each song recorded in a such a way that you can pan to hear the lead instrument alone, the backing track alone, or the two combined.
Each song appears both in Spanish and English. For many, transcriptions of the musical notations are provided as well as graphic illustrations of dance technique.
