5 - Violeta Parra, Creative Researcher

Summary

Bueno. Aquí les dejo entonces este regalito de cuecas chilenas, y espero (uf), espero que ustedes las escuchen una y otra vez, y saquen de este presente mío, alguna conclusión con respecto a nuestra cueca, así como la he sacado yo a través de los viajes que he hecho al campo y de los años que llevo recopilando.

Violeta Parra, 1959

(Very well. So I'll leave you with this little gift of Chilean cuecas, and I hope (ugh), I hope you will listen to them again and again, and from this present of mine draw some conclusion regarding our cueca, as I have during my years of collecting and travelling in the countryside.)

The tone of the composer is inviting, but it also betrays a deep fatigue, not only due to the enormous effort spent on her research ‘travelling in the countryside’, but also from a sense of frustration, a feeling that her research has not had the necessary impact on the Chilean public. The tone is an appeal, asking us to draw ‘some conclusion’ from her work, but we sense an anticipation of failure in her request.

In 1953, four years before she began her creative work, Violeta Parra proposed to form and reconstruct a cultural and acoustic map, bringing together all that we are and have been as a nation, including the diverse poetic-musical records that make up Chile: from north to south, from the sea to the mountains, including Rapa Nui. In this sense she was interested in those versions that predated the nineteenth century, rooted in the popular world and not just in the folk performances of the nation. She would use this map to carry out a larger project: to revitalise Chilean popular traditional folk culture, successively denied by official versions of Chilean identity. She would achieve this through the collection and dissemination of folklore in atypical formats and also through her own creation. Her work took place in an era in which other institutions, researchers and artists were undertaking similar collection projects,3 but Violeta Parra did it very differently. The scope of dissemination would be more significant at a Latin American and world level compared to other artists or researchers and would impact directly on her creative work.