‘The body is our masterpiece’: learning to transform in Lima’s tambores music

ABSTRACT

In this article I discuss the use of rehearsal drills among the tambores musicians of Villa El Salvador (VES), an underprivileged yet emerging district of Lima, Peru that was built and populated by Andean and mestizo settlers starting in the 1970s. Tambores is a drum genre derived from Afro-Brazilian batucada music that incorporates community-oriented values inherited from the seminal ideological principles established by the first wave of rural settlers. Starting in the early 2000s, grassroots organisations led by VES adolescents began developing and disseminating local pedagogies to promote tambores music as a conduit for galvanising communal engagement and solidarity. The article shows how VES musicians deploy rehearsal routines to fortify their grassroots initiatives, seeking to enfranchise other adolescents by incorporating bodily techniques for self-empowerment and dynamic socialisation. Through this pedagogical programme, tambores musicians employ the rehearsal as a space where the district’s youth may fine-tune and ‘transform’ their bodies and social attitudes in order to become engaged and positively motivated members of the VES community.

KEYWORDS:

• Peru
• practice theory
• batucada
• music pedagogy
• neo-Andean youth cultures

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Carlos Odria is a guitarist, ethnomusicologist, and faculty at the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Worcester State University. As a musician/scholar, his research focuses on the intersections between music innovation, practice theory, and the embodiment of moral notions through bodily performance among Lima's emergent neo-Andean youth cultures. Odria has published refereed articles in Ethnomusicology, Mundos Plurales, The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation, Latin American Music Review, and Cuadernos de ETNOmusicología. His latest music compositions include the soundtrack for the documentary film “El Rio,” 2019 directed by Juan Carlos Galeano, and a world/jazz trio album (Independent 2019) inspired on the same film.