August 2001

This is the second installment of Joanne Pottlitzer’s series of interviews with Chilean songwriters and musicians. During the dictatorship, music became an essential form of communication, a sign of identity, a force for mobilization. Artists, and musicians in particular, helped lay the groundwork for later strategies that put an end to military rule.

JAIME SOTO LEON, composer, musician, founder of Barroco Andino

Most of the music during the time of Allende was associated with his Popular Unity government, even the instruments: the charango, the quena, everything. Even a folk tune, or an instrumental piece, played on those instruments was considered associated. A book by Yehudi Menuhin [The Music of Man] mentions it in one of the chapters: "If there was ever any doubt about how important music can be for a country, look at what happened in a country in the southern part of South America, where music was banned because of the ideological meaning it could have. Music becomes dangerous…"

I wondered how we could get around officialdom without being branded as Communists or Socialists. And I thought about my old friends Bach, Vivaldi, Handel. It would be unthinkable for the military to censor a concert of those composers, even if we played their music on charangos and quenas. At the time, those instruments were not heard on the radio or in concerts, nothing.

We called ourselves Barroco Andino from the very first. The name was the idea of one of our members, Renato Freyggang, who went on to play with the Inti-Illimani. We began by giving concerts in churches. Our first rehearsals were in December 1973. Our first performance was the following February in the Dominican church of La Serena [a colonial town about 200 miles north of Santiago].

We were very lucky. For nearly two years we were practically the only group heard in Chile. I remember once a colonel called a meeting of all the folk musicians in Santiago and told them to be careful, not to make waves, and that the Barroco Andino was an exception. They couldn’t suppress us. We were doing concerts in parishes, in churches, and we filled them. Some people may have attended them as a kind of political meeting, a place of meeting, but as far as we were concerned, we were making music. We said nothing related to anything political. If there was any revolutionary attitude we showed as musicians, I think it was the fact that we were there; we were performing; we were playing instruments associated with the Popular Unity and making that music ours. Music that was "new" had not been heard by many people. And in some way Barroco Andino prolonged the New Chilean Song in Chile.

In those first years, whenever we went on tour—to Arica, to Antofagasta, or to Rancagua—I always arranged for us to play in the jails. I would talk to a priest and ask him to talk with such-and-such a person, so the request wouldn’t come directly from us. We played in all the jails, because there were political prisoners in all of them.

In Arica [the most northern town in Chile, on the Peruvian border] I had a friend whom I had met the year before on tour with the Quilapayún, when I was directing the Cantata de Santa María de Iquique. He worked in the cultural outreach program at the State Technical University in Arica and had treated me very well. The next time I saw him was when we sang in Arica’s jail. We embraced each other. We didn’t say much, but it was very emotional to see each other there. Only months before, I had been in his house, and he had been so kind to me. I learned later that he had died; they killed him. I think the story is like this: They were transporting political prisoners by truck to another city. During the night they told them to get off the truck to relieve themselves, and they fired on them…they said they had tried to escape.

It’s absurd what I’m about to say, but sometimes I felt better in the jails, because outside I felt I had little purpose. Nothing ever happened to me, but it was never the life I had before 1973, when I had many friends, many projects planned.

Between 1974 and 1976 we made three records and three cassettes and received all the prizes there were to give from the critics. We had tremendous audiences, all over Chile. So, yes, we had an impact. In 1977 the group dissolved.

Then in 1984, a friend of mine who taught music at a high school, began to call me on the phone insisting that I reestablish the Barroco Andino. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have as many contacts as before; I didn’t know many instrumentalists. So he told me that he would get a group of people together, young people, and that we could do it. We did it. There were ten instrumentalists, besides me; more folk instruments, more zampoñas; we recuperated a cello, which was necessary for some Bach pieces (the arrangements have always been mine); and there were better voices. Our first concert was held in 1985 at the University Parish on Pedro de Valdivia Plaza.

The following year we toured the south of Chile, through the Ministry of Education. The Ministry told me to eliminate a piece by Violeta Parra: Calambrito Temucano, a totally inoffensive instrumental. I didn’t put it in the program, but we did it as an encore. They didn’t even notice. The audience did, because I announced it. That was the last national tour we did.

A kind of double game was played with the Barroco Andino. I think the military ultimately found us inoffensive. And it wasn’t in their best interest to ban us.

PATRICIO LANFRANCO, composer, singer

At the time of the coup, in 1973, I was in my second year of Chemical Engineering at the University of Concepción, a school categorized during that period as the Red University of Chile. It was a progressive university, with 23,000 students, where basically two or three organizations headed up the student movement: MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement)], the Socialist Youth and the Communist Youth. Our focus was to maintain direct access to the progressive cultural movements and a clear connection with Santiago.

After the coup I spent six or seven months living underground in Quilpué, a small inland town near Viña del Mar. I didn’t dare go to Santiago until much later. I was a member of the Communist Youth and had a close relationship with Party members. They were very accessible people who would come to your house to talk and discuss issues. You felt a participant of an historic, interesting movement that was part of your life, part of the common experience.

Chile in 1973 had a very solid artistic movement. It had the New Chilean Song; it had a theater movement and a new painting school. Art concepts had changed in 1968 and 1969, when on one hand, Matta’s influence appeared everywhere and on the other, painting went to the streets and became murals. The political brigades who painted the murals, even the brigades of the Right, competed for walls to campaign for their candidates. Cities, like Concepción and Valparaíso, were characterized by their murals. They were cities of colors. Then the military painted over the walls, and, for a long time after the coup, the walls were gray.

Fortunately, the biggest exponents of Chilean music were on tour in Europe when the military coup happened. The Quilapayún, for example, was abroad; so was Isabel Parra; so was Patricio Manns, the Inti-Illimani, all of them. And they stayed abroad in exile. The same in the field of painting, in the field of poetry. Lucky for them. But that meant that the generation immediately following them were without mentors, without people who could orient them in cultural matters, without people to talk to, go to a bar with and sit down and argue and dialogue and soak up what they had to teach.

Between 1973 and 1975 the students lay low to know what and whom we could count on. Then, around 1975, they began to apply pressure. And curiously, they found a very concrete way of publicly poking a little fun at the enormous repression of anything that smelled of politics: Instead of creating student centers, or student groups, they created student cultural organizations; they created workshops -- music workshops, art workshops, theater workshops, painting workshops. The student movement began to take shape through those workshops.

I was one of the creators of the cultural movement at the University of Chile. In 1977 an extremely important movement was formed called ACU [Agrupación Cultural Universitaria (University Cultural Group)], which I headed in 1980 and 1981. It provoked, confronted, and said to the [professional] artists, "Look, we’re students, we’re doing this, and what are you doing?"

We organized enormous festivals: music festivals, painting festivals, theater festivals. We couldn’t organize the students through union or university demands; we had to do it very carefully, through artistic demands. Those student cultural activities acted more as a kind of safety valve, an outlet for expressing what the students were feeling, than as a pretext for political organizing. I believe that the movement was very honest. Many in ACU were not members of any party, I’d say the vast majority.

When I was arrested in 1981 and disappeared for five days, they had to let me go because of national, and especially international, pressure. I had been a party leader of some influence (in 1981 I left the Communist Party over an important difference of opinion on how to confront the country’s political situation), and people knew they couldn’t touch me because I had considerable strength within the student movement.

While I was president of ACU, its secretary was a member of Ortiga, a famous group in the Canto Nuevo, and we became friends. With two or three others from Ortiga we formed an interesting new group. It was interesting from a musical point of view because the harmony of a soprano, a tenor, a contralto, and a baritone or bass did not exist. There were none in the musical movement. And the idea of working with women was an important challenge, musically and politically. There were seven of us, and we called ourselves Amauta.

We too became part of the Canto Nuevo, which was in formation at that time and so named by Ricardo García of Sello Alerce to differentiate it from the New Chilean Song. Among its emergent interpreters were Eduardo Peralta, Santiago de Nuevo Extremo, Capri, Isabel Aldunate, Ortiga, Napalé, Amauta. There was fluid communication among the groups, but nothing comparable to what had existed during the years of the New Chilean Song: the conversations, the discussions about where we wanted our art to go, whom it should represent, what was it we wanted to say, what was the real expression of popular music. There was no ideological connotation, no articulated movement. So I would not say that the Canto Nuevo is a movement that succeeded the New Chilean Song. Canto Nuevo was a name under which a number of artists who were anti-dictatorship somehow came together, but their goal was not to end the dictatorship. Their fundamental mission was to express themselves as musicians, to make music in a difficult, complicated, complex time.

Those were times of great loneliness, great anguish, a strong feeling of defeat, when life was all uphill, you’d lost friends, you’d lost work, you’d lost the University, you’d lost your parents -- very hard times, very, very hard -- and you would come to a place like Nano Acevedo’s Peña Javiera, the only authentic peña that existed early in the dictatorship, where the spirit booster’s life was as hard as yours. If you were a musician, you could go there with your guitar -- or if you didn’t have a guitar but said, "I’d like to sing," there was a guitar there that you picked up and you sang. It was going to a place where there were others like you, as bad off as you, and you didn’t feel alone, so you felt better. Those experiences were valuable; they gave us strength, a sense of power. Nano Acevedo was very courageous, he was very courageous.

Nano Acevedo, composer, musician: Saturday was a bad night for restaurant owners. Fear was widespread and besides, there was a curfew. Finally, the owner said, "Alright, try it once, this coming Saturday." That night the place was full and he did a good business. He charged a small cover for us and the rest (the food and drink sales) were his. Little by little, by word of mouth, the place began to fill up, we added Friday nights and could almost live on what we earned there two nights a week. When the curfew was 11 o’clock, we’d start at 8 and end at 10:30 or quarter to 11. There was a certain kind of car, taxi, that was allowed to run a few minutes over the curfew. As the curfew got later, we’d extend the hours of the peña. Sometimes we’d stay there till the next day. The police would come now and then. They’d padlock the place and cart everyone off to jail. The peña lasted until 1980. I let it go, not because I had to, but because I was tired of it and there was no longer any risk involved. I’m addicted to risk. Some people are addicted to marijuana, cocaine, tobacco, alcohol. I’m not addicted to those things, but I love to do things that are not so easy…

You had that nourishment from the artists performing there who sang, who played, from the person beside you, across from you, etc. And you’d think about what the artist said, about the song, and you’d sing it, you’d go out and get the cassette. Those were the things that made you feel alive, that gave meaning to your expression, to your way of being. It was your contact with the prior generation, with whom you couldn’t have a conversation or discussion. We would listen to those songs and would say, "Now what did Patricio Manns mean by ‘life’s meanderers’?" And we’d go round and round until we came to an interpretation of a poetic phrase. Well, that’s how the Canto Nuevo emerged.

I’d say that what most identifies the Canto Nuevo is its language, more than the music. Its language is sibylline, clandestine, with a subliminal message. When I say, "Spring is the doors of your house, my love," I’m offering the whole society, the new world, the desire to live again in the midst of this powerful winter we’re living. It was almost telepathic. The language of the New Chilean Song was explicit, combative. Categorically, that was its social expression. The idea of the Canto Nuevo was to be able to write and say things without people knowing the hidden message, except your friends, of course. That was an important challenge.

The Nueva Trova Cubana had enormous influence on us, on the Canto Nuevo. So did Pablo Milanés, Vicente Feliú, Silvio Rodríguez. I think they taught us how to say many things; they taught us a way of kneading language, a way of using words, verbs, that Chileans did not teach us. The Quilapayún didn’t teach us that, the Inti-Illimani didn’t teach us that, Violeta Parra didn’t teach us that. Well, maybe Violeta. Violeta was the most poetic element of the New Chilean Song.

CLEMENTE RIEDEMAN, Poet, Lyricist - Puerto Montt.
[Riedeman is one of Chile's most prominent poets. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, he worked with the popular singing duo, Schwenke & Nilo, writing lyrics for many of their songs.]

I had joined MIR in Valdivia when I was in high school. I was 17. It was the end of 1970, just after Allende’s election. For that reason alone I was the object of personal repression after the military coup, as were all my friends. We all went through the experience of prison and torture. Some left prison in very bad shape and were never again what they used to be; others died; others went into exile. I was one of those who preferred to stay, at the age of 20. I remember there were people much younger than I in prison, people who were 14 and 15, children, really.

I was in prison for six months, from September 1973, a few days after the coup, until March 1974. I was picked up alone. We spent most of our time alone to lessen the possibility of being picked up all together. Periodically we had coordination meetings, which ended up being survival meetings. They found me at one of those meetings and took me. I had gone to see my parents, to tell them I was alright and not to worry. That was a mistake. When you’re young, they suppose that sooner or later you’ll visit your mother and father. That’s how it was. There was a huge network of informants. Maybe it was one of the neighbors.

I hadn’t lived at home for almost a year. I had come to an understanding with my father, who was right wing. Months before the coup, when the situation was so tense, so conflictive, so dangerous, my father asked me to leave the house thinking about the safety of the family. And I accepted that. I understood perfectly.

My father and I had the same name, so the day they arrested me they took him, too. My father fell partly because they had no information and because he had my name. They released him soon after, but not before they tortured him. I saw them torture my father, and he saw them torture me.

We were jailed in Valdivia on Isla Teja, where the university is, a new prison that Allende had built. It’s as though he designed it precisely for all his followers. I had been a student on that very island. I was prisoner with the dean of my department, most of my professors and most of my student colleagues. It was as though they had merely moved the department of the university to the jail.

When my father and I were taken, my mother, who was always a mother, a protector (politics are irrelevant to her), did what all women did: she talked to officials, colonels, lieutenants, military people, taking advantage of a certain radius of influence she had and personal acquaintances to get us out. My father was released almost immediately after a couple of her interventions, a few of her telephone calls. They left me inside, which is how it should have been.

After many negotiations I was finally released. One thing in my favor was my age. I wasn’t of age yet. And to a lesser degree, the kind of relationships my father had with people of the Right and the military. Third, the few political offenses I had on my record. And fourth, maybe it was a star that protected the poet.

After I got out of prison, I had to go to work because my father died shortly after the coup. He had been ill, but I think the prison experience affected him psychologically. From the time he was released in September until January, when he died, he was depressed. I went to the hospital to see him a few days before he died.

As I remember it now, that was a powerful experience. They gave me permission to see him, with two soldiers armed to the teeth. And then when he died, they allowed me to visit the house and the wake. I went with a soldier, who didn’t leave me even when I went to the bathroom. He was very young and was just performing his duty. I promised him that I wasn’t going to try to escape and that I intended to stay until they buried my father. He left. I also talked to the commander of the regiment and asked him please not to send a soldier with me the following day when they were going to bury my father, and again promised not to escape. With difficulty, the commander said, "I’ll look into it," or something like that, "Alright," he said, "but when it’s over I’ll be waiting for you myself at the entrance of the cemetery."

In spite of the pain of the circumstances of my father’s death, there was also a strange feeling of being free -- to participate in everything, go to the cemetery, participate in the funeral ritual. When it was over, and we were leaving the gates of the cemetery, there across the street was the commander. Seeing him there was more horrible than all that had gone before. It’s wrenching to be forced to interrupt a familial process. I should have replaced my father right then and there as the financial support of the household, but I couldn’t. I had to go back to jail.

That moment was the worst. More than the situation itself, what devastated me the most was not being able to go home and perform my duty as head of the family, not being of any use to the people who needed me so. I wished I could have done what Shostakovich was able to do in his Seventh Symphony: transcend the prison walls to reach those who were able to listen with a message of resistance and hope.

I returned to literature, a vocation that had been incubating since high school, when I resumed my studies in 1978, after a five-year interruption, at the Austral University in Valdivia. It was there that I met Nelson Schwenke and Marcelo Nilo. Nelson and I were classmates at the School of Anthropology. Marcelo was a music student. I was 25; they were 21, 22.

Schwenke and Nilo were adolescents when they experienced the coup; they were 13 and 14. They experienced it without a political consciousness. In spite of our different life experiences and that small age difference (which is more noticeable at that age), we were able to connect on some levels. We agreed, for example, that we wanted to defend freedom of expression and that we had to invent spaces to show our art. Official spaces were forbidden to us. Between the option of not doing anything (an option that many took, and legitimately) and inventing alternative spaces, we chose the latter.

We could never perform out in the open, not on stages, not on television, not on official radio stations. We had to build a large underground network, supported by the Catholic Church, which gave us spaces in its parishes, chapels, educational centers, schools. Within that small margin of mobility the universities also played a very important role. It was a risk because meetings or large gatherings could never be controlled a hundred percent. Many times they’d cut off the electricity during a performance, things like that. But even without amplification or lights, the performance went on, a capella and in the dark. We always had a response, almost mystical, from our audiences: the youth, the students.

Most of our poetry got to people through audiocassettes because of their easy mobility, and to some degree, that dictated the style of our work. The cassette carried our experience to the regions and provinces far from Santiago and to the network formed by Chileans in exile all over the world.

Nelson Schwenke, composer, lyricist, musician [Worked with Marcelo Nilo and Clemente Riedeman] At that time there was a penetration of Anglo music, very distorting disco music, a total negation of folk roots. We thought that kind of cultural imperialism too brutal. It didn’t allow us to sing to the city of Valdivia. We were Valdivians. Why couldn’t we sing about the rain? So we talked about the rain, but under the rain were feelings of people in the middle of a difficult, adverse geographical context. And people began to understand those messages, not so much about rain, but certainly about the night -- the dictatorship. The university gave us spaces not realizing the consequences. It even financed our first recitals, thinking it was supporting just another university group. They didn’t realize, nor did we, what those recitals meant in the later organization of student centers. They were innocently given out of a pressing need to express ourselves, with no political consciousness. We were very young. We did it because the university deprived us of everything. We did it for our intellectual survival. I am convinced that our generation was not conscious of the importance that art had at the time. I think we were like the men who painted their caves with artistic images: they didn’t know what they were doing, but knew it was necessary to do, to communicate.

Marcelo Nilo, musician [Worked with Nelson Schwenke and Clemente Riedeman] People would follow us. Nelson’s parent’s house was ransacked. He had to move out. When they located where he was living, they’d stand outside at the hour of curfew. Nelson used to stay dressed all night in case they’d come to take him. But they only harassed him. Several friends, even some of the university professors, took turns walking with him wherever he went so they wouldn’t pick him up on the street. You could see them following us; you’d know that if you left the house, they’d be there. One time we were all in our dressing room at the Cariola Theatre, where we were playing for a human rights event -- many things were done at that theater; it was accessible because it belonged to the actors union. The dressing rooms were small, not much bigger than 5' x 7'. There were five of us in the group: the bass guitar, the viola, violins. And as we were tuning our instruments, I noticed that there were six in the room, not five. None of us knew the other person, but there he was in our dressing room, pretending to be tuning our guitars. And he let us see him! I think that was their job: to make us aware of their presence. Fortunately, they never arrested us -- though they did arrest friends of ours.

Schwenke & Nilo’s first three recitals in Valdivia caused an impact. We wrote our poems and our songs based on things we talked about with people. It’s called "the importance of registering memory." That material obviously touched directly on emotions and desires of many Chileans for opening up the situation -- particularly the young people, who are rebels and questioners anyway, with their illusions of freedom, even more so in that time of absolute repression, of darkness.

Poetry has enormous status in Chile. Two Nobel Prizes, at least fifteen major poets, all of whom were born in the provinces and went to live in Santiago to remember the provinces with nostalgia: Nicanor Parra, Gonzalo Rojas, even Neruda, worked in Santiago and from there they leapt to the world, their visions sieved through the cultural filter of Santiago. If I had repeated that story of the provincial poet who goes to Santiago, my language would probably have ended up being similar to the standard, and eventually I would have been accepted as one of those poets. But writing from the provinces and having a vision of my country and of the world from that perspective has made my language distinctive, in the songs I wrote and in the poetry I’ve been able to build, just for having stayed here. Everyone always told me it was crazy. And it is, if you believe in a literary career as a progression in status in the literary and social hierarchy. I’m convinced now more than ever that I made the right decision.