Canto a la vida is a program of a cappella choral music gems by Venezuelan composers Modesta Bor and Antonio Estévez.
Enjoy gorgeous settings of Latin American poetry for unaccompanied choir rarely performed in the United States including Bor's "Aquí te amo," the title track from our second album.
Performances:
• Saturday, 20 September | 7pm at Academia Cesar Chavez School, Saint Paul;
• Sunday, 21 September | 4pm at Church of the Ascension, Minneapolis; and
• Monday, 22 September | 7pm at Schofield Auditorium at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire.
Our program celebrates the fundamental connections between our inner worlds and the physical world around us; love, memory, and nature are all inextricably linked. We are bound to each other and to the world around us. This concert celebrates the human voice and the way music and poetry bind everything together.
Performing and listening to this music today cannot be separated from the reality of Venezuela’s recent history. Political and economic crises, government repression, and mass displacement have marked the lives of millions, many of whom now live in exile. We are living in a particularly fraught time for Venezuelans in the United States, many under precarious Temporary Protected Status. Their presence here is fragile, and the world too often regards them as statistics and stereotypes rather than as human beings.
My hope is that these songs let us hear a fuller dimension of Venezuelans, that they help us connect to their enduring creativity, tenderness, resilience, and love. Just like the flowers “scream their sweet joy” in “Canto a la vida” until they light up our heart, the music and poetry in these works scream their humanity to us until we have no choice but to recognize it in ourselves. Our mutual humanity, not as a mere concept, but as something that we feel in our bones. When we sing of our beloved in the same breath as the flight of a seagull, when a composer places the whole arc of life inside a few minutes of music, or we hear of a rooster song that awakens the stars themselves, we are drawn into a recognition: their songs are also our songs. There is no us and them, only we. Our grief, our joy, our tenderness, our resilience. This program is a canto a la vida, a song to life. Not to an idealized life, but one that is fragile, resilient, filled with longing, and where we are bound to the world around us and to each other. We sing this music to affirm that all of this, even in the worst of times, is worth celebrating and hope that, in listening, you join us in this affirmation.
-Ahmed Anzaldúa