by Ben Gunter
Two trailblazers in how music connects people from different cultures are coming to Tallahassee this March – Piffaro and El Fuego. It’s a double debut, since this marks the first time either ensemble has played in Florida. It’s also a golden opportunity to step into Florida’s Spanish past firsthand, since both bands specialize in researching and reviving dance music that traveled from Spain to the New World and from the Americas to Spain between 1500 and 1800.
For 40 years, Piffaro has been traveling through Latin America to find compositions by Spanish, Indigenous, and mestizo composers from the 1500s and 1600s. Piffaro’s expert musicians reconstruct performances of these toe-tapping, finger-snapping songs and dances on historic instruments, including shawms (ancestors of today’s oboe), bajones (grandparents of the bassoon), sackbuts (great-uncles of the trombone), and vihuelas (the mother of all guitars). This work has earned Piffaro prestigious recording contracts – including an album of villancicos and dances called Los Ministriles in the New World for Navona records – and rave reviews from all over the world for programs like “The Musical World of Don Quixote,” which persuaded Google to feature Piffaro on Google Arts & Culture. For their debut in Tallahassee, Piffaro is bring a collection of historic instruments and an ensemble of 6 musicians, to present 3 workshops and 2 concerts. Workshops will introduce you to Renaissance instruments and show you how to make a Native American shaker, to accompany a dance tune that dates back to Spanish Florida times. During the concert, you’ll get to dance in the streets to music that Spanish settlers in Florida used to celebrate state occasions.
El Fuego started its work in 2013, the 500th anniversary of official contact between Spain and North America. This adventurous ensemble is quickly becoming famous for making music that sparks cross-cultural conversations. El Fuego’s “The Last Conquistador,” for example, uses chronicles, poetry, art, and music from Mexico and Spain to revive the life of times of Juan de Oñate y Salazar (1550-1626) and explore whether this controversial character was a visionary or a mass murderer. “Acis and Galatea” revives a whole cast of characters from the early 1700s to tell the story of a boundary-breaking love affair through music that made this zarzuela popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world. In “Sublime Love,” El Fuego’s musical director Salomé Sandoval uses guitars, lutes, violins, and voices to blend music of the 1600s from Guatemala, Perú, and Mexico with the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who wrote in Spanish and in the Aztec language Nahuatl. For El Fuego’s first trip to Florida, Salomé Sandoval will bring 2 other singer-musicians who are experts on stringed instruments to teach classic villancicos and historic seguidillas – music that got people from Indigenous, European, and criollo backgrounds singing and dancing together while Florida belonged to Spain.
This double debut is part of Theater with a Mission’s Loco for Love Festival, coming up in Tallahassee’s Railroad Square Art District on March 4-6, 2022. Free and family-friendly, Loco for Love’s theme this spring is “Music, Dance, and Diversity in Florida History.” In addition to workshops and concerts by Piffaro and El Fuego, the Festival will feature step-by-step encounters with dances from Florida’s multicultural past. You can learn Indigenous dances from Native Americans, African dances from experts in Black history, Renaissance dances from scholars at Ohio State University, Baroque dances from scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Regency dances from scholars at Florida State University. Stuffed with activities for kids of all ages, the festival will offer opportunities to pet a Galiceño pony, watch a Dragoncillo puppet show, dress up for the Florida History Parade, and taste-test Spanish paella, African-American chicken perlo, British-Florida pot pie, and Native America possum stew.
To protect the health of artists and audiences, the festival will unfold in a hybrid format. You can access activities in person or online, via advance ticketing and live streaming. Visit Theater with a Mission’s website at www.theaterwithamission.com for details. Come dance to this double debut!
