Jornadas Culturales de La Paz 2007

I'm in La Paz, Bolivia. Things are pretty sweet, I started my 12 hour course in charango. I'm diggin my new charango that I bought in Aiquile on my way to La Paz, but its so small I'm having trouble changing chords. The right hand fingering is being learned fast because of all the flamenco exercises I've played. (Btw, the classes are costing me $1.65 per hour...which reminds me that the best deal so far was a night in Aiquile ($2.63 even though I slept on a straw mattress) and lunch at a Sunday market (less than a dollar). Beat that McDonald's value menu!) Boy that was a lot of parenthesis.

So about the Jornadas Culturales, its a yearly meeting in La Paz to discuss the state of culture in Bolivia. I joined the panel discussing music not really knowning what to expect. There were the main problems they talked about, in addition to preparing for the bicentenial celebration in 2009 (BTW, These are mostly notes to myself and not really interesting):
- The music consumption has moved to a majority of outside authors and music instead of national authors.
-Maintaning local cultural music; for example in La Paz there is an increase in Chacarrera style from the south of Bolivia, while more regional styles are being forgotten.
-Need for an organizational body to represent all musicians from every subsection of music. It seems like there are organizations already joining musicians and composers but there is misscomunication or the demands aren't being met.

One of the participants said, that Bolivia is a country of rich musical culture, but there is no such global presence.

Now for my opinions: I believe that it is important to promote music in the schools, because even though not every student will become a musician, at least this exposure will enable them to become a better listener and participant.

Another btw, my spellin in da last few entries must suck because i've been using internet cafes which use internet explorer which don't enable the spellcheck feature of blogger.