Andean Music and Bambuco: The Soul of the Interior (19th Century–present)

That music from the interior is generically called Colombian Andean music, and it finds its most complete and recognized expression in the bambuco: the rhythm that Colombia has declared its national dance, the one that appears in the folk festivals of Huila and Tolima, the one that classical musicians have arranged for orchestra, the one that peasant troubadours from Boyacá and Cundinamarca have known since they were children as the language of their own identity.

It is a music that the whole world did not dance to, nor did it win Grammy awards, nor did it appear on international magazine covers. But it is the most deeply Colombian music from the interior of the country: the one that remained when all external influences were filtered out and what was left could not come from anywhere else.

The region and its instruments

The Colombian Andean region encompasses the departments of Antioquia, Boyacá, Caldas, Cauca, Cundinamarca, Huila, Nariño, Quindío, Risaralda, Tolima, and Valle del Cauca. It is a mountainous area with a temperate climate, whitewashed towns, páramos, and coffee plantations. Its geography produces a sound distinct from that of the coast: more subdued, more melancholic, with more silence between the notes.

The defining instruments are string instruments: the tiple, a small twelve-string instrument divided into four courses, which is the most characteristic instrument of the Colombian interior — the product of the ingenuity of Creole artisans who took the Spanish guitar and transformed it into something unique —; the bandola, a sixteen-string instrument with a body similar to a lute, played with a plectrum and producing a bright and penetrating sound; and the guitar as the harmonic base. This trinity — bandola, tiple, and guitar — forms the Andean string ensemble, the most representative instrumental format of the region.

These instruments are joined by the guacharaca in some branches, cane flutes in the oldest traditions, and the voice — of soloists, duos, or trios — which in the bambuco and pasillo acquires a particular cadence, slow and ornamented, unlike any other way of singing in Colombia.

The Bambuco: The National Rhythm

The bambuco is officially the national rhythm of Colombia. This designation is not just ceremonial: the bambuco holds the same symbolic weight in the Colombian interior as the tango in Argentina or the fado in Portugal. It is the musical form that encapsulates the identity of the Colombian Andean peasant: their melancholy, their humor, their love for the land, their particular way of being in the world.

Its origin is tri-ethnic, like the cumbia but with different proportions. The indigenous root contributes the pentatonic scales and a certain conception of musical time that does not fit perfectly into the European measure. The African root contributes the polyrhythm — the bambuco has the technical characteristic of simultaneously combining two different measures, 6/8 and 3/4, which produces that sensation of tension between the one and the three that is its unmistakable rhythmic signature. And the Spanish root contributes the poetic structure of verse and refrain, the melodic ornamentation, and the string instruments.

This 6/8 against 3/4 is what makes the bambuco so difficult to dance for those who do not know it and so natural for those who grew up with it: the body has to sustain two different pulses at the same time, and when it succeeds, the sensation is of a particular grace that has no equivalent in any other Colombian genre.

The bambuco has several regional branches: the Sanjuanero bambuco from Huila — which is danced at the Neiva Folkloric Festival every June —, the Caucano bambuco, the Patiano bambuco from the Patía Valley with a strong Afro-descendant presence, and the festive bambuco from the Coffee Axis. Each with its own character, but all recognizable as variations of the same essential form.

The Other Andean Rhythms

The bambuco is the best known, but Colombian Andean music is a complex system of interrelated genres, each with its own expressive character.

The pasillo is the most refined and the most linked to the tradition of 19th-century salons. Derived from the European waltz but Colombianized to the point of being unrecognizable in its origin, it has an elegant ternary tempo and a specific melancholy that made it the music of the Andean cities during the Republic. Bogotá, Medellín, Manizales: the pasillo was the soundtrack of the gatherings and wakes of urban Colombian interiors for more than a century.

The guabina is the most popular and festive genre of the Cundiboyacense highlands. With a fast and cheerful rhythm, double entendre lyrics, and a vocation for collective celebration that contrasts with the gravity of the bambuco, the guabina is the music of the festivities in the East of Colombia.

The torbellino is the oldest and most indigenous of all: a fast-tempo ternary rhythm that in its most traditional versions connects directly with the pre-Columbian rituals of the region and has the tiple and cane flute as its fundamental instruments.

The sanjuanero — especially that of Huila — mixes bambuco and pasillo in a couple's dance that is the most visually and choreographically spectacular of Colombian Andean folklore, and that became the most recognized image of the National Folkloric Festival of Huila.

Pedro Morales Pino: the first codifier

Pedro Morales Pino was born in Cartago, Valle del Cauca, in 1863 and died in Bogotá in 1926. He was the first musician to systematize and codify Colombian Andean music: the first to arrange the bambuco and the pasillo for formal instrumental ensembles, to transcribe these musics to the staff, to bring them to the theaters of Bogotá with a production that made them recognizable as art in their own right.

His instrument was the bandola, and his ensemble — the format of bandola, tiple, and guitar that is still the standard of the Colombian Andean ensemble today — was his most enduring creation. Morales Pino played in Europe, where Colombian Andean music was received with curiosity and interest by audiences who had never heard anything like it. He is the father of the bambuco as a self-conscious artistic form.

Jorge Villamil: the doctor who composed a continent

Jorge Augusto Villamil Cordovez was born in El Cedral, a coffee farm near Neiva, Huila, on June 6, 1929. He learned to play the tiple at the age of four. He studied medicine at the Pontifical Xavierian University of Bogotá and specialized in orthopedic surgery. He practiced his profession for decades. In parallel, he composed more than five hundred songs that today form the most important canon of 20th-century Colombian Andean music.

Villamil was a chronicler of his region with the same documentary vocation that Escalona had for vallenato and that José Barros had for cumbia. His bambucos and pasillos speak of Huila, the Magdalena River at its source, the páramos, the peasants of his land, with a geographical and emotional precision that makes them documents as well as songs. "El Barcino", "Llamaradas", "Espumas", and the bambuco "Fiesta en Corraleja" are some of his most beloved pieces.

He died on February 28, 2010, at the age of eighty. Colombia bid him farewell as the patriarch of interior music.

Carranga: when the peasant found his own voice

In 1977, a veterinary medicine student from the National University of Colombia named Jorge Luis Velosa Ruiz — born in Ráquira, Boyacá, in 1949 — founded Los Carrangueros de Ráquira and began recording songs in a genre he called carranga: a mix of rumba criolla, vallenato guitarreado, and Boyacá peasant music, played with requinto, guitar, tiple, and guacharaca, with lyrics that spoke of the daily life of the peasant from the Cundiboyacense highlands with a humor, tenderness, and precision that no other musician from the Colombian interior had achieved before.

Carranga did not exist before Velosa. He invented it from ancestral knowledge that did exist: the coplas, the tunes, the oral stories of the peasants of Boyacá and Cundinamarca. What Velosa did was take that accumulated knowledge from the mountains and turn it into recordable music, into songs with structure, into art that the peasant could recognize as his own without feeling ashamed.

The first album, Los Carrangueros de Ráquira (1981), contains "La Cucharita" — the story of a bone spoon given as a gift of friendship that gets lost — which became the most popular song of carranga and one of the most beloved in Colombian folklore. It is a song about nothing: about a spoon. And at the same time, it is a song about everything: about peasant daily life, about objects that have value for what they represent, about the culture of those who have nothing and value the little they have.

Velosa defined carranga as "song, proclamation, and dream. Thought, word, and deed. A daily love for life and its affections and a commitment to popular art." That definition is also the definition of all Colombian Andean music at its best.

Editorial note: Two endemic Colombian frogs bear scientific names in honor of Jorge Velosa. One of them was named Eleutherodactylus carranguerorum. It is probably the most unique tribute Colombian biology has ever made to a musician.

Carranga found in the eighties and nineties a popularity that far exceeded the realm of intellectuals and folk festivals: it reached the villages, the market squares, the intermunicipal buses of the highlands, the town parties in Boyacá, Cundinamarca, and Santander. Velosa took Los Carrangueros to Madison Square Garden in New York. In 2011, he recorded Carranga Sinfónica with orchestras from the country, bringing the sounds of the Colombian countryside to the most academic format possible without losing a gram of its essence.

The Folkloric Festival and the Bambuco in the 21st Century

Every year, in June, the city of Neiva — capital of Huila, a department along the upper Magdalena River — celebrates the Folkloric Festival and National Bambuco Pageant. It is the most important event of Colombian Andean music: a week of interpretation, composition, and dance competitions where the bambuco and the sanjuanero of Huila are the absolute protagonists.

The festival has existed since 1960 and has survived decades of armed conflict, economic crisis, and the invasion of more commercial urban genres, because the rural culture of Huila and Tolima has a relationship with its music that is not one of entertainment but of identity: the bambuco is part of what it means to be from there, and abandoning it would be abandoning oneself.

That is the deepest legacy of all Colombian Andean music: it is not music that is listened to but music that is lived. And as long as Colombia continues to be that country of mountains, of farmers, of rivers that are born in the páramos and descend singing towards the warmth of the Caribbean, that music will continue to have a reason to exist.