“There’s a great cultural value in this

music. It represents five centuries. It’s

the musical heritage of Mexico.”
Eduardo Llerenas was a respected professor of biochemistry when he
won a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 1981 for a project to preserve
Mexico’s rich musical heritage. He is now the director of an
independent music label and is considered by ethnomusicologists to be
the world expert on Mexican traditional music. Among the many
factors that brought about his career change, the Rolex Award figures
significantly.
- See more at:
http://www.rolexawards.com/profiles/laureates/eduardo_llerenas/ov
erview#sthash.4QoTe1vq.dpuf

Sounds from the Heart

Like all true transformations, Eduardo Llerenas’s shift from
biochemistry to Mexican son — a form of music with distinct regional
styles played throughout Latin America — was a gradual process. It
stretches back to 1967, when Llerenas began travelling from his home
in Mexico City to the surrounding countryside. The original purpose of
these journeys was to discover nature and people, but he soon
discovered something else: a keen appreciation of folk music.

In the years that followed, Llerenas ventured out regularly on weekends

and holidays to small Indian and mestizo villages, seeking out patron-
saint parties that featured local musicians. "I’m always going to parties
I’m not invited to," Llerenas says. This proved to be fortunate for the
musicians whose work he began to collect, and whose work he
eventually produced, distributed and even helped to bring live to
concert audiences around the world.

Llerenas’s first recording session took place in 1969. By then he had

teamed up with two friends, one a mathematics professor who took
care of the electro-acoustics and one a plastics factory manager who
was also a musician. The three friends decided that when they were not
busy with their regular jobs, they would create an archive of Mexican
traditional music. They then began a systematic musical survey of the
country.

 Talent Seekers
Identifying and locating the musicians in their home towns was a
difficult task since the musicians were peasants who played in their
spare time. As a rule, Llerenas would arrive in a village and begin by
speaking with the people in the market or in the coffee shops. He would
find out whether the local musicians were playing and then go to hear
them. If they proved to be good enough, the team would record the
group.

"We looked for virtuosity as well as the most authentic repertoire of a

particular local genre," Llerenas explains. When they found it, they
recorded right there in the village. Llerenas set up temporary recording
sites in schools, homes, churches and bars — anywhere with good
natural acoustics and where the musicians could feel at home and
family and friends could listen and watch.

"I knew we couldn’t get the best quality if we recorded during the actual
fiestas, so we’d all go back to a home or to some other appropriate
location. There’d be lots of interruptions. Neighbours would stop by,
dogs would bark, children would cry, but the result was great. If you
take these kinds of musicians into a studio, they die artistically," he
says.

 A Relaxed Atmosphere
It was this strategy of recording in a relaxed atmosphere, combined
with the best standards of equipment and recording techniques that
assured the team that they were getting the truest possible
reproduction of the music.

Slowly but surely the archive was built. Today it includes more than
15,000 songs by 800 different groups scattered throughout regions that
make up about 60 per cent of Mexico. The purpose of the archive was
twofold: Llerenas and his friends sought to build something that could
be used in ethnomusical and historical studies, and they also wanted to
diffuse the music in order to preserve it — both in the places where it
originated and in places that had never before heard it.

At first, Llerenas was afraid traditional music was disappearing. He

believed that as roads to remote villages were paved and television
satellites and cables were introduced, the influence of popular culture
would be devastating to traditional music. And this was unthinkable.
"There’s a great cultural value in this music. It represents five
centuries. It’s the musical heritage of Mexico," he says, adding that
Mexico’s music is particularly rich due to the blending of its many
indigenous cultures with Spanish traditions and influences. In
addition, Mexico’s mountainous topography has accentuated the
individuality and variety of the music.

 Career Change
With preservation of this varied musical heritage uppermost in his
mind, Llerenas applied for a Rolex Award for Enterprise. He hoped, in
the event he was selected as a winner, to finish the archives by
recording in regions of Mexico that his team had not yet explored. At
that time, he never dreamed that winning the award would change his
life — but it did.

"Although the prize money, exposure and contacts of the Rolex Award
were all important," Llerenas says, "the real value was the stimulus it
gave me to share my recordings with the public, both in Mexico and
abroad."

After the Rolex Award in 1981, Llerenas and his friends received an
offer from a government agency responsible for promoting popular
culture to subsidise the production of materials from their archives.
The result was the Anthology of Mexican Sones, a collection of six
records (now three compact discs) released in 1985. Currently in its
eighth edition, the anthology was a great success and, it paved the way
for further unsubsidised releases.

The Rolex Award also served as a catalyst for other opportunities. Soon
after receiving the prize, Llerenas was invited to lecture and share his
collection with musicologists at congresses and festivals in the
Caribbean, the United States, and in Europe. He also produced several
radio series, including one that won a prestigious prize, the United
Latin American and Caribbean Radio Award.

 Critical Step
In 1986, Llerenas made the critical step of leaving his position as a
research biochemist at the National Polytechnic Institute. It was not an
easy decision to make.

"Little by little," Llerenas says, "the music was taking up more and
more of my time. It slowly took over.
"For an entire year before I finally decided, I had nightmares every
night. I had a very good position at the institute and I had had a
rewarding career in science. But there were a number of circumstances
that had come together by that time: the important impetus of the
Rolex Award, the fact that we had produced and sold records, and my
growing feeling that I didn’t want to be a passer-by on the music
scene," he says.

The decision is one that Llerenas has never regretted. He finds his
dedication to music both interesting and challenging from an
intellectual point of view, and he also finds he does not miss science.

Corasón, his independent label, is doing well and finding its own niche
in the world of music. "There really isn’t any label on the market like
them," comments a spokesman for the company distributing Corasón’s
releases in the United States. "There’s no one doing what they’re doing
with Mexican music."

 Sounds from the Heart
Together with his partner Mary Farquharson, Llerenas established
Corasón in 1992. The name itself is a play on words; taken from the
Spanish word for heart, corazón, and son. An outgrowth of an earlier
label Llerenas had set up called Música Tradicional, Corasón set out to
commercialise the archives as extensively as possible, and it now has
over 30 titles on the market.

The company makes its products available to markets that are

unfamiliar with the music, for example, internationally or in places like
cosmopolitan Mexico City. It also makes a special effort to distribute to
the places that produce the music.

"Although the musicians we record are the stars of their communities,

very few of them have been recorded by other labels. By selling
cassettes locally, we hope to keep the music alive in the region that has
created it," Farquharson explains.

The desire to preserve the music, one that has motivated Llerenas since
the late 1960s, has not been dimmed by the pleasant discovery over the
years that the music seems safe and sound in the hands of a younger
generation. "Traditional music is not, as we had feared, dying out. It
remains stubbornly resistant to change and an important source of
regional identity. The verses, the context and in some cases the
repertoire and instrumentation are changing in the face of the cultural
homogeneity promoted by the mass media, but structurally, the music
remains intact," says Llerenas.

 Musical Archive
His status as director of the independent label has not meant that he
has abandoned the continued expansion of the musical archive. In fact,
that has become a job that Llerenas now views as unending.

"The project turned out to be much more dynamic than I’d imagined
since I discovered the importance of returning to regions we had
already explored in order to see how the music was evolving." In
addition, Llerenas now conducts personal interviews with the
musicians so that the archive includes biographical information and
visual support for the sound recordings.

Outside of Mexico, Corasón has also featured sounds from the

Caribbean and Central and South America and one of its releases
features African-influenced music from 19 different countries. Over the
years, Llerenas has recorded in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Belize,
Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica, Trinidad and Tobago, Martinique,
Guadeloupe, St Kitts, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.

Key to the success of Corasón today is what distinguished Llerenas’s

original winning project – quality. "This isn’t music for museums,"
Llerenas says. "It’s not souvenir music for tourism. It’s good music."
Published in 1997
- See more at:
http://www.rolexawards.com/profiles/laureates/eduardo_llerenas/pr
oject#sthash.PF72hn0p.dpuf

In the 1960s, Eduardo Llerenas, a

university research scientist, discovered
Mexico's centuries-old tradition of folk
music while exploring the countryside
around Mexico City.
Fascinated by this national treasure, he soon began recording and
promoting it. In 1981, he won a Rolex Award to record music from
regions of Mexico he had not yet visited. The Award brought him — and
Mexican music — international renown. Within a few years, he was
able to give up his university job, turning his hobby into the focus of his
life. In 1992, he established Discos Corason, which is now Mexico’s
leading traditional music label and has brought national and
international recognition to many musicians.

Having recorded thousands of songs by hundreds of groups, Eduardo

Llerenas is still as passionate as ever about folk music. He is currently
digitalizing his entire music archive and continues to work with
traditional musicians all over the world.

Published in 2012
- See more at:
http://www.rolexawards.com/profiles/laureates/eduardo_llerenas/pr
ofile#sthash.0ZrO1ef9.dpuf
Mañana se presenta el disco El gusto, 40 años... en la Feria
del Libro de Antropología
“Al son huasteco no se le reconoce, pero es
tan importante como el flamenco”:
Llerenas
“Para esta antología escuchamos unos 600 sones y
seleccionamos 44, todos, inéditos”, explica
Jorge Caballero
Periódico La Jornada
Sábado 1º de octubre de 2011, p. 7
En 1971, un músico y tres científicos empezaron, por gusto propio, a
grabar el son huasteco que escucharon en los seis estados de la
región. Cuatro décadas después, Eduardo Llerenas, sigue grabando y
ahora presenta El gusto, 40 años del son huasteco, antología de 44
temas inéditos, grabaciones de grandes huapangueros ya fallecidos y
de los jóvenes que dominan el escenario actualmente, el cual va
acompañado por un libro de pasta dura con textos, crónicas,
entrevistas y la transliteración de cada son.
El gusto, 40 años del son huasteco, editado por Discos Corason,
se presenta el 2 de octubre a las 12 horas en la Feria del Libro de
Antropología, con comentarios de Arturo Márquez, Armando
Herrera y Ramón Vera, así como música en vivo a cargo del Trío
Chicamole y Esperanza Zumaya.
El embrión de este libro-disco, informa en entrevista Llerenas,
fue “el impulso de satisfacer nuestro placer, cuando Baruj
Lieberman, Enrique Ramírez de Arellano, Carlos Perelló y yo
decidimos grabar a los músicos de son en su ambiente natural en la
Huasteca, en la Costa Chica, en Tierra Caliente... en todos esos
lugares, porque en el mercado no existía una buena calidad de este
tipo de música, catalogado como son regional mexicano; además era
escaso y lo queríamos hacer de forma profesional, pero como
pasatiempo.
“El trabajo consistía en llegar a las localidades, escuchar a los
músicos, preguntar por los tríos sin tener conocimiento de los que
había... Este disco sólo tiene el son de la Huasteca, pero grabamos el
de todas las regiones de México.”
Llerenas continúa: “Así empezó todo, el primer viaje lo hicimos
a la Huasteca cargando una grabadora Ampex, grandísima y
pesadísima; después hicimos viajes cada fin de semana, porque
todos teníamos otros trabajos... nos trepábamos al coche, con cintas,
grabadoras y mapas; lo más importante fue que comenzamos a
adquirir oído para distinguir e identificar los diferentes géneros y,
sobre todo, para saber quiénes eran buenos músicos.
“Como no era un trabajo formal grabábamos sólo lo que nos
gustaba. Llegamos a desarrollar un oído como los habitantes de cada
región. Cuando elegíamos a quienes íbamos a grabar nos poníamos
de acuerdo con los músicos. Los lugares para grabar tenían que ser
acústicamente aislados, para no tener ruidos externos, para hacerlo
de manera profesional, pero que fueran de campo, desde la casa de
uno de los músicos, una escuela, una iglesia, incluso en Apatzingán
lo hicimos en un cuartito de burdel, porque era buenísimo para
grabar, aunque con las malas miradas de la clientela.”
El entrevistado agrega: “Siempre pagamos a los músicos lo que
pedían por su actuación y teniéndole consideración total. En
resumidas cuentas, eso fue lo que hicimos por muchos años... hasta
1986, cuando decidí dejar mi carrera de químico y dedicarme por
entero a editar discos.
“Para esta antología tuvimos que escuchar unos 600 sones y
seleccionar los 44, todos, inéditos.”
El gusto, 40 años del son huasteco incluye grabaciones de
músicos que se volvieron leyendas de la región, aun sin lograr la
proyección de Los Camperos de Valles. Algunos de ellos dejaron
escuela, a pesar de haber grabado pocas veces.
Inocencia Zavala, El 30 meses, Juan Coronel y Carlos, El Zurdo,
Castillo, inspiraron a una generación de huapangueros cuyos hijos y
nietos buscan sus grabaciones para saber cómo tocaban. Entre las
mujeres grabadas durante estos 40 años, se encuentran la legendaria
La Güera Maza, Natalia Valdés y Eperanza Zumaya.
Eduardo Llerenas, flanqueado por integrantes de Los Camperos de VallesFoto Livia Rad
De la generación más reciente de huapangueros, El gusto, 40 años
del son huasteco incluye grabaciones de Dinastía Hidalguense y del
Trío Chicamole, ambos de Hidalgo. Este último grupo se presentará
en ambos actos, cuando también se anunciará su nuevo disco,
Huapango en Wi-fi.
Los textos de El gusto, 40 años del son huasteco incluyen el relato
de Eleazar Velázquez, de su vivencia entre músicos huastecos. Este
escritor y cronista guanajuatense nació y creció entre el son arribeño
y el huasteco, y ha publicado varios libros de crónicas y
conversaciones con músicos de la región.
Eduardo Llerenas relata sus experiencias durante 40 años de grabar
en toda la región, y ofrece una explicación de la ‘ciencia’ detrás de
una buena grabación de campo.
Juan Jesús Aguilar, escritor y poeta tamaulipeco, escribe de dos
grandes violinistas ya fallecidos: Juan Coronel y Carlos Castillo, y
Mary Farquharson entrevista a Heliodoro Copado y al joven
violinista de Hidalgo, Casimiro Granillo, El Arco Loco.
Valor ideológico
En todos estos años de dedicarse a la arqueología del son, Eduardo
Llerenas menciona que: “La situación del son no ha cambiado
mucho, siempre ha sido vista como música de campesinos, de
sombrero y huarache y no se le da la valoración que debería de
tener, como al flamenco por ejemplo.
“En el caso de México le dan valor a nivel ideológico; se celebra la
Guelaguetza, pero sólo una vez al año, después se guarda. También
existe el fenómeno de que regionalmente sí tiene vigencia e
importancia, sobre todo en la Huasteca, donde en los años recientes
han surgido unos 300 tríos de gente joven que lo están revalorando...
Desde la ciudad de México existe el desconocimiento total del son,
si no se tiene una filiación con la Huasteca o la Costa Chica se
ignora qué géneros existen, no se percibe; también hay la tendencia
a decir ‘si no lo conozco, no existe’ o ‘eso ya está desapareciendo’.
“En el caso del son jarocho ha habido una revitalización muy
consciente, que empezó con Mono Blanco, quienes pusieron talleres
para enseñarlo.
“En otras regiones su desarrollo ha sido natural... músicos
escuchando a los viejos, sin escuela, pero trasmitiéndolo de forma
oral. Desde chiquitos agarran la jarana o el violincito y empiezan a
tocar.”
El gusto, 40 años del son huasteco se presentará mañana 2 de
octubre, último día de actividades de la Feria del Museo Nacional de
Antropología, a las 12 horas, en el Auditorio Jaime Torres Bodet,
con la participación de Arturo Márquez, Armando Herrera, Ramón
Vera y música en vivo del Trío Chicamole e invitados (Huapango
wi-fi), entre ellos Marcos Hernández, de Los Camperos de Valles.
Posteriormente, a las 16:30 en el patio central del museo se
repetirá el programa musical.
Además, el 9 de octubre se presenta El gusto, Los Camperos de
Valles e invitados, concierto magno en la Plaza de las Artes del
Centro Nacional de las Artes (CNA), donde varios tríos y solistas
interpretarán sones huastecos.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2011/10/01/espectaculos/a07n1esp