Music creation from a native language

The K'iche from western Guatemala

Abstract

Creative processes in music are usually non-linear: a series of decisions between a large number of options and probabilities that are not only sound, but also sig- nal, which are available. We interpret the sound world according to our parameters and ways of listening to the environment; However, when the context we want to represent, in a musical work, is different from ours and our culture, it is not clear what should be understood under the premises of the "original context." From this account, the musical work carried out from an original language takes on characteristics of interpretation and “data capture” from which several paths must be taken that lead us to a “better result”, both sound and of interpretation of the otherness that it provides the source information we need for musical creation. From this point of view, this work focuses on an aesthetic of enjoyment and cognitive sensuality through which original and non-originating, authentic and inauthentic, native and alien, can be treated as contradictions or as relative complements. The substantive proposal is, therefore, a “dialectical harmonization” of the two epistemologies that are available, at least partially: the “written and thought” from the loudness of the Spanish / European, and the written thought from the loudness of the k'iché / maya. In turn, this exercise goes beyond the abstract search for stories and the sounds and sounds of stories, privileging field research and ethnography from which qualitative and quantitative analysis of data aimed at supply of creative processes.