Music Worlds Exchanged: Relationalities and the Curricular Value of Performing Bolivian Music

In international encounters, Bolivian musicians’ performances often are marketed and consumed as folklore and as stagings of cultural difference, even as performers resist this cultural cornering. This paper explores an alternative form of exchanging music worlds, not based on the idea of touring Bolivians who perform for foreign audiences, but rather on a model of musicians who, in an intensive course, teach US college students how to play Andean panpipes. The course “Performing Bolivian Music,” is unique in its aperture to any student--not just music students--, and in its bilingual teaching, even though the course carries no Spanish language requirement. Throughout the course, students learn what it means to work in inextricable interdependence with others—an ethos that contrasts with what one finds in many US college classrooms. I team-teach this course with Bolivian musicians and our social contract rests on multi-decade relationalities between an anthropologist/musician and the founder/director of a Bolivian music ensemble. Taking cues from Native American and Indigenous Studies’ and feminist scholars’ focus on the concept of relationality (Cattelino and Simpson 2022), I suggest that such a course moves out of a consumptionist model of cultural exchange and towards a model that emphasizes multilevel relationalities--among the instructors and among the students who become involved in playing Bolivian music. I also consider the relational values assigned to the knowledge of performing Bolivian music, as these practices assume a place within a credit-bearing course of the university’s curriculum, not in the disciplines, but rather in interdisciplinary spaces.