. . . Winter 2003
By Paul Constance
On a cloudless October afternoon in 2001, the native silence of a salt flat high in the Bolivian Andes was briefly invaded by the sound of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. From a distance, the source of the music must have looked like a mirage: 65 musicians, each sporting sunglasses against the white glare, arranged on a platform made of solid salt blocks. Never mind the dismal acoustics. The conductor, a 37-year-old American named David Handel '88 BMA, '91 MM, had planned the concert as a publicity stunt, a chance to show that classical music could "capture everyone's imagination," as he recently put it, in this impoverished, land-locked country nearly three times the size of California. Some 3,000 people, including Bolivia's president, political and business leaders, and busloads of peasants from nearby villages had gathered to hear their National Symphony Orchestra perform for the first time at the Salar de Uyuni. This immense salt lake and the surrounding mountains are the Bolivian equivalent of Yosemite, and the concert, which featured arrangements of indigenous folk music along with the Beethoven, was a tourism minister's dream. CNN and several other international networks broadcast highlights around the world. The local media declared it one of the most spectacular cultural events in recent memory. Repeated implausible successes have made Handel something of a local hero since he took over as artistic director and conductor of the orchestra in 1997. At the time, years of mismanagement and government meddling had reduced the orchestra to a skeleton crew that offered a few performances a year to small, wealthy audiences in the capital, La Paz. Tickets cost around $10 at a time when per capita income averaged less than $800 a year. Programs offered well-trodden standards from the European classical repertoire in a country where 60 percent of the population belongs to indigenous groups that speak Spanish as a second language, if at all. When the Bolivian conductor resigned, Handel, known from previous appearances as a guest conductor, was abruptly offered the job.
'A chance to build something'"I saw it as a chance to build something," Handel recalls. Though he was based in Chicago at the time and perfectly aware of the developmental chasm that separates Bolivia from the United States, Handel saw parallels between the two countries that meshed with his long-term interests as a conductor. "We are both New World societies, former colonies," he says. "We are both populated by a combination of native and immigrant peoples, and we both face the challenge of making music relevant for multiple cultures." These affinities were not immediately apparent to most Bolivians. With his blue eyes, shaved head and rapid-but-accented Spanish, Handel is conspicuously American in a nation where "Yankee Go Home" sentiments are frequently spray-painted on walls. Popular Bolivian perceptions of the US, never sunny, have darkened considerably since anti-narcotics efforts became the overriding focus of US diplomacy in the country in the 1990s. With substantial assistance from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the government of late president Hugo Banzer forcibly reduced coca cultivation from 120,000 acres in 1996 to just 36,000 at the end of 2000, according to official estimates. Celebrated by US officials as a major victory in the war on drugs, the eradication campaign enraged thousands of Bolivian peasants who depended on the crop. (The peasants also cultivate the plant for local consumption in an unrefined state, a tradition that dates to pre-Columbian times.). These cocaleros, or coca-growers, have since formed a powerful political movement whose candidate, the indigenous peasant Evo Morales, came close to winning the 2002 presidential election on a stridently anti-American platform.
Rise of the cocalerosThe coca growers are only the most belligerent manifestation of a broad indigenista movement that has been building since 1982, when Bolivia re-established democracy following a string of military dictatorships. After centuries of discrimination and abuse by fair-skinned elites of European ancestry, Bolivia's native peoples (most are Quechua or Aymará) are using the electoral process to assert their rights in virtually every area of public life. Their demands, which range from bilingual education and better health care to the protection of ancestral water rights, now define the political battle lines for Bolivia's eight million citizens.
When Handel arrived in La Paz he found himself in the middle of a full-blown culture war, a yanqui leading an institution viewed as a rampart of cultural Eurocentrism. But even before he could eloquently roll his r's when pronouncing "imperialismo," Handel had begun to disarm his potential critics. During his first season he replaced the single ticket price with a sliding scale that began at less than $1. He launched promotional campaigns in La Paz's politically tumultuous universities, tripled the number of annual concerts and took the orchestra on its first tour of smaller Bolivian cities in many years. Before, the orchestra had been an emblem of elitism, but now "we were saying that's not what we're about," Handel says. Two of his early concerts took place in a gymnasium in El Alto, a sprawling slum on a desert above La Paz that is home to nearly 800,000 indigenous people. "We performed twice in El Alto to completely full houses," Handel recalls.
Composing for the cueca and lambadaHandel immersed himself in the country's rich indigenous music traditions. For his second season, he commissioned several national composers to write orchestral arrangements of folk styles such as the cueca, a traditional ballad and dance. He launched a series of concerts that featured these arrangements along with popular folk singersa sort of "pops" concept new to Bolivia. The concerts sold out so quickly that Handel turned them into an annual feature and used them as the basis for his first recording with the orchestra. During its most recent season, the orchestra performed with Los Kjarkas, a folk group widely credited with reviving popular interest in Bolivia's indigenous music, including the lambada, an Afro-Brazilian rather than a Brazilian creation. (See Los Kjarkas's highly acclaimed 2002 CD 30 Anos Solo Se Vive Una Vez.) Some Bolivian critics have attacked these collaborations as frivolous, but Handel is unapologetic. Musical cross-pollination has a distinguished place in the classical tradition, he argues. "Brahms did it, Dvorak did it, Gershwin did it, Piazzola did it in Argentina," he says, referring to composers who drew heavily from folk and popular sources. "There is no society known to man that has not produced some kind of refined and ultimately artistic expression." To show that the dialogue isn't unidirectional, Handel has also pushed the orchestra to tackle dozens of challenging works by Shostakovich, Adams, Gershwin, Webern and others who had never before been performed in Bolivia.
Ticket sales are up six foldEven his detractors acknowledge Handel's success in revitalizing the orchestra as an institution. Annual ticket sales have grown from 5,000 to more than 30,000 under his tenure, and local TV routinely features the orchestra, whose operating budget of $560,000 is nearly quadruple the 1997 figure. Two-thirds of this amount now comes from donations and corporate sponsorships raised by a private National Symphony Orchestra Foundation that Handel created. He has raised salaries and hired 20 additional musicians, and this year the orchestra will have its own performance, rehearsal and office spaces for the first time in its 60-year history. When budget problems threatened to cut short the orchestra's tour plans last year, Handel, a hard-driving pragmatist with a subtle nose for diplomacy, convinced US Drug Enforcement Administration officials to give the orchestra lifts on their C-130 military cargo planes. In exchange, the orchestra publishes an anti-drug advertisement in concert programs. "They give us earplugs and strap us in like paratroopers!" Handel says of the trips. The arrangement has saved the orchestra $70,000 in travel costs while giving the DEA a rare bit of favorable publicity. After six years in Bolivia, Handel has become a public figure. But what matters to him more than celebrity is his being "generally respected and treated as un boliviano más [one more Bolivian]. I am very touched by this expression of popular affection and acceptance. It is something I read in the papers but means even more when someone approaches me on the street or when a taxi driver talks to me about a concert he went to."
Paul Constance writes frequently on Latin American affairs. He lives with his family in northern Virginia. | ||||||
