Dr. Kott:
(1)”What are the prerequisites for a college-level couse?” We will start the panel discussion with Diana Tiffany.
DT:
Thank you, Dr. Kott. My name is Diana Tiffany, and I am the instructor of flute at Texas A&M University in Kingsville. I’ve been there almost three years teaching flute and –fill-in-the-blank– a variety of other things, from theory to music appreciation to coaching chamber ensembles, and, for the last year and a half, I’ve been the faculty sponsor of the Mariachi Javelina. That’s the name of our student group. In case you are wondering how the flute professor gets to teach the mariachi, well, it’s just part of my teaching assignment, and really, the group is run by a student director, and this person is someone who has been trained within the group and knows about mariachi music and the different instruments, so he’s really responsible for running the rehearsals. I think of myself as more of the business manager. I schedule the performances, book the gigs, buy the uniforms, schedule the trips, like our trip here today. So my job is more the business end of things. I guess that’s about it. Our program is a university course, and we run it as two-hour rehearsal once a week on Monday nights. I think that’s all the basic information.
JDC:
I’m Jonathan Clark, and I’ve been playing mariachi music since about 1975 when I was a university student in San Jos�, California. I became acquainted with the music, I guess fanatic about it, and in ‘77 I moved to Mexico City to pursue mariachi music and ended up living there twelve years. I met the Mariachi Vargas de Tec�litlan, who took me under their wing, and I studied for many years with their guitarr�n player, the late Nati Santiago. I came with Mariachi Vargas here to San Antonio in 1979 on the same plane with them to the first mariachi conference, so I was a part of that movement since the beginning. I’ve seen it develop. I was in Mexico until 1988 when I went to Puerto Rico to play with a mariachi there for two years. In ‘90 I came back to my home town of San Jos�, California, and I decided to go back to school. Decided “Well, I’m going to go back to the university,” enrolled, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to major in, didn’t know if I’d fit into the music department, but what happened is that very semester they had started a new program called “Improvised Music Studies,” with an emphasis on world music studies. When they found out I did mariachi music, they immediately recruited me and said, “Look, You’vegot to start them. Can you teach this music?” and so I came back just - I was in the right place at the right time. In ‘92 I founded the San Jos� State Mariachi Workshop, which I have directed ever since.
KL:
I’m Kitty Lopez from Arizona State University. I’ve been playing mariachi music since 1985. As a matter of fact, in 1987 I met Jon Clark in Mexico City when I was playing in Garibaldi Plaza down there. My major instrument is flute. I also play the violin in the group and starting in 1985 I’ve been at Arizona State University, first as a clinician, now as a faculty associate. I also work as a professional mariachi in some of the local groups, and then we also have the class at the university level. In addition, we’re trying to get summer workshops and some other programs, to integrate mariachi throughout the rest of Phoenix and Arizona.
RO:
I’m Richard Obreg�n. I’m the founder and director of Mariachi Arizona at the University of Arizona. We are currently in our seventh year, and the course is offered for academic credit. In fact, this past year it was also elevated to the same status as band, orchestra, and choir within the university, which was quite an accomplishment in itself. The group is –all university students are required– to be full time students, and we have a budget that was provided for us by the university president, so with that we are able to travel, and we’ve performed at the Music Educators’ National Conference in Cincinnati in 1994, in Kansas City in 1996, and we’re playing in Nashville in April of 1997, at the Grand Old Op’ry. I believe we’ll be the first mariachi group to play at the Grand Old Op’ry. We’ve also been invited to play at the International Conference on Multiculturalism in Music, at the University of Tennessee in October of ‘97. So in our own way, we get the mariachi music out to areas which very seldom see, hear or experience this type of music, and the course is offered, again as I said, for academic credit. So I keep close track of all the students’ progress within the university. I’m kind of in the same status as athletics, in that I track them and I make sure that they go to class. If they don’t go to class, they can’t perform, so it’s pretty cut-and-dried.
BO:
I’m Brent Osner from Palo Alto College here in San Antonio. I’m Assistant Professor of Music. I developed the program for the last eight years, and this year I guess I’m the newest kid on the block as far as the program. We are new, and this semester we offered our first college class, and had 30 people sign up, and it has been really very, very successful. In fact, we had to link up with Kingsville, to transer there, and next semester we’ll be offering two classes in private violins. Moreover, my telephone has not stopped ringing, literally, since we started the program, so our program is totally new. We have… the Campa�as de Am�rica are our artistis-in-residence, and Ju�n Ort�z teaches the class and is doing an excellent job, so that’s basically where we are.
MP:
My name is Sister Pape, and I’m Assistant Professor and Chair of the Music Department at Our Lady of the Lake University here in San Antonio. Along with Brent, I guess we’re both the new kids on the block because we’re still in our first year and actually our initiating program is through a cooperative effort between the academic part of the university, the Department of Music, as well as the International Folk Culture Center, which Dr. Kott heads, and so it’s really through his inspiration in helping us move along that this has been initiated. We’re offering one class now. It is for credit, and while we have a very small department in terms of music majors and performance majors, our goal is to try to involve as many students as possible, regardless of their major, in some kind of music and ensemble and performance experience while they’re at the university, and so since many of our students didn’t come to us through the San Antonio Independent School District, which has had a mariachi program for a long time, it’s fitting that we are now initiating a program and are beginning to move through it. The university also approved a program within the history majors several years ago that provides a specialization in Southwestern studies, and so we hope, too, that will be a way to dovetail into some other departments as well.
JL:
I’m James Ledger, from New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. I began playing mariachi music in 1973 and formed a small mariachi group of other interested students, none of whom really knew very much about mariachi music, but over the years we managedd to link up with a professional group in Santa Fe sho taught us quite a bit. In 1979 I began a doctoral program in ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin, and I spent five years there playing with Mariachi Paredes, the student mariachi in Austin, and I served as the student director of that group for three of those years. Four years ago I was hired to teach fulltime in the Music Department at New Mexico Highlands University. I was hired to run the instrumental program, and one of the stipulations was that I implement a mariachi program. At Highlands I do the jazz band, the concert band, marching band, orchestra, and the mariachi, as well as teaching a wide range of courses. I also teach part time in the Anthropology Department. The mariachi at Highlands is an integral part of the curriculum. It enjoys the same status as all the other ensembles. We’ve been together for four years now. We started from scratch three years ago, and it’s got to the point that it’s a flourishing part of the community, the academic life, the campus life of the university.
CJ:
My name is Candida Jaqu�z, and I am a Ph.D. student in the ethnomusicology program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. We founded a mariachi ensemble there in 1994. It currently exists as a university student organization that is based in the Music Department and is officially sponsored by the Ethnomusicology Ensembles Program within the Music Department. Our membership is actually made up primarily of students from the university, but also includes recent university alumni as well as some community members, and particularly this year, bilingual educators who work with primarily Mexicano students in the Detroit schools area. We perform primarily for university events, but also within the greater area, in the Detroit area as well as performing for such things as the opening of the Detroit Institute for the Arts Mexican Research Center. My specialty - research specialty - is im mariachi music. Many of you are probably tired of seeing me in various places. I hope to continue and finish the Ph.D. in the fall, and one of my major goals is to train one of the students in the ensemble to actually continue the work.
EO:
Hello, my name is Esteben Osconof, from the University of Texas at Austin. I’m the Student Director of the Mariachi Paredes Tejastitl�n that James has referred to, and this is my first year, or should I say first semester if not first two months directing the group there. The group has been in existence for a number of years. This is my second year at UT. It is a university course offered through the Ethnomusicology Program of the School of Music at the University of Texas, and it is comprised mostly of non-majors, although there are a number of music majors in the ensemble as well as community musicians.
Dr. Kott:
The next question is: “What are the prerequisites for a college-level course?”
DT:
Well, the answer to your question is a very simple one. At Texas A&M University, Kingsville, there are no prerequisites to perform in the mariachi ensemble. The ensemble is open to any registered university student, and I guess to explain that, I should go back to the history, just a little bit. I’ve been told that we were the first university to actually have a course for credit in mariachi. It was started by Juan Ort�z back around, I believe, 1979. And it was formed to be open to anyone. Right now our group has 15 members, and nine of them are music majors. Obviously the other six are not. However, except for the trumpet players, all of our instrumentalists play other instruments, other than what they’re majoring in. For example, you’ll look at my flute players this afternoon, but they are actually a clarinet and a vocal major, and the violin players are a horn player and a clarinet major, so they obviously learn different instruments, other than what they’re majoring in, to be in the group. The only thing that really limits the participation is the lack of instruments. We don’t have instruments to supply to everyone, so unless someone has a guitar in their back closet, or a sister that owns a flute, except for the one guitarr�n and the one vihuela and a couple of violins the university owns, our participation is limited to those that can get their hands on an instrument to play along with us.
JDC:
The San Jos� State University mariachi workshop is open to community members at large. We have about 15 percent of our students - we have about 100 students registered each semester - and about 15 percent of those are university students who take the class for credit. Now we offer two different levels: beginning and intermediate. Of course we don’t supply instruments. That is one of our prerequisites. The students have to supply their own instrument. For the beginning level we have no prerequisites. For the intermediate level our stated prerequisite is a basic ability on one’s instrument. Now that is hard to define. We haven’t put it in writing. It’s been up to the discretion of the instructor right now to determine whether the student belongs in the intermediate or the beginning class. As far as auditions - we’ve avoided that up until now because we thought that might intimidate some people who would potentially be members of our program.
KL:
At Arizona State University the course is open to university students, both music majors and non-majors. We have both in the class, and also to community members, and by audition to some secondary school students who show exceptional promise. It is a university credit course, it meets once a week on Tuesdays for an hour and a half, and part of the reason that we’ve opened it up to some of the secondary students who are able to keep up with the material is because in the Phoenix area the mariachis in the secondary schools are just beginning to get started now. So we’re trying to get more interest in that we’re trying to institute more programs on the secondary level, and we also have a summer workshop that we give for music teachers, to try to get information on how to utilize mariachi boh within existing ensembles and also to start your own mariachi. The group also sponsors a high school invitational every spring, and we hope to use that as a manner of recruitment, and this group will perform - they will open the Sol de Mexico concert next April, so we will have a special group of the best students from the mariachi invitationals chosen for an honors mariachi. I do have two handouts for you. One of them gives you an idea of the makeup of the class, our methods, what we use, things that we present, and also something regarding the summer workshop.
RO:
At the University of Arizona we really have no prerequisites to be a member of the group except that the student be able to play on one of the traditional mariachi instruments, so from the first day of class we start playing. For example, this semester we have — at least half of our group is new freshmen, and so that presented quite a problem in that now the freshmen have to learn the arrangements we use. Fortunately for me, the Tucson Unified School District has developed very strong mariachi programs in several of the high schools, and in fact, along with other educators from TUSD and some local performers, we’ve developed an entire mariachi curriculum which is now available to other school districts, with arrangements and recordings that are recordings of the arrangements within the curriculum. The group meets for three hours a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 1:00 and attendance is always taken, as they’re graded on their attendance and their performance. So as far as the students we get, all of the students, as I mentioned earlier, must be enrolled as full-time students at the University of Arizona. When I first began the group seven years ago, we were taking anyone that could play, and sometimes we only had two or three people show up. But now we average between 30 and 40 students enrolled each semester. But when we perform, we only perform with the typical, traditional set up of six, maybe up to eight violins, one vihuela, one guitar, one guitarr�n and two to three trumpets. So we alternate a lot of the students in the group, and I have the luxury in that I have so many good performers that I’m able to do that. The students come in from the high schools, and again, they’ve already been playing for several years and some of them already, at 18 years of age, have been playing professionally for five or six years. so for me, that’s a great relief, that I know there’s a steady flow of students coming in. And now, because of the success of the group, we’re getting many more students who otherwise wouldn’t even consider college going to the university. In fact, we’ve had three of four students accepted to medical school, and pharmacy school now, and students that are going on to law school, and so it’s become very successful academically for the students that come into the group.
BO:
In developing the new program at Palo Alto, we did not put a prerequisite because we wanted to enroll as many students as we could, and so there was no prerequisite. But of couse when you get 30 people together that have had a lot of different experience — like your group — we have some professional students and we have some rank beginners, and so just recently, about a month ago, we split the class into two levels, advanced and beginners. Now next semester, the second course, the elementary level, you will have to have gone through the first class or audition. That’s how we structure it.
MP:
Last spring Our Lady of the Lake University’s International Folk Culture Center offered a course for mariachi for the community, and it was that course which became the basis for the course we have this semester, which is for credit. It is offered for credit the same as the vocal and other instrumental ensembles. And, as the course is being set up, there are no prerequisites, but there is definitely the importance that anyone in the course is expected to sing, to play an instrument, and also to do some music reading. And so the need, I believe, is there also for some additional coaching both in music reading skills as well as vocal performance skills and those kinds of things, so as I said, we’re in our first semester for credit, and this is a learning experience that will help us as we move on.
JL:
At New Mexico Highlands University the only prerequisite is basic performing ability on the instrument. We don’t accept rank beginners on the instruments. They have to be able to play, but they don’t necessarily have to have any background or expertise in mariachi music per se. Most of the students in my group are music majors, although we do have a large number of students from throughout the campus community. Also, we do allow some participation by community members. The last yeat - in the third year of the mariachi program at Highlands, we were able to break out an advanced group. That advanced group meets separately, but they’re also required to serve as section leaders for the larger group, and they are required to help tutor thee less advanced students.
CJ:
At the present moment, the mariachi ensemble at the University of Michigan exists as a student organization. It’s not offered as a course for credit yet. We’re working on it. One of the things, though, in terms of actually accepting members into the ensemble, particularly in the initial stages, there was a lot of interest. Surprisingly enough, we get a lot of people who come from the Texas area. Actually a lot of Tejanos, but also other students who ccome from throughout the Southwest who may not have had experience in mariachi music per se, but who have a certain basic competence in their instrument or reading music ability. What we try to do is we have an initial brief interview period with the individuals just to sort of see why they’re approaching us in terms of why they want to join the group and also to make sure that there is a centain level of commitment in terms of not only coming to the ensemble and participating in the rehearsals, but also in terms of their willingness to invest some time in preparing themselves, in learning about the history, in terms of also having an appreciation for the tradition to begin with. We try not to exclude anyone, but occasionally we’ve had questions, and usually after those [have] come to one or two rehearsals, they sort of decide on their own that it wasn’t quite what they expected. The other thing that we do try to put up front at the beginning is that because it is a student organization, there are varieties of positions and official duties that each individual is responsible for in terms of the running of the group, in terms of the gathering of … doing some of the research, in terms of preparing, not exactly mini-lectures, but sort of presentations on what mariachi is in terms of its history, in terms of some of the instrumentation, and that basically comes out of my own point of view in terms of my own research in the area, but like I say, we are working on the administration, trying to encourage them to not only support us but also to offer it as an academic course, which is a little bit of an uphill battle, because most administrators don’t want to offer this particular ensemble at this point at Michigan for course credit.
EO:
At the University of Texas the ensemble, like I mentioned earlier, comes out of the ethnomusicology program, which is a program that is only in the graduate school, and so that, if I understand it correctly, it was designed as a means for graduate students who have an interest in mariachi music to gain performance experience, but as well it is offered to all university students, and with that you get a mix of graduate students, undergraduate students, music majors and non-majors, and that is currently mixed up as well with community members. You get people who have varying degrees of experience with mariachi music. For us, though, what is our greatest concern is that you are proficient on your instrument. With trumpet and violin we don’t provide any futher instrument, but with the vihuela and guitarr�n, we certainly try and do what we can to help out with providing instruments and some instruction.
Dr Kott:
The next is “What are the materials used in this college-level course?” That’s printed, multimedia, whatever you use to teach.
DT:
Our course is structured as a once-a-week rehearsal for two hours, and so basically the only materials we use are the printed music that our students play from. We don’t use anything that is published. Frankly, it’s up to the student director to find music - to borrow it from former student directors, or friends, or professional mariachi group - or often, our student director will transcribe things himself off of tapes or CDs or whatever. Traditional tunes or whatever he thinks the group is ready to play. So that’s about it.
JDC:
Well we have a little bit different setup. We have a team teacher teaching situation where we have five different sections for the different instruments of the mariachi and voice, and a separate teacher for each one of those. And with our transcriptions, each teacher is in charge of transcribing their part, and then oftentimes we’ll put it in score for them and try to reconcile all of those. There are always adjustments to be made, things to be corrected. Most of our transcriptions are original, although we have used other people’s material. We also try to do at least one song every semester without music, and make it a point not to write it out because that’s been a problem in the past, that people become so dependent on the music that they’re dysfunctional in a real playing situation. As far as the selection of the repertoire, as the director I ask each teacher to give me a minimum of three songs when we are meeting - when we are preparing the material for the upcoming semester. Out of that, we have to decide… there are some basic guidelines. I ask that it not be an obscure piece, that it be something people are familiar with, that it be based on a model recording, and preferably that we can find a copy for a listening tape because we do give out listening cassettes as part of the class material, and that it’s not too difficult for any one specific instrument. Now out of 20 or 30 songs, we’ll eliminate easily two-thirds of those because some of them might be ideal for centain instruments and impossibly difficult for others. That’s a problem in mariachi music - it’s very rare that any one piece of music is at the same level of difficulty for all the different instruments. We also take into account from a student questionnaire we hand out, a survey we do with people: “What songs would you like to learn?” We take that into account. Then the teachers are in charge of making transcriptions and handing those out. Now in the past we’ve done computer notated transcriptions, and that has its pros and cons, because you can get into the presentation and the music looks great, and you can get obsessed with that at the expense of the content itself, and since mariachi music - these are transcriptions, and they’re never 100 percent accurate - and because of the nature of the genre, a lot of these songs aren’t exactly squared off, or they aren’t exactly appropriate. None of these songs were recorded with educational purposes in mind, so they fit our needs to varying degrees, and a lot of modifications need to be made. We find ourselves making a lot of corrections on the music, or reprinting the music, and you’ve got to be real careful not to become obsessed with that. So we do try to find a model recording. On occasions they’re in the wrong key. I’ve used digital signal processing to actually change the pitch without changind the speed, keeping the speed constant. You can do that to some degree, if you don’t take it too far from the original key. That’s been useful a few times. There are a few philosphical considerations we have in chooding repertoire; now teachers have proposed to me, they say, “Why don’t we make life easy for us? Let’s just play the songs the way we know them and the way we do them in our respective groups. I as a director have objected to that because I think that even though the students may not care, or they might not discern at this point, they don’t really know the difference between a mainstream arrangement or some obscure or some vanity arrangement that I made up myself; you know, in the long run we owe it to them to give them something that’s the best possible model within the trradition and hopefully that they can use somewhere else — not a unique arrangement that’s a signature arrangement for one specific group and that no one anywhere else will play, [but rather] the most universal models.
Dr Kott:
I will speak for Our Lady of the Lake as Sister Pape had to leave. The International Folk Culture Center opened in 1991 on the campus of Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. For the first five years we were part of the university. June of last year we separated from the university, and we are now a separate 501C3 organization. We are still treated as a department of the university. We have produced several media packages since the last mariachi conference in San Antonio. I’m primarily a dancer and musician second. Our goal is to unite musicians and dancers after 40 or 50 years of separation. We have two courses, a Mexican folk dance course and a mariachi course. The first production was a CD. This is a standard CD, containing the music to Jarabe Tapatio, and Santa Rita, a polka norte�a. The music on the CD is computerized music. It was sequenced by master musicians and recorded from the computer. We also produced a CD plus (enhanced CD) for the spring term course in international dance. It can be used as a standard CD and contains “El Punto” and “Denesa,” two very popular Panamanian dances. As a CD-ROM it contains twelve photographs, computer images that can be printed, and two videos of the complete dance and music that can be viewed with the computer. We sell these in the university book store as multimedia packages for the course material. We produced three video tapes this year, all with the same instructors. One video tape is “What Is Mariachi?”; another “How to Play the Vihuela”; and another “How to Play the Guitarr�n.” The “What Is Mariachi?” videotape covers the origin and history of mariachi, the dress, instruments, and demostrates the playing of a few traditional songs. The two songs that we picked for the dancers and musicians to learn are “Los Machetes” and “La Negra.” We have 60 sheets of music produced on a computer in Finale, a music publishing program that our instructor did for the course.
HL:
Over at Arizona State University we usually present approximately 10 to 15 new pieces each semester, and we use both written charts and we also teach by rote, much like Jon has mentioned. The written charts are transcriptions that I have done. I also try to use mainstream pieces. I feel strongly that what the students learn in the class they should be able to take out and play just about anywhere, so I do not use signature arrangements. I use street arrangements. My emphasis in the class has been Mexico City style, primarily Plaza Garibaldi, and so, whenever possible, I try to use an arrangement that comes from there. I also try to find a recording of it if possible. If not, I find something similar, so that the students do have an idea what it sounds like. Each class - we have three teachers: Dr. Richard Haefer, he is the actual director of the group. He’s profesor of music history and music ethnomusicology. Myself, I serve as a faculty associate and the music director, and this past semester we’ve been fortunate enough to add Felipe Bautista, and Felipe is also a mariachi musician. He’s from the state of Guerrero, but he also has a Mexico City background because he has played extensively on Plaza Garibaldi, and he teaches the harmony section. I work overall with the group as the director, and I also teach the violins and the trumpets. In each class we try to go through - after tuning the instruments - usually we go through a warmup piece, then we review the Finales de Caj�n, we try to give an emphasis on a basic knowledge of the different styles. In other words, if we know that we’re playing a piece that’s in 3/4 time, a ranchera, we know how it’s going to end. It’s going to end with a [demostrates vocally]. Again, I want them to have an idea of what the basis is. We also do vocal warm-up exercises, and review some chorus parts, and using some of the simple little rancheras, we work with them on transposition. Since of course in a mariachi you are accompanying many times singers, and although there are standard keys that tend to be used, certainly if you have the same piece and you’re going to have a male and a female vocalist, you’re going to have a different key. We also have sectionals. This gives my harmony instructor an opportunity to work with the harmony players. Most of the harmony players are community members and they don’t read music. Although we do notate the music for them, it’s primarily to have a record, and when we do get music majors in, it’s helpful. But of course he really needs to work heavily with them in order to get a good command of the instrument. We do have a limited amount of guitarrones and vihuelas that we have available for the students. They do provide the other instruments. As a matter of fact, the first guitarr�n we purchased was Jonny Clark’s. We also issue them a suit, we issue them a listening tape, and they have to supply the botines and the white shirt. We also issue them a parts book that is for university use only. We have had some problem with people taking the parts and selling them. So we’ve asked them not to do that. I consider that I’ve transcribed these pieces for educational use. They’re not my arrangements either, and I certainly don’t want someone else selling them, so we don’t like them to do that. When I do choose the charts for each semester, first of all I have to consider who I have in the group, what their strengths are. I like to cover a variety of the genres and the regions and the composers, so I try to touch on the sones, the huapangos, the rancheras, polkas, valses, I like to get a well-rounded group of pieces, and also I like to encourage as many people in the class as possible to sing solos as well as the choruss parts, which they’re all expected to know. I mentioned that we use written charts as well as rote–again there is a very bad tendency to get over-dependent on the music at the expense of what it sounds like, and we find that even the people who are readers, the pieces that they’ve had to learn by rote are the ones that stick in their minds much later on, and I think that that’s important because in a real playing situation you can’t expect to highlight your book, you can’t go looking for pieces because of the extensive repertoire, and granted, a student group is not going to have the same repertoire as a professional group that’s going out and performing, but they do need to be able to take at least a certain number of requests from the audience. We try to take the group out and have them perform in public every semester. They have a formal concert - they just had that Tuesday the twelfth - several community performances, on-campus performances, we also do at least one mass every semester. What we use basically is the Misa Pan Americana, and we have a transcription of that as it was recorded with the Mariachi Oro de M�xico with Ben Jam�n Ju�zar in the cathedral in Cuerna Vaca. Every spring we try to take the students out somewhere - we usually go to the Tucson conference because it’s very easy for us to get there. We’ve also taken them in past years to tours in the state of Sonora where we do several benefit concerts, and also we accompanied some local ranchera singers and opera. There are some pieces in opera that really lend themselves pretty well to transcription for mariachi. We’ve done a studio recording, a cassette tape. We’ve also - interestingly, we made a second trip to Alamos, Sonora, and we were going to play a wedding mass. And in order to have the group play the mass, we had to change our name. The mascot for Arizona State University is the sun devil, and the local Padre was not going to have any devils in his church, so we became Los Angeles del Sol. So we have two separate cards. When we perform mass, we’re Los Angeles del Sol. They’ve also performed in the Festival parade; they performed for the Pope when he was in Phoenix. They also have started a high school invitational. Every spring we invite secondary schools from around Arizona to come and perform in that. We do choose an honors mariachi that later has several performances. We’d like to expand our program; we’d like to have more suits, more accesories, more instruments, and because in the Phoenix area mariachi in the secondary schools is really in its infancy, we like to encourage them to get more programs started and in addition to the summer workshop for teachers, which is one way of doing that. We also have a professional group, Mariachi Coraz�n de Phoenix, who asks us to send the class. All of the instructors are members of Mariachi Coraz�n de Phoenix, and we are affiliated with the Arizona Commission on the Arts, so we do artist-in-residency programs in the schools. We also take these student groups out to perform in schools. And we are starting to be able to offer scholarship to encourage people to come in and study. I do have, as I said, several hand-outs to give you an idea how we organize the class, what we’re doing, what our goals are.
Dr Kott:
We still have time to allow the panelists to present more information.
KL:
And also I have brought a book that has some pictures of the group, and some of the instructional materials that I use, and you’re welcome to come up and take a look at that afterwards.
RO:
At the University of Arizona, my philosophy from the inception of the group is that we would only perform the traditional mariachi songs, and this is a philosophy which I am pleased to say is extending to the public school programs. We do not play Broadway show tunes, rock-and-roll tunes, even when we do outside performances; the majority of the group performances are usually for university related functions and we’re at the president’s beck-and-call. Whenever he wants us, we’re there, since he is providing the entire budget for the ensemble, and it’s always been quite an experience for the students, since they play for important dignitaries. A prince from one of the British Isles came, and we played for a reception for him. The group is very traditional. I usually set aside about $3,000 of the budget for arrangements which are done especially for the group by Juan de Dios N�peri, who was formerly with Mariachi Sol de M�xico. All of the arrangements, as soon as he does them, are copyrighted by Juan and the University of Arizona, so they belong to the institution. Juan does the arrangements at home. He writes out a score, but all of our pieces are done by rote. We never use music. The few times we have tried, I felt it was more of a detriment than anything, even though all of the students are very prolific in reading music - we have several of our violinists who are in the symphony orchestra - it has always seemed to be a hindrance to use music in our group, so subsequently we do not use any arrangements that are written. All of them are done especially for the group. We average between 25 and 40 performances a year, and every we usually have one major national or international invitation to perform, which I think is probably the best education we can give the students in the group, to travel to a new part of the country. We performed at the Primer Encuentro del Mariachi in Guadalajara in 1984, and so the tradition to me is very important, and that’s why we very seldom perform with all 25, 30 or 40 members we happen to have enrolled in the course. I feel that if we have a rhythm section of ten people, that tends to offset the balance of the ensemble, and as far as the tradition goes, everyone in the group must sing. That’s an absolute rule which I have. There is no-one in the group I feel that is good enough as an instrumentalist to stand alone as an instrumentalist. So they are all required to sing. Most students are studying either with our voice faculty at the university or with the voice faculty at the Puma Community College and taking private instruction. At least two-thirds of the students in the group study with Juan N�peri, so as they study their private lessons with him, they are also learning the new arrangements which he’s doing for the group. Juan will do the arrangements, bring them in, and he’ll work with the violins and rhythm, and I will work with the trumpets, so we piece through - sometimes students have come in to observe from another course that I teach, and they say that it sounds like an accident waiting ti happen, since we have all the sections in one big barn band room, but yet they sit around and in an hour we’ve got a song ready to go. And all the sections - we have a sectional at least once a week in which the students are not only learning the arrangements that we’re doing that semester but also some of the techniques of their instrument. They’re all required to make their own practice cassettes. Every student in the ensemble brings a cassette to rehearsal and tapes the parts they don’t know, to review at home, and this is… Most of the material for Mariachi Arizona will be available probably in the next two or three years. We’re working on a grant right now to record a majority of the arrangements we have, and put them on two or three CDs, yet the grant is, surprisingly, being written through the student health center, and it’s a very unusual grant, that if it comes to light will enable us to do several recordings of the group and if we can work it out, to have copyrighted arrangements available of all the material we’re doing. So in essence, the group is very traditional, and as I said, show tunes and cartoon themes and those things we do not perform in the group, and I think that’s what’s made the group so popular, especially in the community when we do play because the viejitos and viejitas, they hear that song that reminds them of something when they were a child, or a loved one who’s passed away, and that’s the real spirit of the mariachi, to bring back memories, and I think that’s what we try to do when we perform.
BO:
Well, at Palo Alto here in San Antonio, we’re very fortunate that having Juan Ort�z and the Campanas as our artists-in-residence, they have a wealth of material to use, and one of the first things I asked when we sat down to plan the course was, “What material are we going to use?” well, they had their own material, so we were very lucky that all we had to do was basically just take the booklet to the bookstore, have it printed, and the students buy it. And as was noted in the last session, there is no textbook - printed textbook - for mariachis, so basically you just take what you can, and of course they’ve had a lot of material - the first course - this first semester has really been structured more as a music appreciation, or mariachi appreciation in the historical aspects of mariachi music and then not so much emphasis on performance right away, even though we do have quite a few performers in the class. Being that they are very big into education in the mariachi scene, the Campanas and Juan, we felt that was very important. Now as far as arrangements, of course he has been bringing in his own arrangements and things, so we have been using those and basically we have been using some very simple, standard tunes that most groups usually learn at the very beginning. Now I foresee probably in the future as we get more advanced, and form a student group, like many of you on the panel already have, that we will be able to do a lot more with performance and arrangements and things like that.
JL:
We depend to a very great extent on my own personal stock of transcriptions and arrangements. Over the years from the professional groups that I’ve played with and the student groups that I’ve directed I’ve had to come up with a number of transcriptions and arrangements. It forms the basic bulk of what we use. The second greatest source is the extensive network of contacts that we have with other mariachi directors. In New Mexico there are number of well-established high school mariachi programs. There have been two very strong programs. The mariachi program in Taos, New Mexico, and the one in Espa�ola, New Mexico, and the directors of both of those programs are old colleagues of mine who played together in mariachi groups for many years, and they also do many of their own arrangements, and we always trade everything that we do. We go to conferences, the very well-organized, very extensive conference at Alburquerque, New Mexico, and we pick up a lot of material at that conference and also conferences in other placed — las cruces and other areas. My students are starting to do some of their own arrangements now. As I mentioned earlier, most of our students are music majors, and when they take the required arranging class, they’re required to do an arrangement in small popular group style, either a jazz band arrangement, a rock band arrangement, a country arrangement or a mariachi arrangement, and many of them are starting to do mariachi arrangements. Much of what we do comes from student recommendations. My students do listen extensively, and when they hear a piece they would like to do, they recommend it and we work together on doing those arrangements. We also depend to some extent on publised arrangements. We use John Vela’s arrangements, from Mariachi Unlimited in Alice, Texas, and we’ve purchased some arrangements that Laura Garciacano Sobrino in Los Angeles has done, and we use those to some extent.
EO:
At the University of Texas I can say that we get all kinds of students. We don’t have a large group. It amazes me and impresses me to hear from my colleagues here of 30-members student groups and more. We don’t have a group quite that large. We’re looking at more like 10 to 15 members, so everyone plays together. And because we have different students with different backgrounds in mariachi or music in general and so they also have a lot of different agendas, so although I would like, in an ideal situation, to come in and play totally by ear and to work out on our arrangements and have everyone sing, we can’t realistically do that. We need as much material as we can use, and so with that, we do use a lot of written material that we’ve amassed in the almost 20-years history of the ensemble at the University of Texas, but as well we do generate a lot of student-generated transcriptions. We do try as much as we can to emphasize the oral aspect. That’s a major point that I try to stress, as well as the students try to stress it as well, that - you know - you don’t bring your sheet music to the gig when you go to play at a restaurant or a bautismo, or whateve. And we usually try to work with that as we do transpositions and facilitate different people singing. As for some of the other material we always, of course, try and play in as many different genres as possible, and I try to make an emphasis on the sones because I do want to emphasize the folklore and the historical aspect of the ensemble. We play a lot of rancheras, and we play a lot of other genres as well, but I think if we can make strides in the sones, which are quite difficult to master, that [for] the group - it’s all for the better. And the arangements that we do use are of course, like the ones mentioned, call them traditional or whatever, I just try to think of them, as the lady from Arizona stated, the type of things you would hear from a hired group, from a working mariachi, and stuff that students can use if they were to find themselves in a working situation outside of the university.
Dr Kott:
Do you have any questions of the panelist?
Q:
Noberta Fresquez, Alburquerque, New Mexico
Dr Kott:
The question basically is “How to recuit and start a new program?”
RO:
The way wee started our program at the University of Arizona, as I mentioned, the first couple of years were very lean. So what I did, I’m very fortunate in that some members of Mariachi Cobre live in town - well, all of them are from Tucson - and some former members, actually there is a former member of Vargas there, and other mariachis from Sol de Mexico. In the beginning, I asked these people to come in and actually play as part of our group. The very first year we had about 15 members in the group, and only one of them was a registered student, and this actually - word got out that the university was actually doing a mariachi course, would have a mariachi group, and it was through the help of the musicians in town that the group was actually able to start to evolve. They donated their time and they dedicated their time, and actually, it helped them because we had about 12 or 13 members of the community who ended up going to Florida to play in different groups there, and it was those people who would come in - I’d ask them to come and volunteer their time to help with the few students we did have, and from there, other students on campus who had played mariachi and some who hadn’t played fro several years, decided to come back and start playing. And now, even today, I still ask for people in town to come in whenever there’s a particular problem or hurdle we have to overcome. I ask people in town to come in and they volunteer their time. But in the beginning I think it’s important to get community people involved with the program because in turn, those are the people who are going to send their children, or their friends, or will tell them about this program. And I think that’s had a great deal to do with how our program has blossomed, and again, it’s not anything unusual that I’ve done. We’re just fortunate to have some very strong groups and very strong programs in the public schools. It’s important to encourage public schools to start these types of programs. Without them, university mariachi groups can’t exist. It’s just a fact. And in Tucson we are also fortunate to have Los Changuitos Feos, whom everybody knows. And we always have students from their group coming to the university. And so I believe, to get it off the ground, you have to get community people involved because they’re the ones who will always support you, and people that helped me seven years ago, that no longer come to the university to help for various reasons - they’re either too busy with their regular jobs, or touring or whatever, are still proud that they had a part to do with that group, in establishing that group, and now it’s become quite a symbol, I think, for our community, in that the University of Arizona actually does have a full functioning mariachi group. And one thing I failed to mention, that I do want to mention - I think it’s important - is that the majority of the students in the group are not music majors. They’re majoring in - quite a few of them are in engineering and the sciences, and we have tons of pre-med majors, and engineering students in the group, and the most students I’ve had in the group was 40 enrolled, and of those 40, I only had two music majors. This is encouraging in that it’s really showing students in the high schools that they can do it. The University of Arizona with almost 40,000 students is an intimidating place for a lot of them. And they find their identity within the group, but I think it’s extremely important if people in the community can help you to get that support. I know without that our group would not be in the place where it is now. From the very beginning, and this was - except for one student of the first 12 that I had, they were all professionals. They’d all either played with Los Camperos or Sol de Mexico, they just happened to live in Tucson, and they were more than happy to come in and said, “If you want to start a group, we’ll help you.” Louis Marines, who plays with Cobre, was one of those people who first helped us with the group, and, in fact, one of the violinists with Cobre was a former member of our group, so I think the community is what really helped our group establish itself.
Dr Kott:
Anybody else want to answer the question?
BP:
I think since our group is very new this semester, we approached it both ways, wanting to either offer as an academic course or possibly through continuing ed, but our strong belief was that we wanted to make it an academic course to begin with and based on the help with the Campanas and then the high schools in the area - because in the San Antonio area there are strong public school programs already established. I havee since been approached by the continuing ed people, but I’m trying to sort of not be around because we just don’t have the space. If we were to offer 0 if we get 30 the first semester as an academic course and then open it up to the community, we’d probably have twice as many, so we’re limited by space and things like that but - and I feel very strongly that making it an academic course, brings people and students that normally would never havve thought about going to college possibly, or even to study music, to bring them right back into the classroom, which is one of our main goals.
Dr Kott:
We’ll have the hand-outs on the table here and you can pick them up on your way out. I have one final question. I think what I’d like to do is go around the panel again and mabe have a two-minute answer to the question of “What do we need to do ourselves?” Not what they need to do, but what I need to do, what do we need to do, to bring this into the perspective of the networking that we want? Is it the internet? Is it a longer conference here the next time we have it in San Antonio? Do we need a three-hour session with instructors or directors geared toward academics related to mariachi> So, Jon, would you want to start it.
JDC:
Sure, I’ve been of the opinion for a long time that the mariachi world is very dispersed and the communication isn’t very efficient between group, especially in different states and different geographical areas. Like how many times have we transcribed the same arrangement? You know, probably a hundred people have transcribed “Son de La Negra,” whereas if there had been one concerted effort or something, then we could have all done more songs, instead of reinventing the wheel, and hopefully, this conference is significant, this reunion here because this whole movement started many years ago in San Antonio, and maybe this will mark a new phase of the mariachi conference movement, where we’ll unite, and I’d like to see mariachi educator’s conference. Now internet and magazines are good. Internet is good, but some of those things degenerate to pure publicity and hype, and that really doesn’t give objective information and material to the student, which is what they need right now.
Dr Kott:
Thank you. Should we tag it onto this? With a one-hour, or three-hour session?
JDC:
I’d like that.
Dr Kott:
Well what day? Saturday, Sunday? We all come…
JDC:
I believe we need to leave it to the group.
Dr Kott:
Should it be a Friday, Saturday, before or after the conference, or during it, or how?
KL:
Just in general, I’d like to see more face-to-face collaboration among the different places where we are presenting mariachi music; for instance, many of us know of each other, but we haven’t had a chance to get together, kind of compare what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, in order that we can hopefully better each one of our programs. Another interesting or important thing, I think, is to compare our philosophies, like for instance, I want a trraditional group and I feel strongly about the arrangement that I use, and that sometimes may be something that makes it a little bit different to agree on, say, one single arrangement because not everyone shares the same emphasis. And yet it’s something that needs to be done. We need to get together, and I think that we could certainly get a lot more material out of the students, we could get more things published that we could use across the board, but more than that, I’d just like to see us get together to have more of an exchange of ideas, and I certainly hope that as a group that we have an additional opportunity to meet with the panelists that are here today so that we can speak and possibly plan something forr next year. I’d certainly like to see more panel discussions, maybe separating it out into more specific areas on the next conference.
RO:
I’ve always felt the one important thing we can do as educators is to includee the public school programs in what we’re doing. For example in Tucson we have just developed an entire curriculum for K through 12, with different levels of material for each grade and emphasizing even within each grade a different level of song that could be performed by very young and inexperienced groups and by more experienced group in the senior high school. But I think it’s important that college groups interact with the high school groups and that there not be a distance there just because we’re on a university campus. In Tucson for example, our group plays at several of the public schools, and Sunnyside High School has one night where they feature all of the high school groups and our group at the university, and I think this helps to encourage the students not just to play mariachi, but to keep on with school, which I think is more important. So my philosophy is that we need to interact more with the public schools, and being on a big university campus, we always have that ivory tower mentality which tends to set us back instead of helping us. so I think that an interaction and especially our involvement at the university with the Tucson Unified School Districts in developing a curriculum and in helping implement it and helping the school districts acquire instruments, get resources for these things and having our students involved with the programs in thee public schools, I think that’s probably the most important thing we can do.
BO:
I don’t know if I can address any specific problems, since I’m new to all this and have only been here a couple of hours, but I think that in walking around and looking at things, it seems like the educational movement certainly is blossoming, and maybe that we need to sit down and really define our goals of what we want to do educationally, not just [in] performance, but in terms of the educational movement too.
JL:
I agree with Jon. I think that we need a formal organization of mariachi educators. Something modeled along the lines of the International Association of Jazz Educators. Since that organization has been in existence, I think it’s done a great deal to further the academic study of jazz, and I think we need something similar to help us in coordinating of the academic study of mariachi music. I also agree with Richard, that I think we need to do a lot with the high school programs. Every spring we do a series of concerts with the area high school programs. We do a joint concert in our community and then we’ll move. The next night we’ll do the same concert in the community in one of the high schools, and the third night we’ll do it with the other group, and it’s a series of fundraisers where we’re all able to help each other out. Another area in which we’re working with the high school programs is that my students are now starting to teach, to tutor, to do workshops for some of the newer programs in the area. We do master classes and workshops and things to help, especially some of the newer, more struggling programs to get organized.
EO:
I guess when you’re last in line you don’t get to say much that’s new, but I can at least add my own perspective to what had been said, in that the idea of — be it a mariachi educators conference, organization, or an extended day within what we have here in San Antonio and other conferences — is nothing but a good idea. It helps in our discussions, as we’ve said, of philosophies and approaches, as well as junior instructors like myself I must say yes, I’m up here; I’m a student director though. My primary mission is to get my degree and this is the job for me. Nonetheless, I’m committed as an educator within my class, but I can learn from people who have more esperience that I as an educator, and can grow from there. As well, I can’t see why there can’t be more relationship between the collegess and the high schools. I know it’s a big movement among students in general, especially students of color, Chicanos, to go back to the high schools and to help out any way they can, and in this sense, it can help in a particular kind of setting. Another discussion we could have in these types of conferences or meetings, is as Jon pointed out, a discussion of materials and how that can be handled both effecttively for ourselves and - well, sensitively - because these things have to be treated with care. That’s all I have to say.
Dr Kott:
Are there any more questions from the floor? Well, it seems to me then that we pretty well agree that we need more time to network. We’ll get together by mail or whatever before the next mariachi festival here in San Antonio. Thank you all for coming. I hope that out of this we institute a network to progress and produce more publications.