Abstract

This academic paper examines musical elements of the pagan-religious celebration Feast of La Tirana, in the village of La Tirana located in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Here, thousands of faithful attend the celebrations for the Virgin Carmen every 16th July. The celebrations include hybrid music and dances that have been performed in the square and streets of the village since the nineteenth century. The aim of this work is to identify the musical elements that have changed over the past decades as well as the elements that remain constant since the first reports of the celebration. More specifically, this research seeks to establish how these changes have been influenced by the increase of brass bands and arrival of outsider performers in the last decades. The hypothesis is that the emergence of changes in the musical parameters of La Tirana is the manifestation of an estrangement with the Aymara instrumentation and the necessity of finding new sonorities that differentiate them from the rest of the bands and celebrations of the South-Andean zone. My methodology considers previous bibliographical references from anthropological and ethnomusicological researchers focused on this celebration plus field audio-visual recordings, interviews with musicians, and musical transcriptions from my field research conducted in La Tirana in 2012.