Singers are storytellers—sensitive beings who need to communicate, transform, and stir. I remember when I started to sing at the age of 10 in my native Colombia. I sang Latin American and Colombian folk music in Spanish, my native language. In this repertoire, it was easy to emotionally connect with audiences because the music was directly related to the environment in which it was produced.
Later, when I started my vocal training at the Conservatory of Tolima, the music I grew up singing disappeared, and I dipped into the universe of French, Italian, and German art song. I often wondered, where was that repertoire I loved so much? Why, when I started formal singing studies, was Spanish music suddenly gone?
I found, almost by accident, a few works of Latin American art song and I marveled to discover that this repertoire established a dialogue between folk and art music—a fantastic meeting point between these two universes. This finding gave way to an obsession: searching art songs in archives from different countries and contacting composers and their descendants throughout Latin America. After a few years, I discovered that this was a huge repertoire, and my personal collection came to have approximately 2,500 art songs from 18 countries in Spanish, Portuguese, and even some indigenous languages.
My obsession became a mission to bring to light and give life to this rich and varied repertoire and its composers. And my search was widened when I established myself 20 years ago in Barcelona by discovering repertoire in Catalan—another great unknown for the singers of the world.
Why are these beautiful songs lesser known? One of the main reasons is that university curricula remain anchored in Eurocentric models that only value and perpetuate the music of Germany, Italy, and France—the hegemonic countries during the 19th century. These repertoires were canonized and today, in the 21st century, institutions, teachers, and singers continue to perpetuate this model without questioning its validity.
The tragedy is that singers and teachers cannot get out of this vicious cycle because they lack knowledge of Latin repertoire, composers, and context of creation and do not have the language or diction tools to learn and teach this repertoire. Institutions of musical education usually teach that success in music is achieved only by following one path—the interpretation of opera and Eurocentric repertoire.
At the same time, we are witnessing a decline in classical music audiences that may be tired of hearing the same repertoire again and again. Looking from the outside, it might seem that classical music is extinguishing—but those of us inside this industry know that there are extraordinary, lesser-known composers, some of whom are still writing today.
It seems necessary that singers develop new repertoire and dare to discover new forms of expression to grow and connect with new audiences by giving the audience the possibility of improving their lives with music and poetry. To achieve this, we need to explore new repertoire and accept that there is much more available than we learn in our student years and also much more than the opera houses and concert series repeatedly program.
To break this cycle of ignorance, besides singing, teaching, and recording CDs, I thought it was vital to publish these works so that singers from all over the world could interpret them. Throughout the years, I have published seven books, recorded eight CDs, and taught in universities all over the world.
Despite these advances, I felt that a place was needed where singers and teachers could acquire the necessary tools for this repertoire: learn the history, composers, and diction of the languages and, of course, interpret the music. Therefore, I founded the Barcelona Festival of Song (BFOS) in 2005. The BFOS is a summer course and a concert that will celebrate its 15th edition this year.
Its core activity is a course of history and interpretation of the Iberian and Latin American vocal repertoire in Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. At the same time, the festival presents eight concerts: six by guest artists and the final two by participants of the course.
The concerts take place in emblematic places of Barcelona. Since its beginning, every year the festival commissions the compositions of new song cycles from composers and poets from the Iberian and Latin American countries. The BFOS is a transgenerational space where students and teachers of singing from all over the world discover a repertoire full of life, expressiveness, and rhythm.
Every year I listen to the participants say excitedly that the festival opened a universe of possibilities that they did not know existed—a gigantic, vital, passionate, and beautiful repertoire that connects directly with the audience with multiple possibilities of expression.
For those who live in the United States, this is a repertoire that presents many opportunities to develop new audiences considering that a large percentage of the country is Spanish speaking. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world with 437 million native speakers. Portuguese is also one of the most spoken languages in the world and Catalan, though spoken much less worldwide, is a precious language with a rich repertoire.
It is time for classical singers to incorporate Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan into their repertoire. Each country in Latin America and the different regions of Spain have numerous composers that have contributed to enriching the repertoire of art song. The Internet provides access to these scores as well as resources that facilitate the learning of diction in the different languages.
Singers are curious by nature, always looking for new forms of expression that allow for communicating the depth and variety of human emotions. The repertoire of Iberian and Latin American art song in Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan gives us endless possibilities to do so. It is for this reason that I invite you to explore this repertoire and open spaces coherent with the social and cultural context of the 21st century. By interpreting works that connect with contemporary audiences, singers will promote diversity, exchange, curiosity, and inclusiveness—values that we have the obligation to promote through our art.
