Otherwise musicking among people with diverse functional abilities in Colombia
Visionaries Ensamble
Colombia
Visionaries emerged as a research collective and performance ensemble based in Bogotá, Colombia. Since 2020, our members have been nurturing virtual and physical spaces where musicians of diverse visual functional abilities can collaborate within an inclusive environment that fosters personal, artistic, and professional fulfillment.
Listen to the premiére of bambuco visionaries, our first co-composed piece in this audio track and video below:
Musicians with visual impairment in Colombia often face challenges to access the professional music environment, and part of the issue seems to start with education. After conversations with visually impaired colleagues in Bogotá, Colombia’s highly centralized capital city, it seems like music programs in public higher education institutions are still developing -or do not have- accommodation strategies to serve students with functionally diverse visual abilities.
One of my colleagues who has been vocal about this issue is Angélica “Angie” Pico Castillo, she is a Colombian violist, who co-founded and directs the Visionaries Ensemble for visual functional diversity and inclusion. Angie herself is blind and has overcome situations of academic discrimination after years of attempting to access college-level music education. I met Angie at the 2017 Festival Interuniversitario de Violistas de Bogotá where she performed entire programs from memory, played in masterclasses, and shared her story with me; this was also where I learnt about her concern for the lack of equitable access to college education and professional inclusion of visually impaired musicians. Our conversations and mentorship relationship throughout the years moved us to start brainstorming an independent community of solidarity in 2019, that sparked from the urge of supporting musicians with visual functional diversity.
This is how Visionaries Ensemble & Research Collective emerged, from a space of otherwise possibility (Crawley, 2017). Visionaries has been co-led by Angie and me since 2020.
In the document below, I offer context on the history and particularities of the bambuco genre, and I share the story of our process of co-creating the bambuco visionaries with Angie, Lorena, Charlie, Mateo, Gabriel, and Ricardo ensemble members
These are the complete lyrics to Bambuco Visionaries, written by Angie Pico, Esteban Hernández, Carlos Manosalva, Lorena Villamarín & Nancy Castillo:
I will now share the parts and rehearsal audio resources of our co-composed piece Bambuco Visionaries, in the spirit of amplifying this work:
This is a slower Midi track we created for individual practice, and to experiment with full structure of the bambuco
Here are the lead vocals, piano, and choir voices practice guides:
Although institutional inclusion and support is still lacking, Angie is now completing her undergraduate degree at a private institution, the Sergio Arboleda University in Bogotá, and reflecting back on our journey with Visionaries, choosing to change the focus of our research towards performance helped us build our community and musicking (Small, 1998) through orality. This change of approach resonates with the Decolonial Disabilities Studies Collective movement, that aims for “an alternative way of engaging and connecting with different forms of knowledge and praxis that are decolonial, interdisciplinary and community engaged, [creating a] body of knowledge, theory, and praxis that aims to unsettle hegemonic forms of knowledge production in Western disability studies.”
As a way of closing this entry and consolidating the otherwise as a practical approach to learning, creating, and re-thinking academic+oral possibilities, which is the invitation I make through this research, I will offer some storytelling in Spanglish. This performative writing allows me to reflect on the experiences of my collaborations through creativity and possibility. I encourage my readers to continue experimenting with the otherwise possibilities of such practice, stimulating our students, colleagues, and communities to continue learning from a place of interconnectedness, which I believe can make the relationality in our musicking our most generous teacher.
The soundstory on Visionaries’ journey below, is about our emotional shift from frustration to hope/action, and the collective composition of our first original piece as an ensemble. The supporting narrative/commentary in English is available below.
As a testimony of the otherwise possibilities beyond the co-composition of our bambuco, here is a version the Bridges MAYO orchestra performed in Bloomington, IN:
More from Visionaries:
esta viola amable 