Moving Away from Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration

by Thomas Turino

Book Overview

Increasingly popular in the United States and Europe, Andean panpipe and flute music draws its vitality from the traditions of rural highland villages and of rural migrants who have settled in Andean cities. In Moving Away from Silence, Thomas Turino describes panpipe and flute traditions in the context of this rural-urban migration and the turbulent politics that have influenced Peruvian society and local identities throughout this century...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226817008
• ISBN13: 9780226817002
• Release Date: June 1993
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 331 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

From a Musician's Perspective

In my search to learn as much as I can about the people who create the Andean music that stirs my soul, I am highly impressed with Thomas Turino's research. For a musician like myself, who seeks to perform Andean music with a deep understanding of the culture, this book is a precious jewel. Turino's respect of the people and his detailed descriptions of the process of composition and performance are immensely helpful. I feel like I am sitting in the earthen-floored house together with him and the musicians of Tarkas de Putina as they softly play their instruments in the dim light of a flame, composing fiesta music by wordless consensus all through the night fueled by coca and alcohol. Furthermore he reports with an equally intimate and scholarly first-person account on changes that migration (between rural Aymara-speaking Conimo on the Northern shore of Lake Titicaca and urban Lima) cause to the music and the culture.