"Paramo de la Sarna"

Calixto Raúl Araújo Monroy (Colombia)

The idea arose from a massacre that occurred on December 1, 2001 on the road that leads from Sogamoso, the city where I live, to the Orinoquía region. There, 15 people who were traveling on an intermunicipal bus were murdered. The paramilitaries stopped the bus in that lonely place known as El Páramo de la Sarna, took the people down and executed them.

The place is very cold and the only thing that can be heard is the wind. We recorded the sound of the wind, we asked several people to read the names of the victims and over a sampled piano sound we randomly interpreted the C Minor chord adding synthesis to the sound to create tension.

We place the voices on top of that sound and then sample the voices and the background is superimposed, interpreted in the controller as a murmur of the same voices, resembling the question of the victims of the massacre: not knowing what is happening or why it is happening.

Subsequently, the "tiple" enters in the key of C minor with a harmonic-rhythm of Torbellino in a minor mode, to which we add a "three" that narrates an improvised melody on a flute trill and some strings in pizzicato.

There is a dialogue between a violin and a mezzo-soprano on an ostinato in the double basses that, on the base I IV – V in a minor mode, link to a major mode in a dialogue between the mezzo-soprano and a bassoon, always with the bottom of the tiple as the base in the "whirlwind".

The proposal is to continue with this dialogue of miscegenation between the traditional and the orchestral, in addition to paying homage to the victims of this terrible event: we want to place the audience in the space of the events, merge the somewhat dramatic music with the subsequent change to greater mode indicating how everyday life erases the gravity of the events from the collective unconscious and everything returns to normal