(lively music) - [David Yetman] The southern Mexican state of Oaxaca is the most indigenous, most Indian state of the republic.

Native traditions run deep.

(lively horn music) It is surprising to find here a wealth of European musical instruments called pipe organs.

(pipe organ playing) (curious music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

(upbeat music) - Oaxaca is deeply indigenous.

Spaniards found its dense population of Indians ideal for conversion, and they sent a small host of priests to bring light to the heathen.

One way was to build gigantic and inspiring churches and convents and furnish them with grand music.

This is the cathedral of the state of Oaxaca.

It's a cathedral in that it's the home of the archdiocese and where the bishop resides.

It's also the most important church in a very Catholic state.

There are hundreds and hundreds of churches but only one cathedral.

One of Oaxaca's best pipe organs is located in the cathedral, and it itself becomes the venue for one of the most interesting fiestas in all of southern Mexico.

(organ playing) - Our International Organ and Early Music Festival started in the year 2001, and for a while we were doing it every year; now it's every two years, so we will just have finished number 12.

And it's grown and grown.

The last festival, we had eight organs.

The festival before that, we had seven.

Now we have nine.

There have been 72 historic organs located in Oaxaca, ranging from the 18th to the late 19th century.

Of those, 10 have been rebuilt or repaired.

In this most recent festival, we have used nine of them in concerts.

Some of the organs are in pieces.

There's some that are virtually complete that are very restorable.

Our goal is conservation and protection for all the organs.

We have very specific criteria.

One is its historical value.

Second is its state of repair; in other words, how complete it is.

Third, community interest.

Fourth, the possibility that it'll be played in the future.

And five, how close it is to a large center, either Oaxaca or some other city.

The grencing team are the specialists.

You would have the pipe expert, you would have the bellows expert, you would have the final tuning and voicing expert, the windchest expert.

And so the objective is to play the organs and to create music.

(organ playing) - To the south of Oaxaca City, still in the valleys, is one of the most delightful towns in the whole region, Tlacochahuaya.

The church there is notable for its size and its organ but also because it was a combination of a convent and a location where very aesthetic priests stayed.

They lived in poverty.

Supposedly even some of them lived in caves.

A town that is distinct from everywhere else.

And they got a great pipe organ.

(organ playing) Before it was electrified, they probably had to have two kids play the bellows, one each.

Maybe one for the music, and then both of them to help with the stops.

It wasn't just a one person show.

(organ playing) (crowd applauding) How much sound comes out of that rather small console.

And a lot of it's decoration, a lot of its frills, so the actual sound box is only a modest portion of that.

- [Guest] And sometimes the bellows, which is moving, when they weren't doing anything, the organ themselves were making the bellows vibrate.

- They like to have somebody operating them, giving a little bit of vibrato or tremolo to the sound.

I mean, just barely moving it.

(organ playing) Good.

It's got great touch.

This whole apparatus works as a baffle; it's a huge sound box to amplify the sound in a time when there was no electricity.

So the pipes themselves have a sound to them, but each of them can be changed by these knobs, which give a different instrument's representation, either a combination of the pipes or a small slide in the pipes that changes how much air is going through to them.

(organ playing) So these are not precision organs.

Every time they have a concert or probably every time they play it, they have to tune it.

And it's not something you can do easily; you have to know what you're doing.

If you have a larger keyboard, you have to have more pipes.

If you have pedals, you have to have even more pipes.

- I find it very strange that the image of the angel is playing a stringed instrument.

- [David] The organ itself is more reminiscent of a full, heavenly sound that would elevate the soul into a different realm.

- This is what we are focusing on now, is trying to get these organs played regularly.

So as far as the involvement of the Oaxaca community, we have a teaching program, we have organ students, and we have done everything possible to fan them out and make sure that the Sunday mass is played on the historic organ rather than the electronic keyboard.

(organ playing) (speaking in foreign language) - [Translator] Meeting musicians from different places with different musical perspectives is beneficial to all of us as musicians.

- [Translator] This festival attracts people who love music to Oaxaca, and also brings in people who are already fond of the state.

- [Translator] Having so many antique organs that can actually be played is an important part of Oaxaca's attractiveness.

- [Translator] Here we are, young people playing these ancient organs.

It is a bit ironic.

What appeals to me is that we can actually play the instrument during mass and in concerts.

- [Translator] Music students here usually begin their studies with the Baroque period.

I think it is important for them to hear and study the pre-Baroque period as well.

- [Translator] Nearly every major Oaxacan church once had an organ.

Now they are quite rare.

This revival is an attempt to reclaim history that has been passed over, forgotten, and make it possible for communities to become familiar with organs and for the faithful to hear them while they attend church and thereby connect with their great music from over the centuries.

(organ playing) - From Oaxaca City, if we head north out of those very fertile central valleys, we head up into what's called the Mixteca Alta, the high land of the Mixtecs, the most visible of the first towns we encounter is called Yanhuitlan, and the Dominicans there created an enormous convent.

It's nearly 500 years old.

(organ playing) (lively parade music) (firework whistling) - [Cicely] The village processions, any village custom enriches rather than detracts from our festivals.

This year, we had concerts in the Basilica of the Soledad, San Matias Jalatlaco, which was one of the most recently restored and added to the roster.

The cathedral, San Adrean Zautla, Yanhuitlan, Tolacochahuaya, Tlacolula, Tamaulapan in the Mixteca Alta, and Tlaxiaco, also in the Mixteca.

(lively organ music) (fireworks popping) As far as the repertoire and the music that we're playing, it's mainly Spanish and Italian repertoire that works for the kind of characteristics of Oaxacan organs.

It's a very conservative organ building tradition, and so things were moving ahead in Europe, but they got kind of frozen in time here.

And so the tuning system is based on a Renaissance tuning system, and you've got certain keys that just don't work.

Bach, for example, is quite modern for Oaxacan organs, except in certain keys.

(discordant organ music) - [David] The town of Tolacochahuaya is a modest medium-sized small town.

You wouldn't expect a church like this.

(organ playing) - This church has the original painting and the original design from the 16th century.

It's been restored, and we can see exactly what the Dominican members of this community saw when they came here in the 1600s.

- [David] There work all had to have been done by native artists.

- [Bill] And so they say that, in this decoration, there are elements from the local Zapotec people that they recognize in the paint color and in the way it was painted.

(somber horn music) (bell tolling) - The contrast between the indigenous funeral and the group of foreigners and people from Mexico City who have come here for the organ concert could not be greater.

This is an ancient town being visited by people with a modern interest in Baroque Renaissance music.

(organ playing) - [Bill] This is the ways the Dominicans spoke to their parishioners.

- [David] Literally.

- [Bill] Literally.

- The language was so difficult for a European tongue.

They're tonal languages.

And the Mixtec and Zapotecs and the other groups around, the priests had a terrible time trying to learn the languages.

And they complained they could learn Aztec in a couple years.

After seven years, one of their leaders said, "I still don't have the language."

Music may have been the solution.

(bell knelling) So this is a funeral offering of mescal.

It's a custom at a funeral time that everyone ... (speaking in foreign language) (somber horn music) About a hour's drive east of Oaxaca is the finest market town I think in all of Mexico.

It's called Tlacolula.

Actually Tlacolula de Matamoros.

- I think this is one of the richest markets I've ever been to in Mexico or anywhere else.

And there's just the variety of food, the variety of goods, the variety of people from different communities.

- If we really knew what was going on, we could identify by ... particularly the women from where they come by the dresses they where or by their costumes.

- By their aprons, by their headdresses.

- Yeah, the headdresses.

- [Bill] A kaleidoscope of color, of sounds, and smells here that is just fantastic.

- Tlacolula is not only one of the most strongly indigenous towns in Oaxaca, but it's also Tlacolula de Matamoros.

- Matamoros.

This has to do with the time the community was founded, when Spain was conquering the Americas and at the same time battling the Moors.

They had just defeated the Moors in the Spanish peninsula, and so one of the celebrations in this community is ... - [David] Defeat of the Moors.

(organ playing) A side chapel independent but part of the church show the violence that early Christians often encountered and helped justify the violent defeat of the Moors.

This wing, this part of the church, is more famous than the main part.

- This is a zone where the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs, the Spaniards were all coming together, so there was a struggle, conflict, taking prisoners, human sacrifice, people were dying from all sorts of things.

So I think that that gets caught up in these martyrs of the church.

And this captures ... one whole side of violent, painful, sorrowful Christianity.

We have Saint Andrew who was crucified on a special cross like that.

- [David] Oh, and then we hear someone is upside down.

Is that Saint Paul that was crucified upside down?

And the priest didn't like to have sacrilegious imagery, but it's there.

- [Bill] The decoration is so clearly indigenous when you start looking for it.

Here on the pots we can see the community, and then below it five feathers of the headdress used by Zapotec and leaders.

- Oh my.

This is my first crack at a Mexican-Spanish style Baroque pipe organ.

(playing organ) A huge sound coming out of this rather small box almost.

The longest pipe here is eight feet long and is probably about four inches wide.

So to blow air through that you have to have a lot of air source.

And these bellows provide that.

They used to be manually operated.

These push-pull levers are called stops, and they control both the number of pipes that are having air blown through them and the amount of air, so they give a different sound, a different instrument.

(organ playing) - What is very exciting is really to realize that you are listening something that was also possible to listen for people centuries ago.

This is connecting you in a very direct manner with same way people that live here of course listening also the same instrument in the liturgy very many years.

As I said before, this is for me very exciting.

And when you listen to music here, it's not only necessary to listen to the music; you have to listen what is this context, of the historical context what is really important.

Two centuries ago, the organs in Spain were still being exported to America.

Then, the organs here and there were very similar, identical.

They were built there in the same manner.

And then they developed here its own elements, its own characteristics.

It's very difficult to be sure that we are really reconstructing the music in the same way the composer has written, but it's one of the task of the organist is really to look for that.

Each organ is completely different.

There is no two identical instrument.

- So this convent in Oaxaca, it's dedicated to Saint Barbara, Santa Barabara.

(chuckles) She was a patron saint of protection against lightning and earthquakes.

And apparently she did a good job, because the story is, at any rate, a lightning strike hit her in the head and knocked off her head.

She lost her head, but the church survived, and the town survived.

- [Bill] Up on the bell tower, there's an etching there of, I can't tell if it's the sun or the moon, but certainly is one or the other.

- [David] It's a celestial body.

- [Bill] A celestial body.

- [David] And that's a little bit pagan.

- [Bill] Yes it is.

- Superficially, this looks like another statement of a Christian presence.

There's three figures.

They are supposedly John the Baptist, who was decapitated, no head, and Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the two most important of the saints, the apostolic saints, but they are flanked by the codices of the Chochos and Mixtecas who were calling the shots.

This outdoor kind of amphitheater and dome was deliberately constructed because the Indians feared the dark, perhaps evil, places inside the church.

And the Dominicans figured, well, we'll baptize them outside then.

And that's not all to the story; there's more.

- Of course.

The Dominicans were not gonna allow indigenous people, pagans, in the church if they weren't baptized.

(organ playing) - In the Mixtec Alta, the wheat was brought by the Dominican fathers.

They wanted to have bread, white bread, and flour to make communion wafers.

And so they insisted on planting their wheat.

But wheat requires flat land and fertile soil.

Corn, on the other hand, can be planted in many different places, and it is also planted with beans and squash.

The beans help fertilize the soil, the corn supports the beans as the grow, the squash in the field provide shade and can be harvested at numerous different times.

It's the ideal crop.

When the Spaniards begin to take over the fields to plant wheat, it gradually impoverished the region.

(patting) - [Bill] It's kind of a combination of patting out tortillas and making pizza dough.

- [David] She has to start the fire under this, they call this a (foreign language), and it has to be very, very hot, or the tortillas won't cook.

These are very healthy.

Salt and whole wheat.

Never, never have I had this kind of taco of a whole tortillas.

- [Bill] The wheat, the cilantro, the chile, marvelous.

(organ playing) - It seems hard to believe, seeing Tlaxiaco today, in the late 19th century this was known as the Paris of Mexico, or the Paris of Oaxaca.

It was the cultural, musical, and intellectual center of the entire state, perhaps even of southern Mexico.

Last night, there was a 6.2 on the Richter scale earthquake here, and it did some damage to the church.

The authorities put up this tape, called off the concert.

But then they said the concert's back on, and then about an hour ago they said no, it's off.

Now they say it's back on.

Good heavens, Bill, there is earthquake damage here.

- This really did have an earthquake.

Look at this.

- Oh yeah.

My goodness, these beams are holding up the whole church.

So I'm gonna go through here real fast.

- [Bill] And I'm following you.

- Oh, this is better.

We're safe here.

This is the balcony, and there's the console, and look at that.

(organ playing) It's ironic that Oaxaca is Mexico's poorest state.

Nearly 50% of the population lives below the poverty level.

At the same time, it is home to some of the most opulent churches and the finest pipe organs in all of Mexico.

But those pipe organs area available to everyone, rich and poor, and they can enrich the life of the poorest Oaxacan as well as the wealthiest.

(organ playing) European missionaries in the 16th century brought Christianity and everything that belongs to it to Mexico and to the Indians.

One of the things they brought was their church building and European-type music, and it caught on here.

And the Indians themselves became artisans to build the churches and to build and maintain the organs.

Even today, in this heavily Indian state of Oaxaca, the organs have a very important part in the religious life of the people.

(organ playing) Join us next time in the Americas, with me, David Yelman.

Palenque is one of Mexico's most charismatic archeological sites.

It is world famous.

Nearly 2,000 years before Palenque was built, ancient Mayas were busy building their first monuments.

- The connection between Aguala Phoenix and Palenque shows this really well.

The arc of the development of a civilization.

- I'm older than you are so ... That's quite abrupt.

When it comes to alcohol, I believe in homeopathic doses.

My colleague believes in a different police.

(woman gasps) (lively music) (curious music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from The Southwest Center.

To order, call 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and program title.

And please be sure to visit us at intheamericas.com or intheamericas.org.

(bright music)