The Soul and the Body

Musical Universalism and National Schools

The twentieth edition of the Cartagena Festival of Music marks a significant milestone in the history of the event. After twenty years of continuous activity and initiatives, the Festival has established itself as the most important musical event in Colombia and one of the leading festivals in the Latin American music scene.

With this edition, the organization aims to achieve several objectives:

1. To highlight the importance of the Festival within the country.

2. To present an edition that serves, in a way, as a synthesis of the themes explored in previous years.

3. To continue offering a carefully curated thematic program.

4. To introduce musicological novelties in the repertoire.To pay tribute to a national composer.

Premise

The musical civilization of the Baroque and Enlightenment periods was largely founded on a universalist ideology, shaped by the belief that knowledge and the arts were a shared heritage of all “civilized” beings—and, therefore, of all those striving to emerge from ignorance, darkness, and prejudice. However, this ideal of universality arose within a limited and narrow universe, both geographically and socially, essentially confined to the small Europe of the learned.

It was only at the beginning of the 19th century that other musical cultures—peripheral to the universalist axis of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert—began to make their way into the European musical world. These new voices brought with them rhythmic and melodic elements rooted in their own popular and national traditions. While popular-national music had already been known and occasionally used, it generally appeared as a “citation” or reference within an academic language that evolved inwards, largely detached from other cultural and social realities.

Folk and national elements were thus absorbed into a “cultivated,” universal language that transformed, reconfigured, and often “sterilized” them according to its own stylistic codes. In their symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and lieder, composers such as Bach, Haydn—more than Mozart—Beethoven, Schubert, and many others of the 17th to 19th centuries often drew from folk melodies and dance rhythms, particularly Hungarian, Czech, or Gypsy. However, these influences rarely altered the fundamentally erudite nature of their music, which retained its academic character despite occasional flirtations with more rustic or popular accents.

The incursion of the “popular” and the “national” into Western music took on different forms across regions, but the most profound—and fertile—impact came from those countries that, until the French Revolution, had remained on the fringes of European civilization. Excluded for geographic and political reasons from the artistic and cultural development of major European capitals such as Paris, Vienna, London, Berlin, and Rome, regions such as the Slavic countries within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tsarist Russia, Hungary, Poland, Spain, and the Scandinavian nations preserved an immense and largely untouched reservoir of popular and rural music. These musical expressions had survived for centuries outside of academic tradition and were virtually unknown to composers educated within the Eurocentric and universalist canon.