Phenomenological analysis of the compositions of the original vallenato or minstrel musical genre

Abstract

Vallenato is a musical genre of essentially peasant origin, typical of the Magdalena Grande region, in the north of the country, in the Colombian Caribbean, passing through the deserts of Guajira and the savannahs of the Upar Valley. Its primary instruments are the accordion, the box (drum) and the guacharaca, which represent the mixture of three races: European, African and indigenous. And although its popular origins earned it a veto in the halls of the region's elites, vallenato managed to make its way on the national and international stage and is today recognized as intangible heritage of humanity by UNESCO.

The minstrels of this genre composed their songs based on the stories that arose from their journeys through the extensive landscapes of this region, real events narrated as anecdotes, experiences of the world mediated by the subjectivity of their author and performer. The present research carries out a phenomenological analysis within the narratives of the original vallenato genre, a favorable terrain for the description, understanding and transcendence of the experience in the minstrel, raised from a Husserlian perspective (description of the subjective experience) and Heideggerian (interpretation of the experience and historicity of the subject).

A content and discourse analysis was carried out based on a corpus of compositions by some of the most prominent minstrels. It was found that the experiences revolve around the feelings that friendship, the loved one, memory, misfortune and the land aroused in the minstrel, narrated in the first person.