In a tribute commemorating the centenary of Margarita Island composer Modesta Bor, maestro Roki Viscuña was moved to tears by a children's choir performance that preceded his own presentation. The event might be merely anecdotal were it not for the stark contrast between his tears and the open celebration of the music. How is it possible that a rhythm overflowing with joy can provoke tears? The question only seems strange if one considers the philosophical tradition, since René Descartes in the 17th century, that seeks to classify passions by assigning each emotion a function and a physical mark. In this framework, emotions operate as fixed reactions intended to govern behavior, so tears are only intelligible if they signify affliction or loss. When a body weeps in response to the sounds of a festive choir, the rationality inherited from this Cartesian approach can only interpret it as an exception, an anomaly, or irrationality, because it needs to define the meaning of what we feel before the experience even occurs. However, crying in response to joyful music reveals the limit of a way of knowing that seeks to solve life before living it.
During his presentation, Maestro Viscuña recalled an anecdote about an occasion when he sang "La Cachúa" at a religious school. That song, whose main verse insists, "If they don't give me a drink, I'll throw away my food, because without a drink I feel no pleasure," was predictably frowned upon by the Catholic institution. However, the school's director, a priest, got out of the way by saying that, since he was an artist, he enjoyed a "poetic-musical license." This seemingly benevolent gesture can be interpreted from the perspective of colonial experience as a formula that reproduces the original dispossession of Cubagua, by stripping the lyrics of their material and symbolic weight and reducing them to mere metaphor. The same extractive logic that separated the pearls from the territorial relationships that gave them existence reappears here in a smaller but analogous operation, separating the song and its lyrics from the material framework that sustains it. To classify the drink required in the song as a rhetorical figure or a humorous joke obscures the true meaning of the parranda, understood as a house-to-house visit where without the drink the song loses its reason for being, and where exchange and pleasure are not literary resources but the very condition for the community to remain standing.
From this perspective, it becomes possible to understand the quest of Maestro Eugenio Franco, who, in the same activity, turned to Descartes to consider Modesta Bor and reflected on the effects produced in bodies when the tuning is changed from 440 to 432 hertz. This controversy is often presented as a clash between the primacy of a technical standard and a return to natural vibration, but what both positions share is the premise that a number can determine the experience before it even occurs. The problem with this common starting point is that the concrete experience is once again subordinated to a prior calculation, be it the established standard or a sacred number to be achieved. As long as attention is focused on certifying the correct measurement, it is lost sight of the fact that the resonance between body and territory does not emerge from a preconceived formula, but from the situated encounter between those who participate, because the shared unity occurs precisely there, in the surrender of the chorus and in the demands of the celebration.
Modesta Bor, born in Juan Griego in 1926, trained in Caracas and at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow while directing musicological research on Venezuelan folklore. She could read Descartes and master the academic symphony; however, instead of opposing academic knowledge to territorial knowledge, she inhabited both realms freely, without allowing one to negate the other. The knowledge she brought from her native Margarita Island needed no authorization. Before any treatise, Bor directed children's choirs and composed pieces like Genocide, denouncing how the media industry erases Margarita's musical memory while the island continues to sing. The Caribbean tradition that shaped her doesn't need to classify emotions to recognize them because it simultaneously inhabits being and non-being, the coexistence of mourning and joy. Therefore, the joyful song that brings tears doesn't ask permission from theory, revealing a political dimension embodied in the body and the land that transcends any code that attempts to classify it beforehand.
