The songbook from El Dorado is also a dramatic musical story about an universal conflict, symbolized by an idealistic Jesuit dream of creating Paradise on earth, in the middle of the South American jungle - and the resistance they were bound to encounter from unscrupulous contractors of the Old World, to whom an earthly paradise could only be built of gold!
The world is in color
Now reality is, as we all know, not exclusively black and white. Sometimes even war and oppression, as a more fortunate side effect, unintendedly create a fertile soil for rich musical traditions. The world is certainly in color and the Baroque music from Latin America, formed by this particular mixture of local and European musical traditions, is an extremely colorful palette of sounds and rhythms, unobtainable in any other place.
The music of the conquistadores was, as a matter of fact, already a compound phenomenon, long before it was brought to the New World. Shaped through centuries by Oriental traditions, and inspired significantly by the musical expression of the latest immigrants, the Gypsies, Spanish baroque, with its inciting and often complex rhythmical patterns, clearly differs from other European Baroque music.