Understanding Música de Fusión in Venezuela: Folk, Popular, and Experimental

In Venezuela, the terms música de fusión and fusión serve as broad descriptors for new works by popular music artists who incorporate elements from folk traditions without producing a recognizable traditional folk piece. These compositions feature formal, instrumental, linguistic, stylistic, and conceptual approaches that are distinct, personal, and experimental. While the musical techniques may resemble those used by academic composers with nationalist aims, fusión operates firmly within the realm of popular music rather than the academic sphere.

Artists working in this vein span a wide spectrum of ideas, from simply applying a folk rhythm to digitally experimenting with folk instruments. In the early twenty-first century, the movement was still too young to group into clear tendencies. One recurring influence, similar to that seen in neofolklore, has been the integration of highly skilled symphonic instrumentalists with folk and pop music worlds.

The main characteristics of música de fusión include:

• Professional music productions (live and recorded) that feature new compositions containing traditional folk music elements
• No specific folk piece is recognizable in the work
• Propositions that differ from traditional folk music in form, instrumentation, language, style, and concept
• A personal and experimental nature
• Belonging to popular music, though it may intersect with the academic music world

As in neofolklore, using folk instruments in new musical contexts guarantees an imprint of traditional folk culture. The same effect can be achieved by employing folk music styles with instruments not traditionally associated with them. Antonio Lauro, a guitarist-composer who led one of the first noteworthy popular music groups in 1935—the Cantores del Trópico—wrote many guitar pieces based on Venezuelan folk rhythms. His works include the Valses venezolanos, Merengue para guitarra, Seis por derecho, and Pasaje aragüeño, among many others. Lauro's guitar compositions have become staples in classical guitar curricula worldwide, all while remaining deeply popular at home. This is notable because the guitar has never been a prominent instrument in Venezuelan folk music, except for a declining role in joropo central.

The cuatro, Venezuela's national instrument, appears in nearly all of the country's folk music, but its role has traditionally been limited to accompaniment. In the 1950s, Freddy Reyna transformed it into a solo virtuoso instrument. He transcribed folk repertoire into tablature, published a method in 1957, followed by a series of recordings, and released a new, improved method for the cuatro in 1996, five years before his death. Reyna's pioneering work was expanded upon by Hernán Gamboa in the 1970s and by Cheo Hurtado of Ensamble Gurrufío from the 1980s onward. Younger cuatro players have since pushed the instrument into new frontiers, including jazz, where the folk reference becomes significantly more subtle. A prominent example of this path is the group C4 Trío.

The word fusión means to join or mingle in Spanish. In the context of developing new popular music, it applies mainly to mixing different rhythms to produce something novel. This is exactly what Aldemaro Romero achieved. He first gained fame for his orchestral arrangements of Venezuelan folk and pop music on the album Dinner in Caracas in 1952. Later, he blended bossa nova with Venezuelan rhythms in a band setting to create a new style he called onda nueva (New Wave) in 1971.

Another highly successful example of fusión in Venezuela is the worldwide hit "Moliendo Café" by Hugo Blanco from 1959, the most-covered song in Latin America. Combining the cuatro, the Venezuelan joropo llanero harp, maracas, güiro, the country's first electric bass, and the son clave in 3-2 configuration, Blanco created a song with an introduction based on the Andalusian cadence and a rhythm with a Caribbean feel, which he called ritmo orquídea. In this piece, the ternary meter typically found in folk harp and cuatro repertoire was adapted to a four-beat, binary-subdivided rhythm.

An important popular music group named Guaco formed in 1960 and developed on the western side of Venezuela in Maracaibo. Using the traditional gaita zuliana rhythm as their foundation—a style performed at Christmas in various forms—Guaco successfully detached the gaita from its seasonal folk calendar tradition and forged a personal "Guaco sound."

As música de fusión evolved, artists introduced all kinds of variations simultaneously: switching instruments, mixing rhythms, and transforming the social function and context of the music. Beginning in 1967, Alí Primera produced a large body of original canciones de protesta (protest songs) that incorporated Venezuelan folk rhythms and instruments, enhancing the cultural and social relevance of his music. During the rock-influenced early 1970s, Vytas Brenner, originally from Germany, created an important track titled "Frailejón" on his record Ofrenda. This piece blended the joropo llanero harp with a rock band and Latin percussion. This direction was quickly followed by jazz pianist Gerry Weil, originally from Austria, who mixed Venezuelan rhythms into the influential experimental group La Banda Municipal during 1973-74. Only an old concert recording, En Vivo, remains of this period, edited and released in 2008. Weil has continued to produce original fusión music in various instrumental combinations ever since. He has remained a permanent resident of Venezuela and a jazz teacher to multiple generations.

The Orquesta de Instrumentos Latinoamericanos, commonly known as Odila, was established in 1982 as a grupo de proyección. Their concert programs included a Latin American folk repertoire alongside commissioned experimental compositions for a thirty-member orchestra using folk and indigenous instruments. Works like "Etnocidio" by Emilio Mendoza, who directed the group until 1987, belonged to this alternative repertoire, synthesizing indigenous, folk, pop, and academic influences.

In Venezuela, solo singers frequently experiment with folk music in various ways. María Rivas, a successful jazz singer who debuted as a soloist in 1987, worked with Afro-Venezuelan rhythms and joropo folk music. Carlos Baute learned to play and dance folk music at the Talleres de Música Popular (Workshops of Popular Music) run by the Bigott Foundation in Caracas before venturing into his Orígenes albums of 1994 and 1997. In the realm of Latin-Ska and Reggae, groups like King Changó included an amplified cuatro in their music, as heard in the track "Confesión" from 1997. This was made possible through new technology developed by luthier Luis Ruiz in Caracas: his "Gordation" cuatro series, similar to the electro-acoustic Ovations guitars.

An additional musical influence—this time from the symphonic, academic world—completes the ingredients of Venezuelan fusión. As observed in neofolklore, this effect is partly a by-product of the youth symphonic movement. Academic instrumental virtuosity paired with extended compositional procedures has influenced the production of popular music that still feels folk at its core. The neofolklore groups that began in the 1980s eventually progressed into experimenting with música de fusión. Ensamble Gurrufío, for example, conducted a project in 2001 known as the "Camerata Criolla," moving in the same direction as Odila two decades earlier, but creating a hybrid-chamber ensemble. They commissioned and performed works by composers such as Paul Desenne, whose Tocatas galeónicas once again blurred the line between academic and pop music.

Over the past two decades, numerous groups and soloists have emerged in Venezuela's very active música de fusión scene. Artists who have maintained a productive output for over ten years, usually with hybrid ensembles, include Arcano, Onkora, Saúl Vera y su Ensamble, Caracas Sincrónica, and guitarist Aquiles Báez. They use various names to describe their music. Saúl Vera, for example, employs the phrase "Música instrumental venezolana de nueva tendencia" (Venezuelan Instrumental Music of New Tendency), incorporating the bandola llanera—a folk relative of the mandolin—into his jazz ensemble. Vera also works as an academic composer, completing his Concierto para Bandola y Orquesta (Concert for Bandola and Orchestra) in 2000 and writing a method for the instrument. Andrés Eloy Medina, the oboist of Arcano, defines the group's music as "Música venezolana contemporánea" (Venezuelan Contemporary Music). This term reflects a blurring of boundaries, both in terminology and music-making, between contemporary academic music and progressive popular music. Other labels coined in the media include "música contemporánea de raiz venezolana" (contemporary music of Venezuelan roots) and "música folklorica urbana" (urban folk music). The merging of the three musical worlds—folk, popular, and academic—is among the most significant outcomes of the fusión category, alongside the creation and evolution of new Venezuelan popular music.

Some relatively recent newcomers deserve mention for their surprisingly high level of music production: C4 Trío (dedicated to new cuatro music), flutist Huáscar Barradas (a strong advocate for the broader validity of neofolklore), Ensemble Catako, Akurima, Pabellón sin Baranda, Kapicúa, Germaín Coronado with Toberías, and Ozono Jazz. These groups and others offer propositions that meld influences from folk music, jazz, rock, and academic new music. The last group, Ozono Jazz, has developed an adaptation of the joropo playing technique known as "jalao" from the bandola llanera, transferring it to the nylon-string guitar, as heard in the track "Espirales."

An important initiative called "VenezuelaDemo," led by Alejandro Calzadilla, Luis Laya, Raúl Abdueza, and Germán Acero, produced twenty-four compact discs between 2005 and 2008. Each disc includes one track from different artists or groups of popular music recorded in Venezuela since the year 2000. Government-funded and featuring over 400 artists across all genres, this valuable collection has only recently begun international distribution. This development may signal an opening of new Venezuelan popular music to the world.