Archive for category: Philarmed News

Kelly has always been fascinated by swimming and music, until he dreams that he dives, with his alto saxophone, into a deep sea to invite many species to play the Symphony Under the Sea, a work dedicated to marine biodiversity, also because The animals make “pretty” sounds and for her that is music. And that is what the piece would be titled if he ever had the opportunity to compose, because his creativity has no limits. She's even thought of a brief description in her program notes, she says, “fish, whales, dolphins and my family in submarines would be invited to this great presentation. Starfish would play the violins, clownfish would play the flutes, seahorses would play the trumpets, and an octopus would do all the percussion, because it has eight tentacles.”

Kelly Montoya Monsalve is 30 years old and is part of Soy Músico, a Filarmed program that creates musical experiences for people with disabilities and/or neurodivergents. At the age of one and a half she was diagnosed with moderate cognitive delay and at sixteen years of age with retinitis pigmentosa, which is why her vision is minimal. “When he was first diagnosed, the doctor assured me that he would not be able to study, and that he would even have difficulty developing his motor skills. In our case, since she was five years old, we insisted on her learning various activities to stimulate her brain, including music," says Dora Luz Monsalve, her mother, who also says that her greatest strength is love and his gift of service, “…because that's what life is, you have to be helping others, that fills me with vitality.”

Kelly was a high school graduate, never missed a school year, practices swimming, loves watching soccer and is a National fan. He currently studies music at the Network of Music Schools in the Aranjuez neighborhood and is even part of a musical group for people with disabilities where he sings and plays violin. And he also plays his favorite songs on the piano, he does it as a hobby.

He likes Beethoven because he is a symbol of freedom, hope and improvement. “The genius of Bonn stimulates my creativity; I love listening to the hymn of joy from his Ninth and with the Fifth Symphony I have a very special memory: I used to listen to it on CD with my brother before we went to sleep,” says the musician.

“Kelly is blind, therefore, he has a good memory. This year she started with the rhythmic thing, because she was very melodic, at first it was difficult for her, but she already has a very good grip on the sticks and plays well. She is attentive, willing and very dedicated, she easily expresses her emotions; She takes the instructions into account, she is very good at her instrument, the violin,” says Verónica Restrepo, music therapist at Soy Músico.

Music in the mind

His limited vision has not prevented him from reading his favorite book The Chronicles of Narnia 5: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and he even imagines playing the violin within the story. It is said that people with degenerative vision diseases are particularly fast at remembering things in the correct order and this is the case with Kelly, when learning sheet music: “her memory is out of this world. He has an amazing ability to memorize music. She is very disciplined. First the teachers send me the scores by email, she reads them from her tablet line by line, she learns them by heart and at the concert she doesn't need to look at them. For me it's like he has a tape recorder in his brain, because he learns music from one day to the next," says the mother.

This is Kelly, tender, smiling, friendly, full of light and who at the age of five discovered a deep love for music. Her disability has become a driving force to bring joy to her family and to everyone who has heard her in concert.

Postscript

“I am very proud of my mother because she does everything with a lot of love; “She is my favorite superhero.”

One time, Luz Mery was in a nature reserve in the municipality of Barbosa. While there, she took off her sneakers and socks, sat down and put her feet on the grass, waiting for something to happen. After several minutes, she began to feel a positive mood growing within her. It was a simple experience that marked a before and after in his life. He felt a sense of peace flow throughout his body.

"Today I'm freeing myself from tension," she told Madroño, the tree with colorful fruits that was right in front, which, although it didn't speak to her, it did listen to her, she said.

—Madroño! Do you want to continue listening to my story? —Luz Mery asked—

The tension was an emotional burden since, at the age of five, she and her siblings were displaced by violence from Restrepo, Valle del Cauca, to Medellín.

—I lived happily in the countryside, playing and helping with the housework, until the atrocious violence of the guerrillas stalked the area and my parents decided to send us to live with an aunt in Medellín in the Robledo neighborhood, Miramar. There I thought that everything would change, but it didn't… —He told Madroño, while hugging him—

In the eighties, fear, terror and perplexity took over the streets of the neighborhood and the entire city; The spring evenings were overshadowed by the darkness of the hitman and even the weapons extinguished the family celebrations, the conscience and the life of one of Luz Mery's brothers.

—Imagine Madroño! What I experienced in Robledo was worse and I experienced it firsthand, it left me with many consequences. I felt anger, my heart was breaking. And I realized that revenge fuels pain more; I decided not to bow my head and transform my life with words, dance, singing and social work. Because where I can sing I can laugh and where there is love, there is a powerful force called reconciliation.

But what do you think I'm doing wrong? Not everything in my life is going well. I suffer from spinal cord cancer due to my long hours smelting lead in a factory in Itagüí and I was even left alone raising my children. Ah, but I have also had moments where I have given love! Like when I play soccer, I bathe and hug the street dwellers who live on the banks of the Medellín River, because they want to be heard and welcomed. I even know a local who speaks seven languages and teaches others to write.

I didn't have love and I want to give it now. I live every day as if it were my last.

Madroño knew that he had to prepare for winter, and while he received Luz Mery's strong hug, he let his leaves fall on her as a sign of gratitude for what she had told him; He made a lattice with his roots and some flowers for her to rest on. Then he lay down with a sweet smile and slept soundly under the tree.

This short story is written to commemorate the life of Luz Mery González, who was a victim of the country's armed conflict and decided to heal his life by joining, since 2022, the Reconciliation Choir, the Medellín Philharmonic's commitment to peace. Luz Mery passed away on Sunday, August 6, 2023.

The confinement measures made us take refuge at home for a year and a half and made it impossible for human beings to enjoy the outside world, except for some animals that went out to occupy the streets in search of food, others to enjoy the low pollution. After completing the quarantine and endless hours of recording to broadcast virtual concerts, the oboist Cristian Cardenas He felt the need to do something beyond music, he wanted to walk—an everyday activity that we were deprived of during the pandemic. For him, walking, in addition to its benefits for physical health, helps reflect and mental well-being.

He still remembers the steps he took in the countryside to get to his school, because he studied in a rural school, and the endless hours walking throughout Bogotá when he needed to have internal dialogues, “I think I walked through the entire city,” says Cárdenas.

The musician has been hiking for five years, it is an activity that he loves because it allows him to have a healthy relationship with the planet; but during the pandemic he had to interrupt it. Cristian is a native of Bogotá, he says he loves Medellín for the climate, for its hills and mountains, “discovering its landscapes blew my mind,” he says with emotion.

Trip

And that need to return to the outside world, two years ago, led him to have one of the best experiences of his life in La Guajira, a six-day adventure that began in the municipality of Uribia and ended in Punta Gallinas. A trip that transformed his life.

“We slept in a rancheria, there are no hotels there. There are only rancherías that provide that service, there is no internet. There is electricity because they have a generator, so they turn it on during certain hours of the day, the same with water…we slept in a hammock.”

For the oboist, the landscapes that can be seen are amazing, the intense yellow color predominates, the plains are immense and in the middle of the desert you can see the traditional Wayúu rancherías, where children take the opportunity to put up small “checkpoints” and ask for toys, cookies or sweets. to the tourists. All this natural wealth contrasts with the poverty experienced there, between the lack of drinking water, extractivism, wind farms and the humanitarian crisis. The Wayúu survive dispossession and food insecurity; hunger strikes them.

The Wayúu* people have struggled with the natural adversities of the Guajira region, a land of sun, sand and wind, in addition to facing discrimination, racism, marginalization and violence by some non-indigenous inhabitants of the region. The DANE Census reported approximately 270,413 people who recognize themselves as belonging to the Wayúu people, a figure that positions this indigenous people as the largest in the country.

“It was a seven-hour journey in the desert, all the time children stopped us to ask for food. It shocked me a lot because we were going for a walk, but we found a very harsh reality even though the landscapes were beautiful; It was something very strong. I feel that the true value of that walk was the spirit of solidarity that was awakened in me. I saw how the children even fought over food and toys. I feel that we are obliged to establish a policy of solidarity with others that helps improve the quality of life of these inhabitants, since they are people who are abandoned and my duty as a citizen is not to be oblivious to that reality. I think that after music, my mission in life is to help those most in need.”

And it was this experience during this trip that planted a feeling of solidarity in Cristian Cárdenas, a virtue that will motivate him to continue walking through the country to get to know its landscapes and be in solidarity with the communities that inhabit them. He is already preparing to tour the Pacific and the Amazon, he says: “solidarity is key to supporting the most vulnerable in our country to have a better life.”

Music

Cristian Cárdenas has been an oboe player with the Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra since 2018. He is part of a musical family from Pasca, Cundinamarca. He has two siblings, Valentina, a violinist, and Julián, a harpist, who currently live, study and work in Spain and China, respectively; and with whom in 2010 he had the opportunity to share the same stage with the Batuta Orchestra of Bogotá. “Since then I never met them again, it would be very exciting to share music in concert again,” says the oboist, a graduate of the National University of Colombia, with two master's degrees in interpretation and orchestra from the Musikschule Trossingen, Germany.

“Composers use the oboe and the English horn in very special moments of the works, many times they are the most melancholic and beautiful in music where these instruments have a great solo. Our job is to move the public.”

* Also known as Guajiro, Wayu, Uáira, Waiu. The word Wayúu is a self-designation used by indigenous people and translates “person” in general, indigenous of one's own ethnic group, ally and also, the partner (husband or wife).

There is a township southwest of Medellín that is named after a saint and even houses a 129-year-old church. There in San Antonio de Prado—with narrow streets and muleteers who transport tobacco, wood and liquor—there is a village where Virginia Saldarriaga, born in 1962, lives.

In her house there is a garden where she plants marjoram, rosemary, arnica and joy; On the sidewalk they say that they are their friends and nurses because they cure even lovesickness. Essences, candles and other concoctions are painstakingly prepared there. And he is so devoted to his plants that he asks their permission to even steal a piece of them.

One day Virginia realized that some plants were not growing and others were growing with their heads down.

—Surely it's that witch! “The one who dances at midnight in the garden and makes my plants die of fear,” exclaimed Virginia to her daughter Jenny Saldarriaga, director of the Medellín Music Network.

He says that when the witch approached the garden the plants suffered a lot since they knew that she would step on them and mistreat them. Virginia, still grieving and sad, decided to bring her plants back to life by singing and playing tiple and lyre, two instruments that she loved to play at the age of five with her father in Cartago, a municipality in Valle del Cauca.

One night Virginia mistakenly drank a potion of aguapanela that the witch had left on the table. She immediately fell into a deep sleep that enveloped her in a terrifying darkness, from which she seemed to never wake up. She felt so weak and plagued by strange hallucinations that she lost all hope.

In the midst of his anguish he began to look back on his life in music and the joys it had given him. Singing Christmas carols at her first communion mass, participating in the Cartago children's choir, founding the Cantos de Antioquia choir and remembering seeing her daughter graduate from the EAFIT music faculty thanks to a scholarship, were memories that motivated her to wake up that deep dream and thinking that through singing she could save her life and even give life to others. After this rebirth, the witch was never seen on the sidewalk again and all her plants grew fresh, green, full of energy.

The story is inspired by the life of Virginia Saldarriaga who is a peace activist and has been a member of the Reconciliation Choir since 2022. She is passionate about sowing and singing, and her entire life was dedicated to music until a diagnosis of cancer, which kept her in death. clinic for fifteen days, they made her forget about her love for singing. After that particular episode, he says he was filled with courage to be reborn as plants do and reaffirmed his mission in life: to heal the soul through music and heal the body through planting.

“For me, the Reconciliation Choir means rebirth, healing through singing, and the most wonderful thing is finding people who are looking for the same thing. What I like most is seeing the harmony of all my classmates in rehearsals and singing one of my favorite songs, Nothing for War.”