A Song for Colombia

As part of its Social Action for Music program, the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) organized the Andes Cantan Choral Festival, with over 500 musicians on stage, which took place last week in Bogotá and Cali. In Bogotá, the venue was the León de Greiff Auditorium in the Colombian National University, and in Cali, the auditorium of the Javeriana University. The Festival is the result of the Voces Andinas a Coro (VAC) (Andean Choral Voices) workshops, which the Corporation has developed on an itinerant basis in the Andean countries, as a tool to stimulate the infinite potential present in the voice as instrument of body and spirit.

The first part of the extraordinary program was devoted to an Andean regional repertoire. The second included the orchestral component in an interpretation of the Mozart Coronation Mass.

The CAF created the Social Action for Music program in 2000 as an integrated tool in the process of sustainable human development as a contribution to the transformation of individuals and societies by strengthening the values that develop civic awareness and citizen participation.

The program is formed by the CAF Andean Youth Symphony Orchestra with 160 children and young people, aged 10 to 25, from less favored sectors of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. The program is complemented by the Andean Itinerant Conservatory (CAI), the only one of its type in the world, which gives continuity to the process of educating children, young people and teachers in the Andean region, and with the Andean Choral Voices workshops.

Ana Mercedes Botero, CAF director of Cultural and Community Development, said that the program’s main purpose was to strengthen civic culture through music, as an art form that exalts the most noble values of the individual, and is a factor in the promotion and solidarity of family and community links, and a better integration of the social fabric.

The CAF music movement, which began in 2000, has become a human chain of over 5,000 musicians, which is expanding training processes for teachers, children and young people in instrumental interpretation, orchestra conducting, choral song and lute.