sábado, 2 de abril de 2011

Barranquilla: Colombias golden Gate

The only risk is wanting to stay!

sábado, 12 de marzo de 2011

Forty days before Holy Week, Barranquilla, capital of Atlántico Department, decks itself out to receive national and foreign tourists who, attracted by the fame of its festival, join together with the city’s inhabitants to enjoy four days of the country’s most important folklore celebration.

During this period, the Carnival Queen presides over the different festivities until Tuesday, when the symbolic burial of Joselito Carnival brings the celebration to an end and announces the preparations for the next year’s Carnival.

Barranquilla’s inhabitants, irrespective of race or creed, join together to make the Carnival. For them, what is important is to dance and enjoy themselves for four days and then prepare for the following year’s celebration.

History of the Carnival

Its history has been passed down from father to son to keep its roots from being lost in the mists of time. It is said that the Spaniards brought with them the tradition of celebrating the European carnival. This, the slaves in Barranquilla combined with their own traditions, by taking to the streets on the cited dates, dressed in typical garb, singing, dancing and playing their instruments.

More recent tales tell that toward the year 1903, General Carajo proclaimed himself President and started dancing in Ancha Street; in 1918, the first Carnival Queen was chosen and enjoyed her crowning amid the rhythm of waltzes, "pasillos," champagne and Scotch, in a private club in the city, while the general public gathered in the well-known "salones burreros" or "corralejas" set up in the streets to the accompaniment of the native "cumbia" dance, drums, bagpipes and white rum.

In 1921, the young people protested over the separate organization and decided to join the general public and make it a single festival.

From then on, the "cumbias" and other dances, parades and costumes have taken on different expressions reflecting the people’s creativeness.

Customs and Typical dances
The Carnaval of Barranquilla is multicultural, diverse, and rich in different cultural expressions. Its dancing and dancing expressions, just like its music, is gathered from every city of the Caribbean part of Colombia. The Carnaval's diversity can be categorized in seven different blocks: Traditional dances or folkloric dances; dances relation or manifestation dances; special dances or choreographic dances; Comparsas (a form of live music), with which the choreography of mmm dances and creativity of dances are expressed; Comedies, which are traditional and folkloric popular theater, where oral expression is its primary characteristic; Litany, which are traditional groups that sing along a choir; and last but not least the customs. These can be individual, or collectives, structural, and dramatic.

Typical Music
The music contains a mixture of cumbia, porro, mapale, gaita, chandé, puya, fandango, and fantastic merecumbés. These are examples of many styles ofColombian music. It is a party that gathers up tradition based on the creativity of the Colombian people, and it is expressed by various forms of dancing, by means of music, by different forms of art works, by the wearing of different costumes, and by the way of celebrating. The Carnaval of Barranquilla is unique because of its cultural diversity and because it is a party where the people are the main protagonists. Every dance, every folkloric group, and every custom play different roles to make the party the best show on earth.

Pre-Carnival Events

Carnival Activities

The Barranquilla Carnival starts off with the Pre-Carnival, during which activities like the following are carried out:

Event

Reading of the edict

Dancing and "cumbia festival"

Carnival music and its roots

Crowning of the Carnival Queen

Crowning of the People's Queen and the Carnival King

Children's Carnival Procession

The festival is launched with the traditional reading of the edict, in which the government, the chairman of the Carnival Board and the Carnival Queen all participate.

Every Friday of this season is a Carnival Friday, during which the Queen participates in parties, dances and people’s street festivities.

Parades

Flower Battle
The Carnival starts with the Flower Battle, initially organized to replace the bullets of war with flowers of peace, and today considered one of the main activities.

It takes place during the Queen’s parade in which the carriages and floats of the club leaders advance amid their groups of "cumbia" dancers.

Great ParadeThe Great Parade swings through the city streets on Carnival Sunday while the judges stand by to choose the best dancers and costumes.

The imagination of the Barranquilla dwellers reaches its maximum expression during the Great Parade, in the dances of the different Carnival clubs, as influenced by their African origin. The best known dances are those of the "Torito," or little bull, and the "Diablo," or Devil, in which multihued animal masks fashioned from wood and painted in tones of black, red, white and yellow keep pace to the beating of the drums.

Dances of the Congo
These dances have been passed down as
the symbol of the Carnival, conserving the
African tradition in their movements, which
narrate the history of their black forefathers
in Africa, the sad memory of their slavery in
America and its subsequent abolition.

Burial of Joselito Carnival
As the story goes, Joselito was a coach driver in the city who worked unceasingly, enjoying himself only on Tuesdays.

One day, he drank more that he was accustomed to and fell asleep in his coach. Carnival merry makers passing by jeered at his drunken state. In their euphoria, they decided to take poor Joselito in his own carriage to the cemetery, while men and women formed a funeral cortege, crying and lamenting the death of the coachman with phrases such as "Joselito has died, oh! Joselito! Why have you died? Why have you left us, Joselito?" These lamentations, year after year, announce the end of the Carnival.

lunes, 21 de febrero de 2011

The Best Music Groups!

The band was founded when James Hetfield responded to an advertisement that drummer Lars Ulrich had posted in a local newspaper. The current line-up features long-time lead guitarist Kirk Hammett (who joined the band in 1983) and bassist Robert Trujillo (a member since 2003) alongside Hetfield and Ulrich. Notable previous members of the band include former lead guitarist Dave Mustaine (who later went on to found the band Megadeth) and former bassists Ron McGovney, Cliff Burton and Jason Newsted. The band also had a long collaboration with producer Bob Rock, who produced all of the bands albums between 1990 and 2003 and served as a temporary bassist between the departure of Newsted and the hiring of Trujillo.

Metallica's early releases included fast tempos, instrumentals, and aggressive musicianship that placed them as one of the "big four" of the thrash metal subgenre alongside Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax, during the genre's development into a popular style.^[1] The band earned a growing fan base in the underground music community and critical acclaim, with the 1986 release Master of Puppets described as one of the most influential and "heavy" thrash metal albums. The band achieved substantial commercial success with their eponymous fifth album (also known as The Black Album), which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. With this release the band expanded its musical direction resulting in an album that appealed to a more mainstream audience.

Tokio Hotel is a pop rock band from Germany, founded in 2001 by singer Bill Kaulitz, guitarist Tom Kaulitz, drummer Gustav Schäfer and bassist Georg Listing.^[4] The quartet have scored four number one singles and have released three number one albums in their native country, selling nearly 5 million CDs and DVDs there.^[5] After recording an unreleased demo-CD under the name "Devilish" and having their contract with Sony BMG Germany terminated, the band released their first German-language album, Schrei, as Tokio Hotel on Universal Music Germany in 2005. Schrei sold more than half a million copies worldwide^[6] and spawned four top five singles in both Germany and Austria. In 2007, the band released their second German album Zimmer 483 and their first English album Scream which have combined album sales of over one million copies worldwide and helped win the band their first MTV Europe Music Award for Best InterAct. The former, Zimmer 483, spawned three top five singles in Germany while the latter, Scream, spawned two singles that reached the top twenty in new territories such as France, Portugal, Spain and Italy. In September 2008, they won in the US their first MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist. In October 2008, they won four awards including Best International Artist and Song of the year at Los Premios MTV Latinoamérica held in Mexico. Tokio Hotel became the first German band ever to win an award at the MTV VMAs and also at the MTV Latin America Awards. They also picked up the Headliner award at the MTV Europe Music Awards 2008 held in Liverpool on November 6, 2008 and the Award for Best Group on November 5, 2009 at the MTV Europe Music Award held in Berlin. They won an Award for Best World Stage Performance on November 7, 2010 at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Madrid.

Maná is a popular pop/rock band from Guadalajara, Jalisco whose career has spanned more than three decades. They have earned three Grammy Awards, five Latin Grammy Awards, 5 MTV Video Music Awards Latin America, three Premios Juventud awards, nine Billboard Latin Music Awards and 12 Premios Lo Nuestro awards. Their sound has been described as drawing on pop rock, Latin pop, calypso, reggae and ska. They initially received international commercial success in Australia and Spain and have since gained popularity and exposure in the US, Western Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. They have been described as the "Most influential Spanish rock band of all time" and their worldwide sales stand at more than 25 million albums as of 2011.

Pop Music! :D

The definition of pop music is purposefully flexible as the music that is identified as pop is constantly changing. At any particular point in time it may be easiest to identify pop music as that which is successful on the pop music charts. For the past 50 years the most successful musical styles on the pop charts have continually changed and evolved. However, there are some consistent patterns in what is identified as pop music.

Do you now what is Music???

Music is an art form whose medium is sound. Common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike), "(art) of the Muses."^[1]
The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within "the arts," music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art. There is also a strong connection between music and mathematics.
To many people in many cultures music is an important part of their way of life. Greek philosophers and ancient Indian philosophers defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies and vertically as harmonies. Common sayings such as "the harmony of the spheres" and "it is music to my ears" point to the notion that music is often ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, "There is no noise, only sound."^[2] Musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez summarizes the relativist, post-modern viewpoint: "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music