Santiago Barbosa Cañón: Carl Orff Competition 2020 LA SERPIENTE

The SNAKE or The hot weather snake is a popular Colombian song written in the mid-1970s by Chilean composer Marlore Anwandtner during her long period of residence in the city of Bogotá D.C.

This song together with others composed by Marlore, are a symbol of the children's songs for several generations in Colombia and are born from the cultural impact of the Chilean emigrant with the Colombian scope: We can glimpse in their inspiring melodies, a music loaded with rhythms and images of the coffee country.

The Snake invokes a strange mixture between the rhythms of Cumbia and Bullerengue, genres of the Colombian Caribbean coasts of strong African influence. Its dynamic and cheerful air, the one that provokes the dance, is based on syncopated rhythmic figurations to the sound of a constant off-beat, whose ritual and pastoral origins constitute a mother component of modern Colombian genres such as salsa, vallenato, merengue , among others.

Children's themes, fanciful fables with animals typical of Colombian landscapes, and music influenced by ancestral rhythms have been sufficient reasons to select this song as a theme for the present instrumental-choral arrangement. The didactic possibilities offered by the genre, as: the evident accentuation of strong-beat and off-beat, danceable character and syncopated melodies, make this peculiar arrangement a pedagogical experience in relation to the Afro-descendant rhythms of America.