Berta Rojas Traces the Guitar’s Journey Across Latin America

Multiple Latin Grammy winner Berta Rojas spent the last two years creating her most ambitious musical project to date. In making La Huella de las Cuerdas (The Journey of Strings), Rojas traveled 8,000 miles to ten countries to collaborate with 17 virtuoso performers specializing in ethnic instruments and varied musical styles. The tracks place the voice of Rojas’s contemporary guitar among those of 13 of its plucked-string cousins.

La Huella de las Cuerdas is a multimedia project comprising a vinyl album, online performance videos, and behind-the-scenes footage for each of the album’s ten selections, plus a coffee-table book with detailed text in both English and Spanish. Rojas takes listeners on a voyage to the sonic world she created in a program of historic, traditional, and new music of South America and the Caribbean.

The project celebrates the influence of the arrival in Latin America of early guitars and vihuelas from Europe beginning in the 16th century and the impact those instruments have had on local cultures. Variants of guitars and vihuelas began evolving as local violeros (luthiers) experimented with the number of strings and tunings to create instruments producing sounds that became identified with the individual cultures of people across the region. Simultaneously, the guitar was evolving in Europe and ships carried it from the Old World to the New World, where it also thrived.

In a conversation from her Boston home, Rojas gets philosophical when describing what she learned about her own instrument during the peregrination. “In one of his songs,” Rojas says, “Uruguayan poet and songwriter Jorge Drexler wrote, ‘A little from everywhere and from nowhere entirely.’ I believe that applies to the guitar. It developed from instruments that came before it and followed a long trajectory to arrive at the shape it has now. The guitar is the basis of so many forms of expression in Latin America. I want this project to open a door so people can see how immense this is.”

Extended Family

The concept for the project came to Rojas while serving as director of the Ibero-American Guitar Festival in Washington, D.C., working with the cultural attachés of the Ibero-American countries (Spain, Portugal, all Latin American nations). “As I was planning to program ten or 12 artists, I found many instruments that best represent these countries were cousins of the guitar,” Rojas said. “The cuatro is strongly identified with Venezuelan culture and the charango represents Peru and Bolivia. Doing more research, I learned about other instruments that represented their countries.” The experience sparked the idea for a new album. She proposed the concept for La Huella de las Cuerdas to her longtime producers, Popi Spatocco and Sebastián Henríquez (both from Argentina), who both enthusiastically embraced it.

Preparing for the outing, Rojas, Spatocco, and Henríquez listened to many live recordings to discover whose music leapt out at them. “We wanted quality musicians with a high level of technical virtuosity,” Rojas said. “After working together, we all became good friends. There is a brotherhood of love among people who have stringed instruments of the Americas as their common ground.”

The album opens with 18th-century baroque guitar pieces by Spaniard Santiago de Murcia and concludes with a guitar-ronroco duet with Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla in his popular theme for The Last of Us, the post-apocalyptic video game and TV series. The ten tracks explore music of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Bolivia, and Peru.

The album’s accompanying book, penned by Argentine music critic Santiago Giordano, includes historical narratives, biographical sketches of the artists, and gorgeous photographs. A special augmented reality feature lets readers “strum” the open strings of each instrument using a smartphone app to scan QR codes embedded in images of each instrument’s rosette.

The book meticulously details the manifold configurations of the instruments. The Venezuelan cuatro has just four nylon strings while the Colombian tiple has four triple courses of metal strings. The sonorous ten-fret Chilean guitarrón stands out with 25 strings grouped into five multiple courses, each with three to six strings tuned in unison or octaves. Four additional non-fretted strings are mounted on either side of the neck and traverse the guitar body to fasten at the bridge. A sweep of its open nylon and metal strings produces a richly textured suspended-fourth chord.

The featured instruments have between four and six courses of strings, indicating some starting and stopping along the evolutionary path from the four-string Renaissance-era guitar and six-string vihuela to the five-string Baroque guitar to the six-string modern guitar. Among the instruments spotlighted on La Huella de las Cuerdas, eight have five courses, four have six, and two have four. The playing techniques are equally diverse. Some are played fingerstyle, others with a plectrum, and percussive tapping on the instrument body is an essential component of the sound of the Brazilian bandolim and Venezuelan cuatro.

Old World Connections

Both the instruments and repertoire (predominantly based on dance rhythms) have Old World connections dating to the 16th century when conquistadors came regularly to the New World from the Iberian Peninsula. “There were 30 instruments that we call ‘Renaissance guitars’ and 13 vihuelas that came into the Americas via Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo in 1523,” Rojas stated. “So, the first sound on the album is a vihuela played by Evangelina Mascardi.”

Mascardi, an early music specialist born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, now resides in Rome. The music she plays with Rojas and percussionist Lincoln Almada was taken from the Saldívar Codex, an 18th-century volume of Baroque guitar music discovered in a Mexican bookstore in 1943. Its unattributed tablature was determined to be that of Spanish composer Santiago de Murcia (1673–1739). He never traveled to the New World, but his music did in the era when musical forms and instruments were crossing the Atlantic in both directions.

The first track, “La Huella del Códice,” is a medley arranged by Spatocco and Henríquez. It opens with the brief vihuela solo “Los Impossibles” played by Mascardi, who later switches to Baroque guitar to join with Rojas and Almada in “Cumbee” and “Zarambeque.” Rojas plays a historic 11-string classical-era guitar with five double courses tuned in octaves and a single course for the top string. The instrument was built in 1820 in Havana, Cuba, by luthier Francisco Pagés Lopez, a Spanish expat who emigrated from Cádiz to Havana in 1801.

Spatocco and Henríquez took the lead in crafting the arrangements for most of the album’s material. Spatocco also conducted an orchestra in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the most expansive work on the album: Tríptico Sudamericano, written by Venezuela-born composer Elodie Bouny with a commission from Rojas. Its three movements pay tribute to the geography of three South American countries incorporating musical elements from each.

The opening movement, “El Mar,” an homage to Brazil, draws on the swaying baião dance rhythm. Playing the bandolim with its five double courses of metal strings, Pedro Franco shares the spotlight with Berta in duet and accompaniment passages at the opening. The video shows Franco tapping a rhythmic groove as Rojas states the first theme before they launch into contrapuntal lines. Following a slower solo section highlighting Rojas’s lyrical guitarwork, the energy level soars during Franco’s astonishing improvised solo, prompting smiles of amazement from Spatocco and the orchestral players.

“La Montaña” (“The Mountain”), the second movement, features Federico Tarazona playing fingerstyle on the Peruvian charango, which has five double courses of nylon strings. The charango’s high-pitched, rapidly strummed chords typify the sound of Andean music, but the virtuosic Tarazona also digs into single-note melodies and contrapuntal passages. Rojas and Tarazona play together and offer solo soliloquies negotiating “La Montaña’s” peaks and valleys. “Federico was trained as a classical guitarist and likes contemporary classical music,” Rojas informs. “He transferred all his knowledge to the charango and takes a very contemporary approach to the instrument. That’s why Elodie went for a modern sound in this movement. It’s the most adventurous piece on the album and Federico’s part is very demanding.”

The final movement, “Los Llanos” (“The Plains”), spotlights Venezuelan cuatro player Jorge Glem. “He was absolutely extraordinary,” Rojas said. “The cuatro is a percussive instrument as well as a harmonic and melodic one and Jorge can handle all three of these things at once.” Bouny drew inspiration for “Los Llanos” from two Venezuelan dance rhythms. An elegant vals opens the movement before it moves into an energetic joropo rhythm in which Glem strums and taps the cuatro vigorously. The vals melody returns before the piece closes with an upbeat button ending.

Augmented Ensembles

Rojas also adds her guitar to traditional ensembles. For “El Canario” she joins a Mexican traditional son Huasteca trio comprising Eloy Zúñiga (jarana), Arely Lozano Hernández (quinta huapanguera), and Ángel Jesús Guerrero (violin). The track opens reflectively with Rojas’s guitar in a gorgeous call-and-response dialog with Zúñiga’s jarana, a high-pitched nylon-string instrument with five single courses. The canario dance form came to Mexico in the 16th century from the Canary Islands and this arrangement offers two views of the dance: one poignant, the other an exuberant local transformation of the form. Guerrero’s violin takes the melody while Hernández’s large-bodied quinta huapanguera with five courses (three single trebles and two double-course bass strings) propels the joyful groove in sync with Rojas and Zúñiga.

The three Saboya brothers rank among Colombia’s most noted instrumentalists. Their Hermanos Saboya trio includes Daniel (classical guitar), Lucas (tiple, four metal triple courses), and Diego (bandola, six metal double courses). Rojas joined the three virtuosos in Daniel’s lilting, minor-key composition “Bambuco Pa’ Billy.” The quartet nimbly negotiates Colombia’s traditional bambuco rhythm that superimposes 6/8 and 3/4 time signatures in this mildly melancholic piece.

Rojas plays with a trio of Chilean musicians on the song “Tierra Mía” (“My Land”), joining revered vocalists Francesca Ancarola and Manuel Garcia and 25-string guitarrón master Alfonso Areta. Spatocco and Henríquez adapted the traditional Chilean song “La Rosa y Romero” with new lyrics by Argentine songwriter Nayla Beltrán. It’s an impassioned dialog between singers, instrumentalists, sun, and moon, appealing to mankind to rediscover the sacred and asking for healing of the land following Chile’s drought and 2024 forest fires.

Tête-à-Tête

Rojas’s guitar engages in one-on-one dialogs in three tracks. On “Sara” by Ángel Mislan (1862–1911), Rojas duets with Fabiola Méndez’s cuatro Puertorriqueño. During the 20th century, Puerto Rico’s cuatro underwent changes in body shape and an expansion to five double courses of metal strings played with a plectrum. Rojas and Méndez glide gracefully through the popular Puerto Rican danza in an elegant arrangement by Spatocco and Henríquez that shifts melody and accompaniment roles frequently between the players.

On the album’s bonus track, Rojas salutes her home country with fellow Paraguayan Lincoln Almada on Guarani harp. The two play a medley of polcas “Che la Reina” and “Arroyos y Esteros” in a Paraguayan take on Bohemian polkas popularized in the late 19th century. The harp did not descend from the guitar’s lineage but is the standard bearer of the national music of Paraguay and often heard in ensembles with guitar.

The most widely anticipated piece on the album is a guitar and ronroco arrangement of Gustavo Santaolalla’s emotionally probing theme for The Last of Us. To date, the Rojas-Santaolalla video has garnered nearly a half million views on YouTube. Intensity builds with the arpeggios and melodic figures of Santaolalla’s ronroco as Rojas slips effortlessly between low-end accompaniment, fleet-fingered tremolo melodies, arpeggios, and rigorous strumming.

Santaolalla plays his Bolivian round-backed ronroco with five double courses of nylon strings fingerstyle. He introduced the instrument to the world in the soundtracks of Brokeback Mountain, Babel, and The Last of Us. Rojas met with the super-busy composer in Los Angeles for the session. “He was working on other recordings and composing soundtracks and had just finished a long tour in Qatar,” Rojas recalled. “He’s one of the nicest people you could ever meet and was very generous in helping our project.”

What She Plays

Berta plays a 2008 cedar-top Michael O’Leary guitar with Madagascar rosewood back and sides and lattice bracing. She strings her O’Leary with normal-tension Savarez carbon trebles and Savarez hard-tension polished basses. —MS