The Musiva Concert Series group is kicking off Hispanic Heritage Month with a program of Mexican and surrealist classical music inspired by Frida Kahlo. The Orlando-based organization focuses on music of the Ibero diaspora – broadly, the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking population across the Americas.
Tyler Pacheco is the Artistic Director of the Musiva Concert Series. In a conversation with Central Florida Public Media’s Cheryn Stone, host of our all-local news show Engage, Pacheco explains Musiva’s mission to amplify underrepresented classical artists and present bilingual programming.
"We do bilingual concerts, English and Spanish, to welcome in a broader audience,” said Pacheco. “We typically do free concerts in our community concert programming style, and they’re typically a little shorter in length to maybe introduce our audiences to concerts they typically wouldn’t have been able to engage with otherwise.”
Pacheco said the idea for Musiva was born after the pandemic.
“It came about just after COVID, when myself and the other co-founder, Annabelle, who is our Executive Director, came together as lovers of chamber music and also from diverse backgrounds - myself being half Hispanic, half Puerto Rican, Annabelle is from Cuba,” Pacheco said. “And we thought of this idea of a concert series to showcase these Ibero-American voices, showcase young and diverse artists from across Central Florida.”
Pacheco said their upcoming concert, “Surrealist Mexico,” is inspired by the life of artist Frida Kahlo.
“I examined what was the music happening around Frida and her life in Mexico during the time which she was creating her art,” he explained. “So we'll hear a lot of Mexican composers. We'll also hear a lot of surrealist composers, because a large bulk of her work was surreal art. We're not just going to hear Mexican music, but we're going to hear kind of an amalgamation of what made Frida Kahlo so impactful in who she was, and in the art that she created.”
Pacheco said the audience should expect a few contemporary artists, too, from “some female Mexican composers who are living now today, and could not have imagined being able to pursue their arts without a pioneer such as Frida Kahlo, who sort of paved the way.”
There’s more to Mexican music than what may first come to mind when you hear the phrase, said Pacheco.
"Yeah, we would typically think mariachi and lots of vocal music and guitar, maybe,” he said. “But there is so much more. If you dive deeper, a lot of Mexican music involves a lot of interesting harmonies and rhythms. And so it's very exciting. I would say there's usually a great amount of energy involved in Mexican music, and it can take many different shapes and forms.”
