Javier Pacheco

Musical Scraps / Migajas Musicales Javier Pacheco

The architecture of sound is known as musical form. Even in Musicology, the description of musical forms and how they affect the listener is aways difficult to put precisely into words. In this work, Javier Pacheco draws upon a lifetime of experience as music maker and listener. The reader is drawn into a world of commentary and examples that evoke music's background and foreground power in our lives, in our lifelong search for meaning and identity. The first poem narrates the basis of the entire collection-the power of music to move the spirit-spoken from the standpoint of the author's affectation for the first notes heard from his father's guitar. "The Little Marcelino in Each of Us" relates to the long list of musical influences gleaned from the parent's love for music, from his tradition of providing recorded music, to his collection of records. Poems like "Funk" and "Keep American Music Alive" evoke the power of music, its attractiveness. "To Sing New Song," "La Danza del Mancebo" and "The Raging Concerto" address the importance of music as cathartic experience in our lives. In "Penence" music is comic relief to the hypocrisies that are experienced in the "trial-by-error" formation of adulthood. The following group of poems express a lyrical musicality in realms where most would not expect to find it, such as meditation, craftsmanship, gardens, or world traditions. Musical Scraps pays homage to the musical hero, and the heroic icon within us all. It is a unique collection of memories about music produced in poetic banter, in a creative language both poetic and musical.