News from Falling Mountain

Folk duo wild carrot devote much of their creative energy to teaching songwriting workshops in school programs throughout southwestern Ohio, but area schoolchildren had to make do without them as their talents were exported for 10 days this autumn to the South American country of Chile. The US Embassy brought Pam and Spencer back for a second tour as "Folk Music Ambassadors" to this beautiful country, including three days of performances at the Expoinglés Festival in Santiago. The festival, which celebrates the cultures of a number of English-speaking countries and promotes English as a second language in Chile, will include bands from Australia, Canada and Great Britain.

Pam and Spencer also performed outside of the capital at another festival and concert in Valparaiso and gave a master class at a music school. This tour is the follow-up to their 2003 tour of Chile, also with the State Department. Pam once again put her Spanish learned in Costa Rica as a Peace Corps Volunteer (1992-1994) to good use on stage and in radio and newspaper interviews.

Pam writes of their experiences, "We played a couple of shows on a large stage at ExpoIngles, but found that performing in front of the Embassy's booth provided an up-close and personal experience for the hundreds of high-school and college-age visitors and the other exhibitors. It was so fun to be surrounded by curious listeners that just couldn't wait for us to pull out another instrument (ooh! ahh!) and introduce them to another style of music! In addition, we were able to perform - along with 8 other bands from Chile, Denmark and New Zealand - at the Immigrant Music Festival in Valparaiso. "

She continues, "We just loved Valparaiso (Valpo, to locals)! It's very hard to describe, but picture seven very steep hills, arranged in a semi-circle, rising out of a blue bay. Each hill is a different "neighborhood" and each has a "funicular" or incline cable car to bring residents and visitors to the highest destinations on each hill. The steep hills and deep ravines are covered with pink and green and yellow and blue and red houses as close together as can be and teetering on the cliffs above the switch-backs and streets below. It is an artists' community where Poet Laureate, Pablo Neruda, had a home. Standing in the study where Neruda wrote his legendary poems was just amazing and inspiring.

We enjoyed the late-night culture - restaurants open for dinner to early birds at 7:30pm and really get kickin' at around 10:00! It was fun to see and join in with people in a bar singing along to the Latin-culture equivalents of "Fire and Rain" and "Hang on Sloopy". We had a lot of great food, wine and conversation and a little bit of time to be tourists.

We brought along our guitars, mandolin, mountain dulcimer, concertina and penny whistles. The dulcimer proved to be the most curious of our instruments. Everyone asked about it and even the airline employees were suspicious of it. We had to carry it on. It's shallow and light, but long, and it raised a few eyebrows as we began the first leg of our trip out of Cincinnati to Atlanta. We quickly learned that if we ran to the gate, we'd have time before flights to play the mandolin and dulcimer. People literally crossed the waiting area to take a seat near us and listen to the music. One woman passed the time by sketching us! The gate attendants were enamored of our keeping impatient travelers happy, and we were able to take the dulcimer on board without question for the rest of the trip.

We figure our performances and master classes directly impacted at least 750 adults, teachers and students of music and English. Audiences and participants asked questions regarding the names and origins of a variety of folk instruments, the culture and history of the music and its relationship to the U.S. and the world. We were nervous to represent our country in such unpopular times, but we were the faces of humanity, the representatives of the people, not the policy and we felt warmly welcomed by the people of Chile. The embassy officers were very happy with our performance as "Cultural Ambassadors", balancing our personal views with diplomacy, as we helped them fulfill the missions of the Cultural Affairs Office. With any luck, we'll end up on tour at another post somewhere in a new corner of the world sometime down the line."

You can hear Pam and Spencer discussing their Chilean tour more in this streaming MP3 from WVXU's "Cincinnati Edition", Oct. 23, 2005.