Nancy Bartolome | December 5, 2017
Cristina Pato is an internationally acclaimed Galician bagpiper and has performed with orchestras around the world in Europe, India, China, Korea and Mexico. Pato and her quartet were recently featured in the fall performance series at the Carolina Performing Arts Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. By the end of the magical evening, Pato had the whole audience dancing la muiñeira, a typical Galician dance that is normally accompanied by music from a bagpipe known as the gaita. Most of the songs that she performed with her Quartet were from her latest album called Latina.
In her kickstarter page, which she created to be able to produce Latina, she called herself “…a migrant bagpiper.” She explained during her concert that Latina is a musical journey that begins with the Italian Tarantella and travels through Spain and Latin American 6/8 rhythms like the Venezuelan Joropo, the Peruvian Lando, and the Galician muñeira. In her album description, Pato writes, “We all have in common our roots, heritage, language and way of life but exploring how a basic 6/8 pattern has evolved in the different Latin countries explored serves my purpose of bringing up how many other topics related to the context of the word Latina have also evolved in fascinating ways: topics like gender, power, and human migration.”
Pato is deeply involved in the arts and education. She was a faculty member in the Arts and Passion Driven Learning Summer Institute for artists and educators at Harvard University and has served as an artist-in-residence at numerous universities. She is getting her second PhD in Cultural Studies and has created a class on memory with neuroscientist Dr. Kenneth Kosik. An accomplished pianist as well, she is currently the Blodgett Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University’s Department of Music.
Pato has also been a long-standing member of the Silk Road Ensemble. She was a featured musician in the film, The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. To complement the film, Journeys in Film has prepared a a curriculum guide to help students understand the role the arts play in inspiring connections with other subjects, with each other, and with current events.
View a live performance of “Muiñeira for Cristina” from Soundcheck to hear the music that accompanies the typical dance of the muiñeira.