Tlacochahuaya

This morning (Friday the 22nd) we had another nice breakfast (a sort of scrambled egg covered with a red chili sauce), then caught the bus again (this time, I tagged along) to Tlacochahuaya. For such a small village, the church (San Jeronimo) is large and very beautifully decorated. People were restoring the murals inside.

We went up the steep, narrow, circular staircase to the choir loft, where there is a very elaborately decorated one-manual organ, one of the first restored. Guy Bovet, the Swiss organist and expert on Spanish baroque organ music, conducted a master class, in Spanish and English. Some young Mexican students and Cicely Winter, the director of the institute here, played short pieces and Bovet offered critiques and suggestions.

Mary Joy first encountered Guy Bovet on his home grounds, in the beautiful old village of Romainmotier, Switzerland, where every year he runs an organ conference in the medieval abbey. In 1989, Mary Joy attended that conference, where she met her friends Marika and Bernard, from Germany (she roomed with Marika). She went back in 1991. A few years ago, Bovet was in Minneapolis to inaugurate the new organ in St. Olaf Catholic Church downtown.

After the master class (during which I wrote almost all of this post), we got back on the bus and went back to Oaxaca, to have lunch at La Olla (The Pot). We had eaten there several times, eight years ago, and liked it very much. The menu stated that the meal was saludable (healthy). We started out with a glass of what they called “lemon tea” along with a much smaller glass of mezcal, which is related to tequila, but made in a different part of Mexico, also from agave plants. It was dark and tasted like wood smoke—we liked it. First came a nice organic salad, followed by a wonderful squash-flower soup (a specialty of Oaxaca). Then we had zucchini stuffed with cheese, corn and herbs. Finally, for dessert we had a Mexican bread pudding. We're going back to La Olla before we leave!


The evening was spent first at the Francisco Burgoa Library, where there was a slide presentation on Oaxacan organs, followed by an explanation of an exhibit about organs and their use in Oaxaca over the centuries, followed by a reception, with more mezcal and appetizers, along with other Mexican drinks, non-alcoholic (a sweet, dark red, cold hybiscus flower tea and horchata, a sweet, milky almond drink). We then all walked a number of blocks to the Textile Museum, where, in an old chapel that used to belong to a convent, we heard a concert of polyphonal songs from old books that had been found in a chest next to an organ out in one of the villages (San Bartolo Yautepec). The eight singers, directed by a Peruvian, were called the Capilla Virreinal de la Nueva Espana (the Viceregal Chapel of New Spain--i.e., colonial Mexico). The music was beautiful and beautifully sung. And so to bed.