Reblogsponse to Silence

As a response to my good friend Ben Cluff's blog post of a quote from Sting
about the quality of silence in music, I post here a song by Atahualpa Yupanqui.
This song, "Vidala del silencio," is an instrumental piece but this particular
version has a sort of prologue to it wherein Yupanqui explains the origen of the
song:
"Once, in a morning surrounded by a landscape of blue mountains, I observed
several small clouds - the kind that seem to hang on to the rocks halfway up the
mountain. The air, absent; above, the sky blue; and below, the earth hard and
warm. Someone spoke to me with strange words referring to these small clouds,
perhaps already far away, that made the landscape beautiful. Someone said:

'What you are looking at aren't clouds, my friend, they aren't clouds. They are
forgotten Vidalas [a kind of folk song rhythm from the Andes regions of
Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile]. They are forgotten melodies that await
someone who will comprehend their silence, understand their words, and intuit
their song. A little while after that moment, which I can't translate lightly because
it is beyond my capacity to comprehend, this Vidala of silence was born.'"