Pianist Dedicates Music To Indigenous People Who Inspired Him

Retosachi, Mexico, Aug 4 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Aug, 2023 ) :Romayne Wheeler sits at his grand piano overlooking Mexico's Copper Canyon and plays music inspired by the mountains and remote Indigenous communities that he now dedicates his life to helping.

The 81-year-old California-born composer no longer lives in the cave where he slept with his solar-powered portable piano after arriving several decades ago in the Sierra Tarahumara in northwestern Mexico.

But he feels as close as ever to the nature and Indigenous Raramuri people who welcomed him into their lives, sharing their food, music and culture.

"I feel truly that all of this area around me is my studio," Wheeler told AFP in his stone house perched on the canyon's edge, several hours from the nearest significant town along winding mountain tracks.

"Every tree, every plant, every flower -- everything here has something to tell me," he said.

Wheeler's love affair with the Sierra Tarahumara began in 1980 when he was in the United States studying Indigenous music and a snowstorm made it impossible to travel to a Native American reservation near the Grand Canyon.

Leafing through a copy of National Geographic magazine, he came across pictures of the remote Mexican region and decided to see it for himself.

"It was like coming home," he recalled, wearing the Indigenous-style shirt and traditional sandals that he now prefers to Western attire.

"The people that are most revered here are the musicians. They stand in high honor like the shamans," he said.

The mountainous corner of Chihuahua state is part of the notorious "Golden Triangle," a region with a history of marijuana and opium poppy production as well as drug cartel violence.