When a college invites a major singer to perform, the familiar arrangement is simple: students accompany a master, and the master’s work remains fixed. Susana Baca’s 2014 Berklee concert had a different premise. The school announced a 30-piece student band playing original arrangements of her music, including seven students from Peru. Baca brought a body of Afro-Peruvian song; the students had to decide how to write parts around it. That exchange makes the event more useful to think about than a ceremonial tribute.
Arranging is an act of interpretation. It allocates space to a voice, shifts emphasis among instruments, and decides what a listener may hear first. Those decisions can illuminate a song or flatten it. The risk is especially clear when a conservatory ensemble approaches music rooted in communities outside its classroom. Afro-Peruvian traditions should not be reduced to an “influence” that becomes more valuable once translated into academic notation. Yet forbidding students to alter an arrangement would also treat Baca’s repertoire as an untouchable artifact, incapable of new conversations. The concert placed that tension on the music stand.
Berklee’s account after the performance says students from Peru, Italy, Mexico, Japan, and elsewhere arranged most of the songs; Oscar Stagnaro and Matthew Nicholl produced the event. Those details matter more than an abstract claim that music crosses borders. The classroom contained musicians with different relationships to the repertoire, and specific people took responsibility for the result. The account also notes traditional Latin percussion and contemporary writing, suggesting an encounter between tools rather than a one-way passage from “old” material into “new” form.
Baca is not only a singer whom an institution can honor. Berklee identifies her as an Afro-Peruvian artist and former Peruvian minister of culture. Her career joins performance to public arguments about whose culture receives support and visibility. A student chart for a Baca song cannot carry all that history on its own. It can, however, force players to ask what they are changing, why, and for whose ears. A responsible arrangement is accountable to the song and to the living artist who continues to work with it.
The lesson of the 2014 concert lies in that verb: continue. The students did not uncover a finished musical past, and Baca did not hand over ownership of a tradition. They made a dated, documented collaboration in a specific hall. Its value is in showing that preservation sometimes requires new work, provided the new work names its sources, credits its makers, and remains open to correction.