| American Suzuki Journal
Victoria Vorreiter is an internationally known Suzuki violin teacher. Like Dr. Suzuki himself, she is a living soul of extraordinary gifts and wide interests.
"The Music of Morocco and the Cycles of Life" is the 50-minute video that Victoria Vorreiter filmed, wrote, directed and produced over a 3 1/2 year period. It is an example of the work of an intrepid traveler with a sensitive ear who went to Morocco on her own with a camera and a microphone, in search of the source of our human heart-response to music.
It is fascinating that Victoria was able to record for posterity some of the most private moments of music-making, those which celebrate the rites of passage, in this small part of North Africa. Only a few years ago Morocco was still an untouched pearl of culture, a time warp of unchanged ritual since the middle ages.
We hear grandmothers murmuring lullabies and children singing their playground games. We witness teenagers dancing and flirting with each other to the simplest musical accompaniments. an entire village becomes involved in vocal and instrumental tributes at an age-old Berber wedding ceremony. A muezzin wails his call to prayer from a minaret tower, and a rabbi intones his religious book in a synagogue. Ancient work songs and merchants' cries in the market are especially impressive. Death brings about other peculiar forms of music-making in the Moroccan hills — the expression of grief made into sound.
Victoria Vorreiter captures these extraordinary occasions without hype or sentiment. She has made a truly valuable contribution to our knowledge of the ancient peoples and the world of ethnomusicology. She has preserved on film, maybe for the last time, the actual music by which the people of Morocco live, and have lived since time immemorial. we should treasure this video, her gesture of honoring world culture.
"Every tone has a living soul." — Shinichi Suzuki
Reprinted from Volume 31#4 of the American Suzuki Journal
(Helen Brunner)
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