V Edition of Baroque Music Festival of Alcantara will be dedicated to the theme “Musical Dialogues between East and West” and pay tribute to the song “Spanish-Andalusian” or “Arab-Andalusian”. Born of the mixture of various cultural, African and oriental ingredients from the eighth century on the Iberian Peninsula, the Arab-Andalusian music has influenced the European music from the Middle Ages to today.

The Brazil, and particularly Maranhao, offer themselves as the ideal place to promote such musical encounters. For the maranhenses land coexists one people mosaic so different roots. The miscegenation is the rule since Tupinambás and Tapuia people were surprised by galleons Iberians full of greed and exclusionary utopia. Remember, in our sad times of new ethnic wars in the East and in Africa, the modern era of suffering and discrimination, huge processions of exiles not seen since World War II, the Maranhão also hosted several diasporas aimlessly. The exiles ‘economic’ volunteers are always joined waves of immigrants, victims of human violence symbolized by slavery, by religious conflicts, the “pogroms” of all genres and by the bursting of the old European and Ottoman empires. Pilgrims from many exoduses came to these lands. Africans from various nations, Europe without borders and more diverse as eastern Syrian-Lebanese, Turkish, Sephardic Jews etc, all of which had to rebuild in these new lands.

A “mixture” whose main cultural ingredients, curiously, had already lived together for more than seven centuries in the Iberian Peninsula, that big old world artistic and intellectual polo were Spain and Portugal Islamic Al-Andalus. From that fertile territory left people Spanish and Portuguese colonists founders of that South America has been called the Far West. This miscegenation wants to inspire the V edition of the Festival, which will spread a message of peace through the old songs from around the world (but with a common core) and performed by groups from countries that today are in conflict or war between them. It will be the inclusion and harmony Festival, which want to open up and offer their public access to new musical horizons that bring together men and women of all backgrounds and do not keep them, there as here, in ethnic ghettos, social and also cultural.