Volver a la Montaña

Volver a la Montaña (Return to the Mountain) by Shelly Hanson is the second movement of a four-movement suite and is based on several folk tunes of the Quechua (“Inca”) people of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Near the end of the movement, the folk song Separación (Separation) is quoted briefly. The words are “My mother told me not to cry, though I'm leaving the mountains forever.” Over the past century, many of the Quechua people have had to leave their villages forever because of the economic difficulty of maintaining their traditional mountain lifestyle. (Source: published score)