Bruin sees music as gateway to cultural studies

Music lays the foundation for everything from food, art forms, indigenous languages, spiritual exercise and entertainment in native cultures throughout the Americas, said ethnomusicology graduate student Jessie Vallejo.

“Even in a lot of South American lowland and highland indigenous groups, there’s a really strong connection between chicha (corn beer) and music,” Vallejo said. “You have food and smells and other sounds all as a part of the musical experience.”

Coming to UCLA five years ago with bachelor’s degrees in music education, performance and Spanish from the State University of New York, Postsdam: Crane School of Music, Vallejo said she wanted to try and bridge the gap between ethnomusicology and music education.

Her extensive research on music of the Americas and active involvement in musical ensembles have gained her respect from colleagues and the community. Vallejo said she hopes that becoming an adjunct professor will be part of her plans for next year, along with performing with Mariachi de Uclatlán and Mariachi Tesoro de Rebecca Gonzales.

“My personal music side of playing mariachi and developing my musicianship and playing in some of the other ensembles has made up several years of growing a lot and really honing a lot of my skills,” Vallejo said.

Third-year ethnomusicology student Willie Acuña plays the guitarrón, a bass guitar, alongside Vallejo in the Mariachi de Uclatlán ensemble. Acuña said Vallejo is a great leader within the group who has a lot on her plate but still gets it all done.

“She’s researched things that people have told her have already been done, but she actually found a different way of looking at it,” Acuña said. “She’s had a lot of professors commend her for taking her own approach to ideas that were previously thought to be indefensible.”

Vallejo said that after interning at the Smithsonian Institution, she became even more interested in further applying her music, her research and scholarly teaching skills to her future endeavors.

“If you ask (Vallejo) anything about her research especially, she just lights up,” Acuña said. “If you ask her about regional music of Mexico or folk ensembles she’ll light up; she just really takes interest in what she does.”

During her work with Mohawk tribe teachers in Northern New York for her master’s thesis, Vallejo said she discovered that music lays the foundation for a lot of other things.

“Music is very closely tied to indigenous peoples‘ yearly experiences, their landscapes and communities,” Vallejo said. “It harbors a lot of really important cultural knowledge about those places, whether it be an understanding of time, weather or agricultural practices.”

During her graduate studies at UCLA, Vallejo said she was lucky enough to receive a government Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. The grant was awarded to Vallejo for studying the native Kichwa language, allowing Vallejo to travel south to Ecuador.

“It had a mix of everything, but after all my time there I’ve made new friends; I have a goddaughter down there,” Vallejo said. “My host family was at the center of this revival of the type of flute that I ended up studying and so the winds took me to places that I am very happy for.”

The experience, Vallejo said, influenced her musicianship regarding how she listens to music and hears different musical elements.

Vallejo said that part of her dissertation analyzes everything from tempo, rhythm, pitch and timbre, and talks about how it relates to indigenous peoples’ musical aesthetics and spiritual beliefs.

“A lot of the times, it’s a multisensory experience so you have music that is the fabric that ties everything together,” Vallejo said. “They have so much cultural knowledge built into these musical systems that if you lose that, you lose a lot more than just an instrument or just the song.”

Vallejo said that she has experienced music of several different backgrounds in performances on various string instruments with the UCLA Silk & Bamboo ensemble, the L.A. BlueGrassHoppers ensemble and an Andean ensemble, in addition to Mariachi de Uclatlán.

Vallejo said recording in a studio for her first time with UCLA folk group BlueGrassHoppers was a memorable experience.

“When I got to record with the bluegrass group, that was definitively great,” Vallejo said. “They are all such phenomenal musicians and it was the first time I had recorded in a studio.”

Vallejo said that during her music education in New York, she had to learn many different types of instruments and now feels comfortable picking up a new instrument, but she knows how much dedication it takes to really master each one.

In teaching music, Vallejo said she believes it is important not to let students’ technical abilities get in the way of their expression.

“Theory is important,” Vallejo said. “I used to joke with my students that learning the technical stuff can be basic and not the most interesting, but it builds such a strong foundation that it allows you to be creative.”

Ethnomusicology graduate student Alexandro Hernandez said he has been Vallejo’s colleague over the past five years and that her work ethic, both in her research and as a musician, is very much admirable.

“She’s one of those rare types that can handle the research very well but also present the material at hand in a way that is engaging,” Hernandez said. “She has that background of knowing how to man the classroom.”

Along with continuing to perform professional mariachi, Vallejo said she knows that the job market is not great, but hopes to continue her passion for teaching and conducting her own research whenever opportunities come her way.

“I love playing music; I love teaching about it,” Vallejo said. “I love learning about it, and I love doing my own research too, so academia would be a really good placefor me.”