Record-Journal (Meriden, CT)

The room at the Spanish Community of Wallingford on Washington Street fell silent as Ramon Ponce, director of the Mariachi Academy of New York, spoke of “ritmo” and “tiempo” during a master class Wednesday for the budding musicians, 7 to 15, as part of SCOW’s Escuela Guadalupana de Musica.

With Ponce’s help, the school, which has 52 students 6 to 17 years old, is striving to become the Mariachi Academy of Connecticut, said Director Evangeline Mendoza Bourgeois.

Ponce, 35, started his academy in 2002 in Queens, N.Y., to promote mariachi music along the East Coast with its starting point in New York City. Mendoza Bourgeois launched her mariachi program in Wallingford in November 2008, joining SCOW in September 2010, she said.

After meeting Mendoza Bourgeois a couple of years ago, Ponce said she had the idea of launching an academy in Wallingford.“I said, ‘Wonderful, because that’s exactly what we’re looking for, what we’re trying to do,’ ” Ponce said. “We’re trying to reach the Mexican and Spanish community through music – and in this case mariachi music – because it’s great to see kids who are getting in touch with the music because that’s part of the tradition.”

Ponce said mariachi music originated in central Mexico in the mid-1800s. There are several styles of mariachi; all are known for their combination of passionate vocals, guitar, violin, rhythm guitar, called a vihuela, harp and bass guitar, called a guitarron. He said trumpets were added for a fuller sound in the 1930s, when mariachi musicians started to perform on radio.

The musicians originally wore traditional Mexican attire of simple cotton shirts and pants with straw hats when performing, and then adapted their current look of colorful suits and widebrimmed hats when groups moved into urban areas, such as Mexico City, Ponce said.

“The main thing that distinguishes mariachi music is really the instrumentation. I mean you have violins on one hand, and you have trumpet, and between those two, you have this wonderful rhythm section that you can almost feel a drum set, but it’s not there, and that’s because of the guitarron and the vihuela,” he said.

Ponce noted that nowadays musicians can turn any song into mariachi because of its characteristic sound.Daisy Lopez, 14, a freshman at Mark T. Sheehan High School, said she was reluctant to learn how to play mariachi guitar, but her mother wanted her to learn because Yvett, Daisy’s 12-year-old sister, also at the master class, was part of the SCOW program.

“Actually, I didn’t like (the music). My dad listened to it all the time and I would be like ‘Turn it off. I don’t like it.’ But now, I’ve even started listening to it and I have it on my iPod,” said Daisy, who said she is interested in becoming a nurse.

The 10 students were selected for the master class because they are the most advanced students in the Wallingford program, Mendoza Bourgeois said. An aspiring musician, Alex Ramirez, 13, a seventh-grader at Moran Middle School, said he has been playing the guitarron for three months.

“One of my dreams is to start a big mariachi group,” he said. One of the youngest members of the class, 10-year-old David Avila, a fourth-grader at Parker Farms School, has been playing guitar for about a month. He also plays drums for his school, and knows what he wants to get out of the master class. “I really want to learn to play really fast,” said David, who said he wants to be a musician, inventor and teacher.

In the daylong master class, the students – split evenly between five girls and five boys – included seven guitar players, two guitarron players and a vihuela player. Instruction was scheduled from 11:45 a.m. to about 4:30 p.m., and Ponce said the class packs months of work into less than a day.

“What I would like for them to remember or at least to know is to be able to identify, to know a little bit more about mariachi music. So when they go home and listen to mariachi music, they are able to say ‘I know that rhythm,’ ‘I know that music,’ or ‘I know how to play that,’ ” he said.

Yazmin Lopez, Mirka Dominguez, David Avila, Kim Cerna, Eric Morales, Yael Avila and Eliel Martinez also participated in the class.

Copyright 2011, Record-Journal, All Rights Reserved.