The Wall Street Journal calls her "one of the living masters of the bagpipe" and the New York Times once described her as "a virtuosic burst of energy". But Galician bagpiper, pianist and composer Cristina Pato not only enchants as a performer the main stages all over Europe, the United States, India, Africa and China. She also collaborates on a regular basis in innovative academic projects at universities such as Harvard, where art breaks down walls and becomes the language that sustains the dialogue between different fields of the knowledge. 

The magazine Nuestro Tiempo publishes this interview on the occasion of Cristina Pato's participation in the annual meeting of the Institute for Culture and Society.

What does it mean to be a "sustainable artist"?

From agreement with my experience, he is one who is able to transfer the talents and skills that any musician develops naturally -partnership, flexibility, innovation, imagination - to other fields that help him to support himself economically. This is especially important when you dedicate yourself to something that does not exist, when you make your own way. challenge Living professionally on the bagpipes for eighteen years has been a real challenge for me: the options were not clear from the beginning, I have been creating them little by little by transferring my passion for my instrument to other disciplines.

How have you managed to succeed globally with a proposal so rooted locally?

No matter what profession you are in, your roots go with you and mark what you do. In the case of music, there is a very strong component in traditional instruments, the earthy sound. It's a question of cultural identity, something that relates to all of us; whether you're in Angola, India or the U.S. Doing something authentic, related to the history of a community, is a very interesting commercial avenue because you're talking about everything that goes around a national or cultural expression. When you play an instrument in which your origin is already implicit, like the Galician bagpipe, then a series of questions arise about the history of your land, where it is located on the map, how its society is defined... I bring you my roots and explain why they are important. 

How do countries as different as China or the United States receive an instrument with such a peculiar sound?

The bagpipe, like so many traditional instruments, has a very specific voice, it has a natural strength. Apart from this exotic component, attention to take advantage of it and adapt it to any status, for which I have been greatly helped by having been trained in different musical languages. For example, in the United States I did a complete immersion in jazz because I saw that there was a possibility of including the gaita in that language. I took classes, worked with musicians... And in China I recently played with a rock band group . As with languages, it's easier to understand others when you speak their language.

Along with a successful musical degree program you have a stable academic relationship with prestigious universities. What led you to start in this world, apparently so different from the artistic one?

My parents, because of the generation to which they belonged, could not have training, and that is why it was so important for them to give their daughters a solid academic Education . When I released my first solo album at the age of eighteen, my mother forced me to continue my programs of study and to do a Master's Degree. For her, my getting my doctorate was in a way the culmination of her work as a mother. At the time I didn't understand why it was so important, but now I do. There are not so many musicians -especially traditional musicians- who can speak both languages: moving people with an instrument and convincing academic institutions of the value that music can have for them. In any case, as I was saying, the path I have followed did not exist: if eighteen years ago I had been told that I was going to teach a summer course at Harvard with my bagpipe, I would have died laughing. 

Now more than ever, discussion is on the table about the brain drain. You, who have traveled the world so much, do you think it is inevitable to leave in order to succeed?

I don't think so. In my case, when I left I was still at a high point of my degree program in Spain and the crisis had not yet landed. I did not leave with a market vision: in fact, I would have result a bit stupid to do so because I play an instrument that a priori has no market there, although now I am doing my best to find it. On the one hand, going to the United States was the fruit of a truncated youthful dream, and thank God my first album did very well and I had to fulfill the contractual obligations of that time. After five years giving a average of one hundred concerts a year I left for the first time and, after several trips back and forth, in 2004 I obtained a scholarship from the Barrié de la Maza Foundation to do the doctorate in Musical Arts in Collaborative Piano at Rutgers University. This allowed me to stop my professional degree program to dedicate myself to reflect, study, think and write. My idea was to stay there for three years and then continue with my life in Spain, but I was lucky enough to meet Yo-Yo Ma, my mentor USA, and I stayed.

Precisely, one of the most important initiatives in which it collaborates is the Silk Road Project, founded by Yo-Yo Ma and associated with Harvard University. Where do they intend to go with this project?

Yo-Yo Ma is an institution in the United States: he is a world-renowned cellist with a great social impact -he even appears in episodes of The Simpsons and Sesame Street- and has an enormous commitment to the new generations. He taught me that talent is a responsibility, that with the ability to excite with your instrument you can provide solutions to the problems of your society. With the Silk Road Project I began to see all the possibilities that exist in that sense. In our concerts you can see an Israeli, a Persian, a Syrian, a Chinese... Playing together on stage is a metaphor of understanding between cultures. 

Can this understanding also be applied to the dialogue between fields of knowledge?

Yo-Yo Ma decided that the project had to be on residency program at a university like Harvard and that our role was not to work on the department Music, but to connect Departments through the arts. We have developed programs like "The Arts and Passion-Driven Learning", to integrate the arts in the Education, or another for cultural entrepreneurs, in which we put in contact the Business School with the School of Humanities. As a result of this experience I saw that all institutions have this problem of communication between the different fields of knowledge and that it could be interesting to create similar programs in other centers to promote partnership between Departments. That is where my work with The College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts with the topic "Time, Memory and Identity" came up. 

Full interview in pdf