In music schools around all Latin America the rules which have prevailed the most are those used in traditional western compositions. We see waltzes, marches, sarabandes, fugues, sonatines tone rows and others, on the works of important composers in every country. In contrast to this fact, some European and North American composers who have traveled by these lands have composed orchestral music using tangos, sambas, rancheras, cumbias, rumbas and bambucos. With the aid of contemporary thought on music, the music of today allows this regional or native instruments to be part of the orchestra. In this way, dances and folklore are increasingly being part of many new compositions world-wide. Today we see how composers are including Andean, Indian, and Caribbean instruments on their compositions of traditional acoustic or electro-acoustic music.
If as people from the central to the southern part of the new continent, we look for a substantial contribution to the history of music of mankind, we have to look for a collection of new priorities on how music is conceived, composed, produced, and performed. For people on this side of the world, music is inherent to every activity. By nature the Latin has few preconceptions about what music should be, and therefore performs music in a primitive but spontaneous way. Since it is difficult to rationalize the way every individual performs and the way a sound is produced, a study of several cases could possibly give some clues which in place could help or influence the way an instrument or a voice are performed. New compositions do not have to elaborate on sophisticated compositional techniques, they do have to focus on the freedom of expression, qualified by the state of mind of the cultural surroundings in the creative mind. Sound sources could be explored by getting a new blending of tone colors either with traditional instruments or by methods of subtractive synthesis. In any case we return to the fact that most of the music of Latin composers is a realization of dreams and imaginative processes which might as well started to be modeled in modern virtual worlds.
Most of the history of Latin America can be applied to every country and geographical region ranging from Mexico in southern North America, Central America, and South America. Colombia is on the northern part of South America. Since it is surrounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it has a mixture of musical heritage found in Central American and the Caribbean it also has the Hispanic traditions brought by the roads built by conquistadors, from the Atlantic to the golden gods of Peru in the middle of South America. The Andean mountain range spreads into three cordilleras or smaller mountain ranges leaving also many Andean traditions.