Cipriano Frederico Vigil and his wife live in the small Northern New Mexico village of El Rito, tucked into the hills between Española and Abiquiú. At first glance, their house on family land — decorated with devotional art and family mementos, with a grandchild's bike in one corner — might be that of many norteño clans with simple, traditional tastes. Then one looks around, and clues to another side of life emerge.

Against one wall of the living room is an electronic organ.A violin case stands open on a nearby table. Several closed guitar cases show the gentle scuff marks of long use. A glance into an adjacent room reveals hundreds more encased instruments, neatly placed in serried ranks or hanging from the ceiling.

And then one notices that, while the nails on Vigil's left hand are cleanly cut and his fingertips calloused, the nails on his right hand are longer and carefully shaped into gently pointed ovals. They are the hands of a man whose guitar is at home in his arms — the hands of a man of music.

Vigil is not only one of New Mexico's most beloved and notable folk musicians and teachers, he's also a distinguished ethnomusicologist.He holds a bachelor's degree in music education and a master's degree in bilingual education from New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, another master's from El Centro Cultural El Nigromante in Mexico, and a doctorate in ethnomusicology from California's Kennedy-Western University. He has performed and lectured around the country, including at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. As they say, he knows his stuff cold.

Along with a number of notable fellow musicians, Vigil brings traditional New Mexico music to life Saturday, April 18, for the ninth annual Nuestra Música festival at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. The event has been co-curated by aural historian-musicologist Jack Loeffler and Enrique Lamadrid, director of Chicano Hispano Mexicano Studies at The University of New Mexico.

Besides Vigil and La Familia Vigil — his son Cipriano Jr. and daughter Felicita — performers are the Trio Jalapeño of Antonia Apodaca, Ray Casias, and Bernardo Jaramillo; Tomás Lozano and the ¡Viva La Pepa! ensemble of Bruce Panula, Sharon Berman, and Juan Wijngaard; and Juan Andrés Romero and Jonathan Harrell-Naranjo performing as the duo Sangre Joven.

"In essence, my background was first learning all the traditional folk music of Northern New Mexico," Vigil said. "I had mentors from a very young age, like Luz Lopez. He had the Luz Lopez Orchestra, which was a band with saxes and drums and guitars and violins. My father used to play with him in a band at the dances. As a young boy, I remember, I would hear them practicing. When they would go to play for a dance, I would love the sound. I would keep the melodies in my mind."

To figure out how to reproduce the sounds he heard, Vigil started keeping an eye on guitarists — sometimes sneaking away from his mother to go to dances in Peñasco, he admitted — and taking notes. He would draw the neck of the guitar, then indicate where the musician was placing his fingers on the strings for each chord sequence. In essence, he was making his own chord charts.

"I picked it up by ear then. I'd hear it, then go back and play it on the guitar or violin." He would sit by the stove at night and quietly practice into the early morning; before he was 10, he was a fluent guitarist. He also began to amass the huge repertoire of songs he holds in his memory — at a rough guess, some 5,000, he said. Learning to read music came later.

There's certainly no shortage of genres and subgenres in the music Vigil has made his life's work. Forms include corrido, canción, relacíon, decima, vaquera, Comanche, cuadrilla, and more. Each has its own function and history.

"They're all different," Vigil said, as he turned the pages of one of his many scholarly yet practical compilations that include not only music for violin and guitar but also a companion CD. "A corrido would always be about a tragedy, for example. A relacíon is about how we relate with animals, or act at times like animals. Comanches is a style of music used in theatrical performances such as a Matachine dance."

The old titles are compelling and suggest a full community life: "Sacar el gallo" (Pluck the rooster), "Matar el año viejo" (Killing or seeing out the old year), "Adan y Eva" (Adam and Eve). That last was sung as notice of a wedding. "Musicians would get into a wagon and go from place to place singing about the upcoming nuptials. That's how people knew there would be a wedding and that they should go."

In his dual role of traditional musician and ethnomusicologist, Vigil has collected music of specific Northern New Mexico rituals for baptisms, weddings, and funerals: rituals de los angeles, de los novios, and de los difuntos. "The rituals are dying out, so I wrote about them and the history and the verses — everything," he said. "The interesting thing is that these rituals only exist in the northern part of New Mexico and the southern part of Colorado. It's isolated in this part of the world. The southern part of the state, it's not really known at all."

Besides Vigil's large repertory of traditional songs and rituals, he also writes and sings nuevo cancíon, which he said "originated in South America as a form of protest against military or governmental oppression, sort of like that. I decided to use the nueva cancíon for myself, not for protest but to be able to bring a new style to songs to get messages across to people.

"It talks about, let's say, acequias — the water rights. Also about how logging trucks would come into the mountains and rape the mountains without concern for ecology or water levels or habitats. That's what I write. I want my songs to be able to open the eyes of people to things that are happening to us, affecting us. One of the songs I have talks about how the government came in with the Forest Service and took over the mountains where we used to go fishing and hunting for free, and how we have to pay."

As befits someone who first "played" the family's broom in lieu of a guitar, Vigil has always been fascinated by instruments. His first guitar, violin, and mandolin formed early steps on a road that led to his Aladdin's cave collection of items that can be blown, struck, rattled, strummed, bowed, or played electrically. In musicological terms — and fully explained in his meticulous inventory documents — that means aerophones, idiophones, cordophones, membranophones, and electric instruments. The drum section alone is enough to make any musician's mouth water and fingers itch.

Among many other items, he owns a digital saxophone, a double-keyboard electric organ, a three-necked electric guitar, an electric bass guitar, violins both acoustic and electric, an electric sitar, wind chimes, thunder and rain sticks, a psaltery, a Celtic harp, an ocean harp, a slide whistle, a horn violin, a Hawaiian guitar — and even an omnichord, or electronic autoharp. He also plays the musical saw, specifically when he performs the folk tale of La Llorona, the weeping ghost of a woman who killed her own children. Some of his instruments he bought; others were gifts; still others were made for him, including a viper by luthier Mark Wood. It looks something like a six-stringed guitar but is played with a bow.

One of Vigil's earlier and most amusing new-instrument encounters took place when he was studying in Mexico. He made a deal with a local musician: Vigil would teach the man guitar if he would make Vigil a charango — something of a cross between a lute and a ukulele — and teach him to play it. "I made the mistake of paying him 100 pesos, and he took off, so I was stuck with the charango," Vigil recalled with a smile. "The moment I figured out how to tune it, that told me how to play it. Then I found a chord chart later on."

Vigil recently added several new tools to his inventory: a computer on which to organize music, write scores, and set down research; and a pocket digital recorder for times when inspiration strikes when he's on the road.

"I don't want to have to be humming the melody all the way home," he said. "That happened once. I had an idea driving home and I kept playing it in my mind, and I got home and didn't even say 'hi' to my wife. I got into my computer and put it down. Then I was able to relax. If I'd stopped and thought of something else, I'd have lost it maybe."

That spontaneity works for him, and it's the only thing that does. "If I sit down with pencil and paper and say, 'I'm going to write a song,' nothing happens. But if I wait till it comes, then it's there."

Even with such a full plate, Vigil has found room for exploration of yet another musical treat: his own original works, which he is compiling under the title "Poémas Musicales." They are compositions that he is scoring for various combinations of instruments in chamber or even large-orchestra format. So far, they've only been performed through his computer speakers, though live performance might materialize some day.

"One talent that I have is creating, composing music, and so one day I started," he explained. "I had all these compositions and I wanted to write them out in a symphonic format to see what it would sound like with orchestra."

Mostly short works ranging from around four to eight minutes in length, they have a variety of inspirations and titles ranging from the picturesque to the purely descriptive: "Niña," "La Sierra," "Song of Hope," "Polca," "Bolero Romántico," "Destino." Some are based on melodies or themes from the 1970s that he wrote down but only recently developed; others are rooted in traditional attitudes or sounds.

"They're so beautiful, so relaxing to listen to," he said proudly. "One of them I wrote in my mother's house, 'En Casa de Mamá.' I was in the kitchen, and I ended up picking up a napkin from a chair so I could write out the theme. When I brought it here to the writing program, I blew it up into a whole symphony style that sounded very traditional."

details
Ninth Annual Nuestra Música Festival
7 p.m. Saturday, April 18
Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco
$10, 65 and older no charge; 988-1234