A guacimo wooden rod over two meters long, tensioned by a metal wire and a handkerchief with a gourd right in the middle. It is the quijongo, the instrument that produces one of the sounds that most defines Guanacaste and the enslaved African populations who were brought to these lands.
That the instrument still exists today is thanks to those who have strived to keep it alive. One of those people is Werner Korte.
For more than 40 years, Korte has worked to reinvent this instrument without betraying its essence.
His latest effort is a quijongo that disassembles and fits into a suitcase. Why? Because moving it from one place to another has always been a headache.
The dream of a traveling quijongo
A few blocks from Plaza Gonzalez Viquez in San Jose, Werner lives in a green Victorian house that belonged to his grandparents, featuring an optical illusion that makes it seem larger on the inside than on the outside.
Surrounded by workshops, parking lots, and the bustling commerce of the capital’s periphery, the house is an endless wooden labyrinth filled with posters, paintings, historical documents, antiques, and musical instruments. There, in the living room, we began our conversation.
The house safeguards the memories of when he was a boy of just 12. One of his anecdotes is when he heard folk musician Lencho Salazar at the National Theatre perform his song “El Quijongo” with the very instrument that gave it its name. That was quite possibly the origin of his passion.
I really liked the timbre from the moment I heard it… I was amazed. I used to say: ‘Where are those notes it produces coming from?'”, Korte recalls.
Years later, when he enrolled in the Musical Composition program at the University of Costa Rica, he took supplementary voice lessons with teacher and researcher Jorge Luis Acevedo. Both connected immediately over their shared interest in the music of Guanacaste.
Noticing his fascination, Acevedo gave him a quijongo built by the Quirós Alvarado brothers from Bagaces.
That was the beginning of a long journey that led him to become a historian, researcher, ethnomusicologist, composer, singer-songwriter, musician, performer, and to open his own instrument-making workshop.
He traveled across Costa Rica and other countries with a quijongo, but transporting it was always difficult—a common story within the quijonguero community. Master Elualio Guadamuz used to recount that people refused to give him a ride upon seeing the instrument’s two-meter length.
Transporting it by plane was another ordeal. In fact, in 1989, on an international flight, the airline lost Korte’s quijongo days before a musical performance in Italy.
The plane arrived in Rome, they unloaded it, and since the bow was just a rod, it wasn’t visible. So it continued straight to Turkey, came back, and only then was it delivered to us so I could assemble it,” Korte recalls.
From that scare, a bright idea was born: to build a folding quijongo. But over time, Korte did not pursue it further.
The idea remained on pause for more than 40 years until one day, a young quijonguero from Nicoya arrived at his doorstep with the exact same need.
The young man, Malcom Rojas—a multi-instrumentalist musician, activist, and one of the main promoters of the Guanacastecan quijongo—arrived with a drawing that Guadalupe Urbina had made for him. She had shared—and illustrated—that Honduran artist Guillermo Anderson owned a quijongo that could be disassembled. With a clear concept, Rojas sought out Korte to replicate the idea.
“We talked a bit about the possible design of the instrument, I showed him Guadalupe’s drawing, and at that moment he said to me, ‘So what you need is something like this?’ and pulled the first prototype of the folding quijongo—still without a string—out of his workshop,” recounts Malcom in Werner’s living room, where we spoke with both of them.
Werner had worked on the concept a bit after that scare at the airport, but Guadalupe’s sketch and his conversation with Malcom helped him simplify that prototype much further.
Sketch by Guadalupe Urbina used to create the folding quijongo.Photo: Malcom Rojas
Korte redesigned the joints of the bow, slightly reduced the size to more manageable dimensions, and secured it in the center using a single wing nut. The result is a quijongo that disassembles in a few minutes, fits into any luggage, and maintains a tuning and tension identical to the traditional acoustic model.
The sound and weight vary slightly due to the construction materials, as it uses a lighter type of wood, but it doesn’t lose its essence, Rojas assures.
he folding quijongo is small, lightweight, and easy to transport. The assembly and disassembly process takes Malcom Rojas just over two minutes.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
Rojas played this folding quijongo for the first time during a Guadalupe Urbina concert on August 19 in Palmira, in the canton of Carrillo. He received it that very day, and although he struggled to assemble it at first, it now takes him less than five minutes.
“Additionally, I find it extremely important to mention that this quijongo includes a tuning peg, so it can easily be tuned to different keys, making it very versatile for inclusion in all types of music,” he adds.
From the whispers of the hacienda to rock speakers
Amid the mountain of instruments scattered throughout his house, the neck of an electric quijongo emerges—an older, yet significant, reinvention.
Perhaps one of the most common experiences for those hearing the quijongo for the first time is noticing only the rhythmic tapping of the stick against the wire, completely missing the echo emanating from the gourd.
This exact thing happened to Werner in the early 1980s while standing in front of students at the Colegio Superior de Señoritas trying to give an ethnomusicology lecture. He struck the metal string of his acoustic quijongo, but the noise of the hall completely drowned out the instrument’s soft whisper.
Thanks to his background in analog electronics and his passion for 1970s progressive rock, an idea struck him.
The metallic sound immediately reminded me of electric guitars… being metal, it sounded like an electric instrument, producing a timbre very akin to rock,” he explains.
Three years later, Werner designed the first electric quijongo. He attached an electromagnetic guitar pickup to the center of the bow to amplify the metal string, and placed a microphone inside the gourd to capture and independently control the harmonics.
Werner Korte plays a song with his electric quijongo in his home workshop.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
This intervention not only solved the volume projection issue of the gourd, but it also took the quijongo out of its rural setting to integrate it into heavy metal and progressive rock pieces alongside the dance-theater group Metamorfosis in 1998.
Although 40 years have passed since Werner designed the electric quijongo, he feels that an interest in the instrument is only just beginning to awaken.
“Cultural acceptance is very slow; it wasn’t until now that a community of quijongueros appeared here, which didn’t exist back then. In my time, the quijongo was completely unknown here, except to older people,” Werner explains.
Malcom believes that electric and folding quijongos can coexist with the traditional quijongo, and that they should do so alongside these contributions.
“We can embrace these advancements that stem from traditional knowledge and the needs of quijongo players, which also open new doors to experimenting with the instrument. Perhaps we are opening the doors to a kind of new golden age for the quijongo. Only time will tell, but I strongly believe in the musical movement we are rallying behind,” he adds.
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