Tómense esta botella conmigo (entre algunas ficciones y muchas verdades...)

Quien se acuerda la fecha exacta pero si sé que fue hace algunos, varios, muchos ayeres en que por alguna razón, que específicamente no puedo recordar, agarramos la tradición del Chavelazo.

En ese entonces vivíamos en la 27 poniente, numero incierto, cerca de la taquería Los Parados,  famosa por estar abierta para los munchies trasnocheros y por ser especialmente tolerante con los “pasaditos de copas,” y cerca del famosísimo “parque de la muerte” mejor conocido como Parque los Ángeles (años después me entere con tristeza que las leyendas de asesinatos, violaciones y crímenes cometidos ahí solo vivían en la imaginación del taxista que nos lo conto, en la realidad era un parque bastante común y nada interesante).

Jovenazas como estábamos andábamos viviendo la resaca de los primeros años universitarios: las noches interminables, fiesta tras fiesta, el derroche de alegría, la embriaguez de la recién adquirida “independencia” (así, con sus respectivas comillitas), el desmadre y los años dorados de  “los imprudentes” (nombre apócrifo que se designo a algunos distinguidos miembros de la comunidad Chiapaneca residida en Puebla que gustaban de la bohemia y de la buena convivencia). 

Algo paso en ese lapso, algo nos impidió seguir con la eterna alegría, seria el futuro incierto? (tan incierto como se puede ver a los veintitantos), la creciente responsabilidad, los amores ingratos (algunos arraigados desde hacia un tiempito, otros con aires argentinos, acabaditos de llegar), el enfrentamiento con nuestras fallas académicas (algunas con forma de escala musical, otras venían escupiendo anatomía, otras simplemente se llamaban hastió), fue así, entre encuentros y desencuentros que un buen día nos sentamos y sacamos ese par de discos, gastados hasta la ruina, de Chavela Vargas. Volver a España se llamaba la compilación, maliciosamente robada de la colección de mis padres y altamente reclamada por mi madre al darse cuenta de su desaparición. La magia fue instantánea, en ese entonces nuestra mesita verde todavía tenía todas las sillas intactas, se acuerdan?. Solo bastaron unas velitas dispersadas por la habitación, la luz apagada, por aquello de la ambientación (y silenciosamente de la economía), una botella de tequila y la caguama individual. Lo que fue una reunión casual, se convirtió en un ritual obligado realizado casi todas las noches durante aquella primavera del dos mil y pico (o seria otoño, quien se acuerda caray). La favorita, Paloma Negra obligadísimo unirse al coro desgarrador, mi favorita Cruz de Olvido. Entre caguama y tequila, se nos fueron las noches, ladies only, por cierto, y entre platicas exorcizábamos las tristezas para terminar coreando los éxitos de la gran Chavela (para descontento de mis vecinos y algunos transeúntes despistados). 

Asi se pasaron un par de buenos meses (quien los cuenta),  en donde todas nos entregamos a la ominosa tristeza acompañada por la Chavela y envueltas en la camaradería que solo los años y el cariño que nos tenemos pueden forjar. Todo dejamos en los Chavelazos, tristezas, secretos, rendimiento académico, salud (mental y física, que caray), dejamos todo y nos quedamos con todo también.

Hoy las convoco, a esas, las del Chavelazo (con todo y la exiliada cuyo nombre omitiré por miedo a represalias), las que estuvieron, a las que les contamos, las que se enteraron, las que todavía lo recrean, las que lo añoramos, las convoco hoy que se fue nuestra Chavela, se nos adelanto decían algunas…tómense esta botella conmigo, hoy y siempre mis hermanas, CHAVELAZO COMO NO!!! 

Porque escuchar a los clásicos? (y cuales son estos llamados clásicos)

Recientemente tuve la oportunidad de leer un ensayo del escrito Italiano Italo Calvino titulado “Porque leer a los clásicos”  en donde hace una serie de reflexiones acerca de lo que define a un clásico y porque resultan indispensables en nuestras vidas. 

El ensayo me hizo pensar en la importancia de escuchar a los clásicos, pero, quienes son estos clásicos? Es decir, que los hace ser clásicos e indispensables y de que manera podemos acceder a ellos sin quedar atrapados en los pantanos de los discursos ortodoxos que solo alejan a posibles escuchas de los placeres de la música académica.

Usando algunas de las definiciones que Calvino hace en alusión a los libros, me atrevo a aplicar algunas a la música clásica también.

1.     Un clásico va a hacer aquella pieza que se quedara clavada en nuestras emociones y que a la larga influenciara nuestra experiencia personal para formar parte del colectivo inconsciente.

2.    Un clásico es un tesoro escondido, una experiencia sublime reservada solo para aquellos temerarios que se atreven a escucharlos y a disfrutarlos.

3.    Un clásico es aquel que cuando lo escuchas por primera vez te da la sensación de haberlo escuchado antes.

4.    Un clásico será también aquella pieza musical que genere críticas, discursos y especulaciones, que sacuda nuestras conciencias y nuestra voz.

5.    Un clásico es aquel que independientemente del país de procedencia, nos habla directamente y expresa nuestra experiencia y sentir como si viniera de nosotros mismos.

6.    Un clásico es la pieza que siempre persistirá como ruido de fondo aun cuando el presente sea totalmente incompatible con lo que la pieza algún día represento. 

Pero, porque la música clásica no goza de la misma popularidad que mucha música comercial? No creo que la respuesta este en simplemente aludir al carácter pretencioso y académico de la música formal y a la necesidad de tener conocimientos previos en torno a esta para ser capaces de entenderla y disfrutarla. 

Es evidente que la alienación que la música formal ha sufrido en torno al gusto popular es culpa de los sistemas educativos que se han encargado de relegarla y prácticamente desaparecerla de los programas escolares. También es culpa de los medios de comunicación que en su desmedida ambición se han encargado de producir en masa productos “musicales” de dudosísima calidad, carentes de contenido significativo y en general enajenantes pero fácil de distribuir y de insertar en los gustos populares. Y finalmente, también es culpa de nosotros mismos, tan acostumbrados a recibir y aceptar lo que nos llega de los medios y las instituciones y tan incapaces muchas veces de hacer uso de nuestro pensamiento crítico y de tener un sentido común independiente.

Al final, cuando nos aventuramos y decidimos ir más allá de lo dictado por las masas y de las tendencias impuestas, nos encontramos con un mundo de posibilidades y expresiones artísticas que retan nuestras emociones y desafían completamente nuestra reducida visión del mundo que nos rodea. 

No necesitamos saber si Beethoven fue un compositor Alemán de semblante fuerte que simpatizo con los ideales del movimiento cultural llamado Sturm un Drang y que sus obras desafiaron los cánones del clasicismo para dar lugar luego al movimiento romántico que exalta la libertad y fraternidad por sobre el racionalismo para conmovernos con su novena sinfonía o exaltarnos con los primeros acordes de su quinta.

Definitivamente no es importante saber si Rachmaninoff fue uno de los mayores representantes del romanticismo Ruso y uno de los compositores para repertorio pianístico mas idiomático que hubo para disfrutar su concierto para piano num. 2 y rendirse absolutamente ante la belleza de la melódia del segundo movimiento.

Carece de total importancia saber si el trabajo de Gustav Mahler sirvió de puente entre la tradición Austro-Germana y el inicio del modernismo a principios del siglo veinte para asombrarse con los solos del corno francés en el scherzo de su quinta sinfonía y sentir absoluta empatía y duelo con la marcha fúnebre con la que comienza la obra.

Realmente es fundamental saber que Rimsky-Korskov perteneció al grupo de compositores rusos conocidos como los cinco, que fue un absoluto maestro en orquestación y que en su Gran obertura para la Pascua Rusa utiliza temas tomados de una colección de cantos litúrgicos pertenecientes a la tradición de la iglesia ortodoxa Rusa para exaltarse y disfrutar de su carácter festivo y de la intensidad de su instrumentación?

Invito a todos a sumergirse en los clásicos con total, absoluta y orgullosa ignorancia pero con oídos y  corazones dispuestos para el viaje…

20 Años sin Piazzolla (El tango libertario)

Giro con barrida y boleo, atenti al mio cuore que se afana con tristezas, cunita y sacada, hoy me llora el bandoneon lagrimas de teclas, aguja y ocho cortado, la milonga cadenciosa resuena en el arrabal, son sus notas las razones de tanto penar, traspie y cruce con variantes, hoy el tango me ha piantao, me resuena y juna sin mirar…Salida con traspie y toque.

Hoy cuatro de julio se cumplen veinte años del fallecimiento del compositor Argentino Astor Piazzolla y hoy mas que nunca, me vienen a la mente sus magnificos tangos, ecos del espiritu latinoamericano, libre, pasional y rebelde.

Piazzolla fue de esoso compositores que empezaron buscando su voz en la musica formal, su formacion academica va desde haber tomado clases con Bela Wilda, un dicipulo de Rachmaninov que le enseño a amar a Bach, Bartok y Stravinsky, que lo guiaron por los caminos del Avant-garde de los cincuentas, pero quizas su mas grande leccion la recibio de Nadia Boulanger, una de las mejores educadoras musicales en la Francia de mediados de siglo veinte, y la que lo incito a seguir su carrera como compositor en el genero del tango.

Su pasion por el tango se refleja en sus obras que parten de un lenjuage musical moderno y sofisticado pero que a su vez no pierden su origen ni su sabor popular tan caracteristico del genero tanguero que nacio en los barrios populares de Buenos Aires y Montevideo y que dio voz por tantos años a las cosas del amor expresadas mediante el lunfardo por migrantes y la clase trabajadora.  El tango, definido por Santos Discepolo, uno de sus mas grandes poetas, es “el pensamiento triste que se baila”. Nacido del arrabal y alimentado por el desengaño, el tango exterioriza el llanto y sublima el deseo y la tristeza.

Piazzolla tomo el tango tradicional y lo elevo a las salas de concierto de todo el mundo, cambio la formacion de orquesta tipica tanguera por ensambles mas pequeños, lo cual provoco algunas criticas entre los tangueros mas ortodoxos pero que aun ahora son las formaciones musicales mas usadas para el genero. 

 Sus bellisimas melodias, su desarrollo tematico, el uso del contrapunto, todas estas caracteristicas le dan a sus composiciones un estilo unico y lo convierten en un compositor que todos los musicos soñamos siempre con tocar.

Hoy que me encuentro desafortunadamente lejos de mi tierra,  observo con emocion y zozobra los acontecimientos politicos y sociales que andan sacudiendo conciencias y moviendo pasiones por toda latinoamerica. Escucho sus voces pidiendo justicia, defendiendo la democracia, representan la nueva generacion, la que se deja oir, la que nunca mas se callara. Hoy les pongo musica y la escucho con alegria, hoy solo es el Tango, el Tango libertario y pasional el que acompañara sus voces y su lucha.

Yo si lo recuerdo…. (Some thoughts about the prince of song)

Recently there has been a song in my head titled amnesia, a heart broken hymn performed during the 1990s by Mexican singer Jose Jose. This romantic song was one of the many hits achieved by him and whose career goes from the early 1970s until now. It is little known that Jose Jose started his musical career as a bossa nova double bass player before becoming the so called prince of song. 

His big chance to start a solo career as a singer came with the performance of El Triste in the II Latin song festival, a performance that until now is remembered as one of his most beloved ones. The song is also a perfect example of the Mexican imaginary that these romantic ballads build during the 1970s and 1980s. The main themes that these ballads deal with were about broken hearts and unfinished love that ends with a lonely man staring at his tragedy with resignation but yet grief and sorrow.

These ballads continue the folk tradition of Mexican ranchera song that begun in the early 20^th century and had its origins during the revolutionary years with the corridos, a special kind of song played commonly with a solo guitar and that was used to talk about some of the revolutionary heroes and their ventures. Later during the 1940s some composers like Cuco Sanchez, Alvaro Carrillo and Jose Alfredo Jimenez take the corrido form to write love songs using the solo guitar style or arrange those for the Mariachi aggrupation.  Most of these composers were self-trained musicians and to made the instrumentation many times they used the help of formal train musicians like in the case of Jose Alfredo and his collaboration with Ruben Fuentes, a classical violinist who made his career working with mariachi music. His arrangements for Mariachi still remains as some of the best ones.

With this historical background Jose Jose settled as a romantic ballad performer and became very famous and recognized above Latin America because of his unique vocals and his deep interpretation. It is curios how like many other musicians that worked with this style of music, like some the ones that I mentioned above, he also lived with the stigma of alcoholism and although he is a survivor of it, his voice result really damaged because that.

Amnesia is one of his many hits and the song reached the top ten of hot Latin tracks in the billboard top of Latin songs chart during the 1990s.  In 1998 a group of Mexican rock singers made a tribute to Jose Jose’s music and released an album of covers with his major hits, Amnesia was one of the covers and it was performed by Hip Hop Mexican group Control Machete.

Control Machete was a Mexican Hip Hop group formed the north of Mexico formed during the middle 1990s, a time of important social movements in Mexico. The group helped raise Mexican Hip Hop from an underground level to a mass one and the social content in their lyrics positioned them as one of the most important and influential bands of that time.

In the cover of Jose Jose’s song we heard a rhythmic base which works as foundation for the original melody that is sung by a female singer.  Above that Fermin Caballero, one of control Machete’s former members, rapp using some of the lyrics. The final result is a deconstruction of the original ballad,completely transformed but without taking its beauty and its melancholy mood away. Certainly an exquisite cover worth of dusted off and listening again.

BEBOP AND A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS.

I read the word bebop for the first time in the pages of a novel by Jack Kerouac. And when I got the chance to listen by chance to Coltrane’s soprano sax, singing my favorite things and completely changing the original meaning of one of my favorite cheesy tunes of all time I just have to know more about it.

When I was 11, one of my beloved and older cousins, Gabriel, took his copy of Kerouac’s “On the road” and got lost for two months without telling anybody. He appeared in Can-Cun, working as a dishwasher guy in a fancy hotel. It was his way to do homage to Kerouac and his Beatnik essence. For me, it was the moment that I got really curious with Kerouac enchant and in consequence with the BEBOP.

Bebop and Beat poetry shared the taste for experimentation and the anger of reaching new fields and new artistic languages; many bebop musicians took the genre into avant-garde grounds. Taking the jazz tradition to higher levels of virtuoso improvisation and harmonic complexity. On the other side, the Beatnik poets, took their hedonism and unconformity and converted it into a statement flag against the post-war disenchant. The bebop musicians were also reaching extremely radical borders and many of them, sadly didn’t see the end of it.

One of the most beautiful characteristics of Beatnik writers were his willing to give voice to the anti-heroes of literature, the outcasts, the poor ones, the “others”. They were crossing America and inclusively, many of them end up in Mexico at some point of their lives, looking for cheap drugs and exotic adventures.

Both genres represent and portray the reach for a new artistic representation, characteristic that saw the light in the beginning of the twentieth century and that was seeking for  its higher point in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Many of the bebopist and beatniks of that time, were also close to the most academic and serious arts and were familiar with the serious music trends of that time.

Bebop was inspired by musicians like Debussy and Schoenberg. Many serious composers of that time also had closely relationships with some of the famous names in Bebop. Although Bebop is just one small part of enormous and rich Jazz tradition, its influence is big and we can sense until now, especially in the way that change solo improvisations and turned them into a more complex and rich musical moment for every performance.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection

to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…

A.G

Julio Estrada: The Latin American Avant Garde

Latin American culture is based primarily in two structures: the prehispanic and the Hispanic. These two concepts blend and formed our cultural and artistic background. During the 1930’s with Silvestre Revueltas, Mexican Music begin to enter to the modernism, a new language was being written in the hands of Revueltas but still, it was full of the national romanticism of the early twentieth century. After Revueltas the search for the Latin American voice started to reach new fields and began to turn its face to the American and European Avant Garde.

Julio Estrada is a Mexican composer and theorist and its one of the Mexican represents of the Avant Garde of the 60-70s.  Event thought the shadow of death and terror that was leave by the two WW was still floating in the air, in the 1960s the search for new languages in Art and Music was more focused in the experimentation and in the search for new textures and new languages, not exactly based in the horror of the past wars. The Avant Garde of those years looked to extend the music and art experience and change completely the traditional structure of the artistic performances.

Estrada studied composition with Nadia Boulanger, Oliver Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti. All of these composers were initiators of the avant garde movement of the 1960s. This influence was carried with Estrada to Mexico where he began his research for new musical systems.

Estrada compositional style is a blend of some the musical movements that start in the 1960s such as allateorism, controlled uncertainty and his own musical theories that are based of interval classes for scales of any subdivision and the amplitude of the harmony based on rhythm and sound. One of his majors and more representative works is an Opera based on the Mexican book Pedro Paramo. In this piece, Estrada makes an analysis of the text and search for tonal musical elements in its narrative. The book was created by Juan Rulfo and tells the history of a ghost town in the north of Mexico where the ancient tradition of the Mexican country and local ideas of death blends into a surrealism narration that described many of the Mexican culture idiosyncrasies. The result of these investigations creates a world of expression where music and literature blends perfectly. The experiment aspect of the avant gardism in Julio Estrada are taken to the interdisciplinary world with this piece but at the same time we can find the two aspects that makes the distinction with the European and American avant garde: the Hispanic and the prehispanic heritage.

The search for a truly Latin American voice in the music is still happening, Estrada is taken this concept and he is forming a new generation of composers that are taking this search for a cultural autonomy and a truly national aesthetic part of their own quest. He is an active member of the National University of Mexico (UNAM) and he is part of the institute for aesthetic research and the National School of Music.

Britten ghosts

Certainly, Benjamin Britten is one of the most eminent and influential figures in Twentieth century Music. He is one of the best English composers and perhaps, the one that truly translate the English language into music. His relationship with many of the most important poets and authors take him to create music that in a way alters and have a serious engagement with the literature text which is based on. This level of relationship with literature and music is one of Britten’s more particular and amazing characteristics. His close relationship with literature put Britten’s music into two realms, the music and the literature one. 

In 1961, Britten spent most of the year writing the War Requiem, which was finally performed at the end of May in 1961 and become one of Britten’s more acclaimed works. The Requiem is conceived in three planes: a setting of the Latin Requiem Mass for soprano, chorus and orchestra, another setting for male soloists and a chamber orchestra based on poems by Wilfred Owen, a war poet of WWI, and a third setting that evokes the innocence unstained by war, a separate choir of boys voices.

Britten’s Requiem is not meant to be taken as a piece of pro-British-war glorification. It is Britten most clearly statement of his pacifism and his anti-war convictions. The piece is a public and artistic denunciation of all the horrors of war. It is also truly significant that Britten intention with the requiem is to evoke reconciliation between the conflict nations after the WWII. He wrote the piece for three specific soloists- a German baritone (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), a Russian soprano (Galina Vishnevskaya) and a British tenor (Peter Pears). This demonstrated his conviction with peace and it symbolized the importance of forgiveness and unity.

The text that Britten used to combine them with the Latin traditional mass for the death text was Wilfred Owen’s poetry. He was a World War I foot soldier who was killed in France one week before the Armistice. His poetry is strange, realistic and obscure, it is a clearly reflection of a man struggling with guilty and conflictive feelings. His topics denounced the life in the trenches and the horrors of poison gas. During his time Owen’s poetry help to change public perception of the war and it changes the literary conception of patriotic verses. Owen poetry is full of truthful, his poetry doesn’t feel conciliatory but it is certainly a warning for all generation.

Britten orchestration for the Requiem enhances the importance of Owen text and it represents and communicates the message. The Performers are divided into three distinct planes and are physically to create the atmosphere of distant. . The soloists who sing Owen poetry unify the piece with the mass of the death tradition and war poetry. The use of a tritone between C and F# also works as  a unify motif during all the piece. The boys choir and the organ gives the sensation of inhuman sounds almost like a distant eco, perhaps emulating how does the war sounds.

Britten Requiem is one of his finest examples on how he manage to fusses literature and music and make it a one being. His ghosts hover around in the form of a neurotic governess, an elder writer obsessed with a young boy, a sailor mad by guilt and the spirit of a crazy French prodigy. All that it remains is to simply listen.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
-- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

Wilfred Owen.

The Doomed Generation

How can we imagine all of the horror that the WWII left behind. The level of physical destruction that the war shows was extensive, the world and its inhabitants seemed literally to have been torn to pieces. Music after war suffer perhaps, it biggest change in its aesthetics. The general statement was to rebuild a new musical world out of the ashes and horror of WWII. The task was taken by young composers whose own experience with the war made this change possible.
It seems that this generation of post-war composers were at the same time, living the duality of have all the freedom to make musical discoveries but at the same time, the darkness mood that the war left was dangerously faced them with the crude reality of finding “nothing”.
The wartime devastation and the beginning of the atomic age after the 1945 treaties exacerbated the pessimistic and subdued tone. The new tendency in arts was looking for a total distrust with the past. The physical and cultural ruin that the war caused could be only reconstructed with a radical break and make possible a new start.
Composers like Messiaen, Stockhausen and Xenaquis was leading these radical changes in post-war aesthetics. Their own experience with war makes them fearless and their stylistic search reach large scales. The new aesthetics were leaving completely behind the old classical traditions. New laws were being writing. Music started to become more violent, direct and crude. New tools and stylistics recourses was being used to change for completely music structures. Fierce rhythms, total serialism, indeterminism, futurism, silence as a unitary musical motif, complexity, density, all of this new musical forms were reflecting the darkness of the post-war mood but at the same time was opening the gates to a new whole world of musical experimentation.
It was in these extraordinary circumstances that one of the most emblematic compositions of the war times took place. During 1940, Messiaen was captured by the German army and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp. Since he was with three other professional musicians, a violinist, a cellist and a clarinetist, he decides to use this peculiar ensemble to create his, Quatuor pur la fin du Temps . The quartet was premiered in Stalag VIII-A in Gorlitz, Germany, outdoors in the rain on January 15 of 1941 with an audience of about four hundred fellow prisoners of was and prison guards. Although the piece according to some scholars could remain peripheral by comparison to other Messiaen’s works like the Turangalila Symphony, its major importance remains on the historical context that give birth to it and in its special significance for the composers that belong to the war generation.
The piece is inspired by a text from the Book of Revelation (Rev 10:1-2, 5-7, King James Version). The piece is divided in eight movements and each of them has a special quotation made by Messiaen. The piece reflects Messian stylistic mélange and it is build base in his own ideas in theory and harmony. The first harmonies in the piece certainly have a crystal quality and although it has some frenetic moments in general the mood in the piece remains very reflexive and obscure. It is a perfect representation of what must have seemed like the end of times.

Shostakovich and the infinite sadness....

Knock, knock, who’s there? The NKVD…  

Shostakovich was one of many Russian composers that, during Staling times, suffer of censorship and constant fear of being arrest, exile of worse. His work was labeled of being intentionally discordant, muddled or extremely formalism for the state aesthetics. This abuse made Shostakovich’s life a living hell for many years.

During these times many of Shostakovich’s friends, patrons and family members, suddenly disappeared, drowned into the maelstrom of Stalinist repression. It is amazing how Shostakovich managed to keep, in a way, his sanity and at the same time, write some of the most remarkable music.

Shostakovich, according to many scholars and biographers, was an obsessive man. Full of strange habits, tics and grimaces. He was, certainly, very vulnerable and receptive, an important feature of his genius. It is unimaginable how a man like him could survive all the repression and horror of Stalin’s era. His life, like most of his compositions, were full of antagonism, at the beginning of his musical career, Shostakovich make his debut as a state composer, but, later in his life, he developed a love-hate relationship with the state.

Shostakovich composition style has two different directions, the extreme neo-classical and the heroic. The Cello Sonata in D minor for cello and piano Op. 40, was writen in a particular difficult time in Shostakovich’s life, He was in a period of emotional turmoil. This sonata is formed by four movements. The piece is full of the duality that a composer like Shostakovich was suffering by being trapped in a totalitarian system. As part of his latest works, this piece is full of statements more responsible and profound in its nature. The humanism and tragic lyricism of the sonata struggle with the concept that the artist cannot survive by retreating into a private creative world; he must be part of the socio-political problems, however bitter the experience were.

His face reveals a troubled man, struggling with his interests and his duty as an artist, his music, undoubtedly, reveals this concerns. In his cello Sonata, the first movement begins with accompanying and flowing piano arpeggios. As the musical tension arrives we can hear the themes, unusual and full of shifts but, tonal. Both instruments imitate each other during the piece, and, from the beginning we start to hear the development of a strange and insidious rhythmic motif, penetrating to our spine and through the flowing textures of the themes. Then is there, tataTA, tataTA, it starts in the piano like a whisper, almost an eco and then, is finally taken by the cello. First in pizzicatos and then, take it to its full sonority, it almost sound like someone knocking at the door, using the rhythm ostinato as a peculiar password. Knock, knock, who’s there…..?

How to kill a snake...¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

If you want to kill a snake, you have to do it a proper way, first you have to get a real mayombero (spiritual leader and medicine man) or become one yourself, god luck to find a place where they teach how to be one. After cover this small requirement you’re ready to lead the ritual and while you sing vigorously Mayombe-bombe-mayombe! Offer in sacrifice a snake to Babalu Aye in order to heal somebody or, if it is the case, spread some pestilence.

The other way, and probably the smarter, will be just listening to Revuelta’s Sensemaya. Silvestre Revueltas was Mexican composer born in 1899 in the North part of Mexico. Since he was a little kid he began his studies in Violin and composition in Mexico City. During the second decade of the twenty-century he moved to Texas USA to pursue studies in violin and composition. During his years in the United States he collaborated with Carlos Chavez and both of them were dedicated to perform recitals of modern music across the United States. Around 1937 he went to Spain with a group of leftist artist and after spent some time in Europe studying and conducting he returned to Mexico and devoted him to composition.

Revueltas was part of a family of renowned artist which include painters and highly regarded writers. As happens to many brilliant artists, Revueltas spent most of his life in poverty and earning very little. By the end of his life, just when he was in the height of his musical career he died as consequence of a poor life and tormented by social and political issues of his time all of this merged with alcoholism and exhaustion.

Nicolas Guillen was a Cuban poet dedicated to the creation of literature based on his Afro-Caribbean heritage merged with the traditional strophic structure of the Spanish poetry. With his works he renovated completely the Latin-American poetry. In his poems we can find a deep popular rooting full of the warmth feeling and melancholic rhythms of Latin-America. Sensemaya is one of Guillen’s examples of Poetic tributes based on actual Afro-Caribbean chants.

The principal theme of the piece has an onomatopoeic connection with the principal motive of the poem, Mayombe-bombe-mayombe. The music is purely based on the poem own rhythm and the musical sections keep an underlying relation with Guillen’s text. Revuelta’s work keeps a close relation with the tendencies who were rising at that time in the musical scene. The twenty-century compositional techniques had their genesis the de-Europeanization of arts who starts with Debussy’s interesting in Oriental music and continued by the following generations until Revueltas himself. The ostinatos used by him in Sensemaya are naturally risen out from the folk music of Mexico, who at the same time is a fusion between Spanish, Indian and African components.

The piece opens with a tuba melody that evokes the start of the ritual followed by the dominant ostinato of the piece, a motivic rhythm based on the beginning of Guillen’s Poem Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!. The colors in the piece and the static elements that applied to Afro-Cuban or Afro-Caribbean influences and the final crescendo rages masterfully throughout the piece and leave us at the end with the magical sensation that the ritual is complete and magic is just about to start.

Canto para matar una culebra

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

La culebra tiene los ojos de vidrio

la culebra viene y se enreda en un palo

Con sus ojos de vidrio, en un palo

Con sus ojos do vidrio

La culebra camina sin patas

La culebra se esconde en la yerba

Caminando se esconde en la yerba

Caminando sin patas

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!