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.