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…..?