{"id":11037,"date":"2020-06-12T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-12T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cervantes.es\/londres\/?p=11037"},"modified":"2020-10-02T09:58:08","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T09:58:08","slug":"getting-to-know-ibero-american-classic-music-5-pieces-to-start-you-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cervantes.es\/londres\/2020\/06\/12\/getting-to-know-ibero-american-classic-music-5-pieces-to-start-you-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting to Know Ibero-American Classical Music: 5 Pieces to Start You Off"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Pianist, Latin Classical music expert and\u00a0Artistic\u00a0Director of the Iberian & Latin American Music Society (ILAMS<\/a>), Helen Glaisher-Hern\u00e1ndez,\u00a0recommends\u00a0five pieces of Ibero-American classical\u00a0music to our readers\u00a0by way of introduction to this exuberant repertoire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00abI would highlight the following pieces of 20th-century repertoire which, for me, stand out for their ingenuity and originality,\u00bb says Glaisher-Hern\u00e1ndez. The following list includes works that \u00abconjure up imaginary musical landscapes, capable of opening doors into different, new dimensions through their ability to articulate otherworldly sounds and textures. It\u2019s through pieces like these that we can observe Spanish and Latin American composers making genuinely original contributions to classical music that go beyond the mere \u2018echoing\u2019 of conventional European trends, as the Cuban writer, Roberto Retamar, famously put it,\u00bb adds Artistic Director of ILAMS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Xochipilli: An Imagined Aztec Music <\/em>(1940)<\/strong><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    \tCarlos Ch\u00e1vez (Mexico)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    \tCarlos Ch\u00e1vez was known as one of the \u2018Big Three\u2019 Latin American composers of the early-to-mid 20th<\/sup> century, along with the Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and the Argentine composer, Alberto Ginastera. The enormity of Ch\u00e1vez\u2019 musical imagination and his revolutionary achievements influenced many subsequent generations of composers and changed the course of classical music-making throughout the Americas and beyond. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \tA child of the Mexican Revolution, Ch\u00e1vez became a leading feature of the so-called \u2018Mexican Renaissance\u2019 \u2013 a flowering of socialist writing, mural painting and architecture that took place in the wake of the Revolution \u2013 alongside other intellectuals and artistic figures such as Diego Rivera and Jos\u00e9 Clemente Orozco. A central focus of this movement was a desire to bring the masses into the fold of the arts, in part by celebrating the indigenous oppressed, and Ch\u00e1vez\u2019 music is replete with references to native Mexican music and culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \tIn this vein, Ch\u00e1vez is best known for his Symphony No.<\/em> 2<\/em> \u2018Sinfon\u00eda india\u2019<\/em>, but for me it is the much more radical Xochipilli<\/em> which most vividly invokes the Mexican Indian, in the form of the eponymous Aztec god of flowers, music and dance. Composed in 1940 for winds and percussion, the work was commissioned by Rockefeller for a MoMA exhibition in New York titled Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art<\/em>. Ch\u00e1vez designed the piece so as to didactically showcase the Aztec instruments he was actively researching, but in doing so he also produced a radical and compelling piece of art, and a tour de force for any percussion section, requiring all sorts of weird and wonderful indigenous Mexican instruments. I programmed this piece at the Southbank Centre in 2012 as part of a \u2018Revolutionary Concert\u2019 celebrating the collective Latin American bicentenaries of independence, and I remember spending an inordinate amount of time trying to track down \u2018hawksbells\u2019, amongst other things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \tAnyone listening to this piece who has ever visited Mexico\u2019s pyramids and archaeological sites (and even those who haven\u2019t) will find themselves plunged into the pre-Hispanic world in a very compelling way. A work of tremendous power, to hear it performed live feels like coming face to face with the might of the entire Aztec empire \u2013 especially as the piece gradually moves towards the formidable climax of its final movement. Ch\u00e1vez appears to achieve the impossible: to transport us back in time to pre-Columbian Mexico and resurrect the Aztec himself. If you can\u2019t hear this music in concert, make sure you have the volume on your stereo speakers at home cranked up to the maximum!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \tA wonderfully off-the-wall, funky and fun piece, Xochipilli<\/em> belies so much of Chavez\u2019 other characteristically astringent music, which is well-known for being difficult to listen to. In contrast, I celebrate this work as an example of how, for those with less adventurous tastes at least, atonal and polytonal music can be just as beautiful and exciting as any other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    For listening, I recommend the version by Mexico\u2019s Tambuco Percussion Ensemble<\/a> performing with La Camerata on the 1994 album, \u2018Carlos Ch\u00e1vez\u2019. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    2. Motet em r\u00e9 menor \u2018Beba Coca-Cola\u2019 (1967)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \tGilberto Mendes (Brazil)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    \tThis is another piece I programmed for my \u2018Revolutionary Concert\u2019 at the Southbank Centre in 2012. Out of a later period of left-wing politics, from 60s Brazil, emerged a work that speaks to Latin American anxieties over the rising dominance of American economic imperialism, offering a caustic musical indictment of the \u2018contamination\u2019 of Brazilian society by the unchecked importation of American cultural values. The Motet in D Minor<\/em>, also known by the sobriquet \u2018Beba Coca-Cola\u2019 (\u2018Drink Coca-Cola\u2019)<\/em>, is a work for mixed choir by the Brazilian composer Gilberto Mendes, based on the homonymous 1958 text by the Brazilian poet D\u00e9cio Pignatari. And it is, in my opinion, nothing less than a Postmodern masterpiece. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \tWriting in the verbivocovisual<\/em> \u2018Concrete Poetry\u2019 tradition, Pignatari plays on the marketing jingle of the multinational soft drinks company \u2013 Coca-Cola being one of the most recognisable symbols of capitalism worldwide, and advertising being part of capitalism\u2019s essential, nefarious machinery \u2013 in order to attack the \u2018system\u2019 from within in true Postmodern fashion (instead of from the outside). The slogan-subject, \u2018Beba Coca-Cola\u2019, is turned in on itself in an act of metaphorical autosarcophagy that evokes Karl Marx\u2019s assertion that \u2018capitalism tends to destroy its [own] two sources of wealth: nature and human beings\u2019. In both the poem and the musical work, the syllables of this sound bite are perpetually scrambled and re-scrambled in a musical gesture of anti-propaganda, the words ingeniously twisted in all directions to proffer various sorts of mischievous and derogatory semantics. \u2018Babe cola\u2019, for example (in Portuguese) alludes to the \u2018drooling\u2019 of coke, whilst \u2018caco\u2019 implies the imbibing of broken glass. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \tThis babble provides an inexorable ostinato chant throughout the piece; a parody of the relentless subliminal message of the sales pitch. (It reminds me, more specifically, of a more recent Christmastime UK Coca-Cola ad \u2013 you know: the one where they sing \u2018Holidays are coming\u2026 Holidays are coming\u2026\u2019). In counterpoint with this \u2018mantra\u2019, the composer scores a succession of onomatopoeic tricks, employing extended techniques such as spoken vocal lines, glissandos and breathy effects to mimic sounds such as the opening of the bottle and the escaping gas, the intoxicating effect of the bubbles. Use of microtonality incites a feeling of nausea, whilst menacing, almost gothic, dissonant intervals threaten the approach of very real malady. Eventually this bilious prattle finds relief in the form of a glorious belch by a male soloist. (I should add that this is by no means easy to pull off in the context of a live performance, as I found out with my own singers. I would strongly recommend that any choral directors attempting this piece have a burp machine on standby!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \tThe piece resumes only to descend into anxious cacophony, as the chant builds into an aggressive protest. If by now the listener hasn\u2019t already got the message, the ending punch line makes the moral of the piece crystal clear, with a final re-fashioning of the slogan into a new, unequivocal word: \u2018cloaca\u2019 (\u2018sewer\u2019, or \u2018cesspool\u2019). The deconstruction of the jingle is thus complete; capitalism is exposed as poisonous filth. Through ample use of the delights of the Postmodern toolkit (satire, sarcasm, repetition, intertextuality and self-consciousness), Mendes achieves a persuasive repudiation of the act of unbridled consumption itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \tThe response of Coca-Cola to the premiering of this piece provides a perfect coda to the story of its composition. In lieu of the reprisals Mendes had anticipated, Coca-Cola instead sent one of their representatives to deliver a box of soft drinks to him in person, by way of thanks for \u2018advertising\u2019 the brand. \u2018Speak good or bad, but talk about me,\u2019 was the representative\u2019s rationale. It brings to mind an aphorism often attributed to Lenin: \u2018The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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