alta voz presentation - felipe lara · web viewgrossman also introduced felipe lara to the group...

Marc Gidal

January 6, 2006

Listening for Latin America in Álta Voz:

A Latin American Composers Consortium in the U.S.

Álta voz (“loud speaker, loud voice”) is a consortium of five art-music composers

– Jorge Villavicencio Grossman, Pedro Malpica, Mauricio Pauly, José Luis Hurtado, and

Felipe Lara – from Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, and Mexico. Having become friends in

Boston while earning graduate degrees in composition, they decided to co-produce

concerts of their music and thereafter formed the organization with an advisory board

consisting of their composition teachers and a few more established Latin American

composers in the U.S.: Mario Davidovsky, John McDonald, Theodore Antoniou, Lukas

Foss, Tania León, and Carlos Sánchez Gutiérrez. Since 2003, Álta Voz has produced

concerts in Massachusetts and New York, which have included compositions of other

Latin Americans living in the U.S. such as Ricardo Romaneiro and Ricardo Zohn-

Muldoon. They see themselves as promoting cultural exchange throughout the Americas

through contemporary concert music, or in their words, “fine art with a Latin American

flavor, new music with purpose.”1

1 Concert program, Alta Voz Concierto V, The Juilliard School, New York, April, 12, 2005. I interviewed in person, by phone, or by email each of the composers, one advisor/teacher (Mario Davidovsky), and one advisor/teacher/performer (John McDonald), as well as conducted one feedback interview with two composers (Lara and Hurtado) in which we watched and discussed a video-recorded concert. Unless otherwise cited, all primary data come from these interviews and follow-up email correspondences: Lara (in person, 18 Feb 2005), Hurtado (in person, 29 March 2005), Hurtado and Lara (in person, 10 Oct 2005), McDonald (in person, 1 Nov 2005), Grossman (telephone, 1 Dec 2005), Pauly (email, 2 Dec 2005 and 5 Jan 2006), Davidovsky (telephone, 6 Dec 2005), and Malpica (telephone, 9 Dec 2005).

Marc Gidal Álta Voz, page 1

The members variously refer to Álta Voz as a group of Latin American

composers, composers of Latin American music, and composers of new music, labels

that raise larger questions about music, identity, and meaning: What do they mean by

“Latin American”? Why do they call the consortium “Latin American” and do they all

consider themselves to be Latin American? Is the music they compose Latin American,

and, if so, how and according to whom? How is this label related to their experiences

outside and inside the U.S.?

Latin American composers in the U.S.

It is difficult to pinpoint the earliest performances of Latin American art music in

the U.S., partially due to the nebulousness of the term “Latin American.” Louis Moreau

Gottschalk (1829-1869) was likely the first prominent U.S. composer to draw on Latin

American material and perform it throughout the Americas and Europe.2 Whether or not

Gottschalk should be considered culturally Latin American because he grew up in New

Orleans – a city bursting with Caribbean, Mexican, French, and English culture,

purchased from France twenty-six years before his birth – Gottschalk’s international life-

history and intercultural oeuvre illustrate how ambiguities of borders and identities

complicate any definition of “Latin American” in the U.S. context with regard to art-

music composers.3

Following the new industrial strength of the U.S. in the global economy at the

turn of the twentieth century and the subsequent growth of art-music institutions, Latin

2 Gilbert Chase, A guide to the music of Latin America, 2d , rev. and enl. ed., (Washington,: Pan American Union. Division of Music and Visual Arts; Library of Congress, [1945] 1962), 349; Aurelio de la Vega, "Latin American Composers in the United States," Latin American Music Review 1, no. 2 (1980): 163.3 Defining nineteenth-century New Orleans as culturally Anglo-, Creole-, and African-American rather than Latin American has also marginalized Latin American influences in jazz historiography. Chris Washburne, "The Clave of Jazz: A Caribbean Contribution to the Rhythmic Foundation of an African-American Music," Black Music Research Journal 17, no. 1 (1997).


American composers increasingly traveled to the U.S. in addition to Europe.4 The

visibility of Latin American art-music in the U.S. increased after World War I, when

composer collectives, arts organizations, and government agencies began promoting

dialogue within the Americas through the arts. Although the U.S. government’s policies

toward Latin America have been overwhelmingly hostile and self-serving,5 it did promote

cultural exchange through the Pan-American Union, which established a Music Division

in 1938 due to Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy (1933-4). The Music Division

premiered hundreds of Latin American works at its music festivals held in Washington

D.C. Due to the efforts of Charles Seeger, Gilbert Chase, Colombian conductor

Guillermo Espinosa, and Argentinean musician Efraín Paesky, the Division published

pamphlets on Latin American “folk music,” catalogues and (later) scores by Latin

American composers, and a Spanish-language volume describing music in the U.S. to

Latin American audiences.6 These publications are arguably the first scholarly treatments

of Latin American art music in the U.S., though the volumes on art-music are mostly

bibliographic.7

Foreign-born composers have generally led efforts to promote in the U.S. the art

music by Latin Americans. In 1928, a decade before the Music Division’s inception, the

composers Chávez, Verèse, Cowell, Ruggles, and Whithorne formed the Pan American

Association of Composers with the objective of creating “music of the Western

4 de la Vega: 163.5 Carlos Oliva Campos, "The United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean: From Panamericanism to Neopanamericanism," in Neoliberalism and neopanamericanism : the view from Latin America, ed. Gary Prevost and Carlos Oliva (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). Also see other articles in this volume.6 This 637-page volume was the fifth volume of the Music Division’s annual journal, Boletín latinoamericano de música (Oct. 1941), edited by Francisco Curt Lange and published in Montevideo. Chase, 28, 350.7 Ibid., 350; de la Vega: 173-4; John Haskins, "Panamericanism in Music," Notes 15, no. 1 (1957); Carol J. Oja, Making music modern : New York in the 1920s, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 279.


Hemisphere.”8 The Chilean-American composer/scholar Juan Orrego-Salas established

the Latin American Music Center of Indian University in 1961.9 Organizations

established since the 1980s that present Latin American art music include Cuban-

American composer Tania León’s Sonidos de las Américas (part of the American

Composers Orchestra), Uruguayan-American composer/conductor Gisele Ben-Dor’s

Ben-Dor Music Discovery Project, and James Brooks-Bruzzese’s Symphony of the

Americas.10 Álta Voz, in its short- and long-term aspirations, easily fits in this historical

trend of composer-led organizations in the U.S. that promote cultural exchange in the

Americas through art music.

As the presence of Latin American art music in the U.S. grew, so did its study

among historical musicologists in the U.S., though not extensively. Aside from the Pan-

American Union’s publications, American musicologists have largely left the subject to

Robert Stevenson, Gilbert Chase, and a few immigrant composer/scholar/advocates –

Gerard Béhague, Aurelio de la Vega, and Oreggo-Salas – who have expressed outrage at

how long it has taken for comprehensive studies to be undertaken in English.11 Case in

point, a history of Latin American composers in the U.S. was not published until 1980,

written by Vega in Béhague’s journal; likewise, Béhague’s still unsurpassed history of art

music in Latin America had only arrived a year earlier.12

8 Oja, 194; Robert L. Parker, "Copland and Chavez: Brothers-in-Arms," American Music 5, no. 4 (1987); Deane L. Root, "The Pan American Association of Composers (1928-1934)," Anuario Interamericano de Investigacion Musical 8 (1972). 9 Latin American Music Center website, http://www.music.indiana.edu/som/lamc/ [21 Dec 2005]10 Sonidos de las Américas website, http://www.americancomposers.org/sonidos.htm [21 Dec 2005]; Ben-Dor Music Discovery Project website, http://www.tangofestival.net/bendor.htm [21 Dec 2005]; Symphony of the Americas website, http://www.symphonyoftheamericas.org [25 Dec 2005].11 Aurelio de la Vega, "Music in Latin America: An Introduction," The Hispanic American Historical Review 60, no. 4 (1980); Antoni Piza, "Book Review: Latin American Classical Composers: A Biographical Dictionary," Notes 51 2nd Ser., no. 1 (1997).12 Gerard Béhague, Music in Latin America, an introduction, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979); de la Vega, "Latin American Composers in the United States." Chase’s 1945/1962 volume is an annotated bibliography rather than a history.


American ethnomusicology generally ignores Western art music, since it was

established largely in response to historical musicologists who neglected to study music

traditions other than European art music.13 This might explain why nearly sixty years

after early studies of Latin American folk, religious, and popular music by seminal

American ethnomusicologists such as Richard Waterman and Alan Merriam,14 we can

find the following statement at the end of a five-page chapter titled “Art Music” in the

South America volume of the recently minted, ten-volume Garland Encyclopedia of

World Music: “An ethnomusicological study of the art music of South America, Mexico,

Central America, and the Caribbean (the entirety of so-called Latin America), however,

has not been attempted.”15

The composers of Álta Voz

The current director, Jorge Villavicencio Grossman, now an assistant professor of

music composition/theory at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was born in Lima, Peru to

a Peruvian scientist and a Brazilian mother. Due to Peru’s instability in the late 1980s,

his family migrated when he was fifteen to São Paulo, Brazil, the home of his mother’s

family. After studying violin in Lima as a child and in a São Paulo conservatory (B.A.,

Faculdade Santa Marcelina), Grossman moved to Miami to study composition (M.A.

composition, Florida International University) and then Boston (DMA composition,

Boston University).

13 Notable exceptions include Henry Kingsbury, Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Bruno Nettl, Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).14 Alan Merriam, "Songs of the Afro-Bahian Cults: an Ethnomusicological Analysis" (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1951); Richard A. Waterman, "'Hot' Rhythm in Negro Music," JAMS 1, no. 1 (1948).15 Dale A. Olsen and Daniel E. Sheehy, "Art Music," in South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Garland encyclopedia of world music; v. 2, ed. Dale A. Olsen and Daniel E. Sheehy (New York: Garland Pub., 1998), 116.


At Boston University, Grossman met Pedro Malpica, another Peruvian

composition student who had come to Boston having studied guitar in Lima

(Conservatorio de Lima), and guitar, composition, and music education in Puerto Rico

(B.A., M.A., music education, Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico). Malpica was

shocked to find another Peruvian composer at B.U., because of their minimal numbers in

the U.S. After three years at B.U., Malpica moved to New York to study composition for

a year at The Juilliard School (Graduate Diploma) and then composition and theory at the

Graduate Center at City University of New York (Ph.D. student, composition). Both

Grossman and Malpica recently visited Peru to participate in festivals of new music and

lecture at the conservatories, experiences that were personally gratifying experiences for

both, yet added to their doubt about the economic feasibility of resettling in Peru.

The following year a Costa Rican composer, Mauricio Pauly, joined the two

Peruvians at B.U. Previously a professional pop and jazz bassist with a background in

vocal performance and computer science (Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica), Pauly

became interested in composition when studying music in Miami (B.A., composition and

jazz bass, University of Miami). Finding the art-music tastes in the U.S. too

conservative, he followed his girlfriend to Hungary and composed independently after

completing his master’s degree in composition at B.U. In addition to pursuing

composing and a renewed interest in pop-music production, Pauly currently studies

sonology in Amsterdam, and intends to incorporate the three fields.

The three students organized a concert in 2003 of their music at B.U. and decided

to invite other local composition students from Latin American to participate. They

invited José Luis Hurtado and Felipe Lara to join their effort, with whom they had


become friends through Grossman. During a summer Composers Conference at

Wellesley College, Grossman had met Hurtado, a Mexican composer who was to begin

his doctoral studies in composition at Harvard. Hailing from several generations of

professional Mexican musicians based in Morelia, Michoacán, Hurtado was born in the

small town of Cd. Valles, where his parents teach high school. Having learned to play

piano from the only teacher in town, after high school he moved to his father’s home city

of Morelia to attend its conservatory (B.A., piano and composition, Conservatorio de las

Rosas). During further composition studies in Jalapa (M.A., composition, Universidad

Veracruzana), Hurtado met Mario Davidovsky, a visiting composer, who encouraged him

to apply to Harvard. Currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard, Hurtado recently

organized a small festival of new music at his old conservatory in Morelia, presenting

works by Malpica and himself as well as Schoenberg, Carter, Berio, and Lutoslawski.

Grossman also introduced Felipe Lara to the group of friends. Originally a samba

and jazz guitarist from São Paulo, Brazil, Lara moved to Boston (B.A., Composition and

Film Scoring, Berklee College of Music), after studying jazz guitar briefly in London.

Becoming seriously interested in art music and composition while in Boston, Lara

continued to study composition at the New England Conservatory, thereafter at Tufts

University (M.A., composition), and currently at New York University where he will

study with Davidovsky.

Boston

Even though most of the Álta Voz composers have moved around the Americas

and Europe, they tend to single out Boston – more than Miami and São Paulo – as their

first exposure to people, culture, ideas, music, and composers from around the world.


Some noticed that their influences and approaches to composition changed in Boston,

reflecting their new experiences and new teachers. Although Lara studied music in São

Paulo and London, he believes that the diverse student body and musical interests at

Berklee as well as Boston’s art-music culture – and New York thereafter – truly sparked

his interest in composing art music. Boston’s international diversity for Grossman was a

“life changing experience” that he feels indirectly affected his music. He believes that as

the Álta Voz composers remain in the U.S. and are affected by their new surroundings

and teachers, their composition styles will sound less similar to each other, perhaps less

Latin American. He noted a recent review of their concert that described Hurtado’s

music as “North-Atlantic.”16 “That’s what’s happening. We get influenced from

everywhere and I’m sure that José Luis’s style will change. I have no doubt about that.”

Since arriving in the U.S. three years ago, Hurtado in particular consciously tried

to “stretch,” as he says, the compositional techniques he learned from more conservative

teachers in Mexico, one of whom coincidently studied composition at Harvard. Of all the

Álta Voz composers, Hurtado describes his approach in the most formal terms with the

least personal symbolism. This partially reflects his strict education in Mexico, where

every aspect of a composition was expected to be technically justified: “Every note,

attack, rhythm, tempo. So now I’m trying to do the same thing, but looser.” Referring to

his piano trio “De relieve doble” (2005), he continued, “This is the first piece that I tried

to do that. So maybe that’s why it sounds so good.” Hurtado has been recently

developing a new technical approach that uses timbre in a more “personal way” than that

he used while studying with Davidovsky during his first two years at Harvard.

16 David Cleary, Review of Concert: altaVoz: Concierto VI [website] (New Music Connoisseur, [cited 21 Dec 2005]); available from http://www.newmusicon.org/reviews2005/altavoz.htm.


I’m still working on [personal timbre]. But, it’s related mostly with pitch… I had this collection of notes and I had this transformation of same collection of notes. So two collections of notes that behave like different pieces, but they were put together based on one piece. Each collection of notes has an opposite dynamic. So one is always piano, or pianissimo, and the other is always forte. You hear an attack – pow! – and then something in the background. That’s the other piece, let’s say. So there are two pieces at the same time. So if I take one away, the other piece works. Or at least that’s what I tried to do [laughs]… It’s not about instrumentation. It’s just about attack and dynamic, and collection of notes… And that is also related with timbre. For example all the pizzicati are always forte. I don’t have any piano pizzicati.

Hurtado feels that his approach has changed enough since leaving Mexico, that “If I

played this to my composition teacher in Mexico, he wouldn’t like it.” Though rather

than interpreting his new approach as breaking old rules of composition, Hurtado

understands the changes in his music as indicative of his new experiences:

And music I see as a reflection of your self. So if you’re changing in the good sense of the word, then your music is changing… It’s just related to experience. It’s just different. You see new things, hear new things. You learn there are other composers, other kinds of performers, different people. It’s not about rules. It’s just about experience. It’s about adding things.

Though immersed in a music culture of international diversity and heterogeneity,

which all the composers described positively in terms of personal growth, each reveled in

the company of other Latin Americans. Malpica explained this phenomenon:

There were people from all over the world, but at the same time those people were very willing to socialize. We were all very open to try to be friends and it was really nice. So we had a very nice group there with people from every part. But of course, at some point, there were two Taiwanese girls who would go off and start to talk about their own things. And people from [the U.S.] that would be talking about specific things, cultural things, that are from here. In the same way I think it was a natural reaction for us to come together.

Although he preferred Juilliard as a composer and CUNY as an academic, he still

considers his experience in multicultural Boston as inspirational.


Homelands

Although Álta Voz brands itself as “Latin American,” most of the composers have

strong personal connections with their countries of birth and hope to participate in the

music scenes there, whether or not they return permanently. For Hurtado, who considers

himself more Mexican than Latin American, participating in Álta Voz is part of his sense

of national pride and personal obligation to Mexico:

To be in this group is to be linked to my country, being in another country.… reminds me that I have a role in the cultural life of my country, not in the cultural life in this country…. I think that’s the first thing and the most important thing. Besides giving concerts, besides having a weekly beer… It is not just that I feel more comfortable speaking Spanish. It’s that it reminds me of something, my roots, my origins. That’s the biggest difference.

Malpica identifies as Peruvian and South American far more than Latin

American, an identity he associates more with Puerto Rico than Peru having experienced

culture shock when moving there. Malpica’s main goal has always been to teach music

in Peru. Now he is uncertain whether he will be able to maintain a career as a cutting-

edge composer living in Peru since a professor’s salary will not support frequent travel to

the centers of new-music; he fears that his knowledge and approaches will be obsolete

within a decade of living in Peru.17 Grossman, inspired by his recent professional trip to

Peru, his first return visit to the country after leaving seventeen years ago, now wants to

return more often in order to help the small new-music scene; however, he intends to

settle in the U.S., not Peru.

Less adamantly Peruvian or South American than Malpica, perhaps due to his

dual Peruvian and Brazilian backgrounds, Grossman defends the identity of Latin

American as inclusive of all cultures of Hispano-Iberian origin. Yet, once in Boston,

17 Davidovsky, on the other hand, believes that the Internet has allowed composers in Latin America to be more aware of innovations than he living in New York.


Grossman began to drawn inspiration for his compositions from Peru, to which he had

not retuned in seventeen years: “Probably because I was thinking of traveling back to

Peru. I started thinking it had been such a long time since I left, that I really need to go

back. So my Peruvian identity probably started to come up.”

The composers often describe Pauly as the “most international,” partly because he

expresses the least personal connection with Costa Rica. Pauly did not articulate to me a

personal obligation to the music culture of Costa Rica, whereas Lara, who annually

participates in Brazilian music festivals, does share the group’s vision of presenting

concerts throughout the Americas as a form of cross-cultural dialogue.

“Latin American”

Álta Voz uses the label “Latin American” for three primary reasons: because of

their common Spanish language and Hispanic cultural backgrounds; some wish to

promote intercultural dialogue, exchange, and education; and “Latin American”

distinguishes the group from myriad composer collectives. They became friends in

Boston primarily because of their affinity as composers and their common language in a

predominantly English-speaking city and art-music culture. They also feel they share a

common cultural background, having grown up in Latin American countries. Many

commented that they could understand each other’s jokes, cultural references, knowledge

of Spanish literature, and interests other than composing (such as soccer), as well as

professional struggles common to all composers. Despite these commonalities, they have

many differences. In addition to the various Spanish dialects and Portuguese they speak


and their diverse countries of origin, Grossman and Lara categorized the group members

primarily based on musical backgrounds.18

Álta Voz also relates the Latin American label to its ambitions to promote trans-

national educational. Hurtado, Lara, and Grossman envision involving the group in

concerts and educational projects that could help cultural dialogue among countries in all

the Americas. They call this project, “Linking the Americas through the Arts,” which

Hurtado’s festival of new-music in Mexico was connected. Hurtado also spoke of the

intercultural collaboration of Latin American composers and non-Latin American

musicians in their Juilliard concert as part of this greater effort: “A group of Latin

American composers working with a group of American performers. That’s a bridge

already. We are building a bridge. And they are very excited to participate in this

project.”

A third factor in their branding concerns marketing the group as different – a

decision not without debate among the composers. Unlike most composer collectives,

they believe that theirs is the first and only collective of Latin American composers of

new music in the U.S. Because of this niche, Grossman hopes to develop the group into a

national association of Latin American composers in the U.S. Pauly, on the other hand,

objects to composers and critics who emphasize foreign-ness above all else: “There is a

tendency in some artists to believe that their supposedly exotic origin is an asset, and that

as such they should exploit it openly. I am of the opinion that this is bad taste. It seems,

though, that this is what many music reviewers, in absence of real knowledge, like to

cling to.” There are also competing visions for the group’s inclusiveness of composers 18 Grossman believes that a background as art-music performer impacts a composer’s outlook: “I would say that someone who is considering themselves as a performer is thinking more about the performer when writing.” Aside from these differences, Grossman points to the influences of their various teachers and then individual’s “aesthetic orientation.”


other than Latin Americans or U.S. Latinos. Hurtado, Lara, and Pauly want the group to

include any composer, and, for Lara, especially those with Latin American connections.

While Grossman ethically agrees with inclusiveness, he feels that it would sacrifice the

only distinctiveness the collective has and thus their sole promotional niche.

The Álta Voz composers believe that marketing the group as Latin American has

attracted larger audiences to their concerts than they have seen at similar new-music

concerts in Boston and New York. Grossman estimates that a concert last June at

Harvard’s Paine Hall drew approximately 100 people; their B.U. concert drew the same

number; and their Juilliard concert drew 60-70 people. The Boston audiences may have

been larger because the composers have more connections in Boston for word-of-mouth

marketing. They suspect that other than friends and friends of friends, audiences

comprise those who are interested in the combination of “Latin American” and “new

music.”19 Malpica compared their events to the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s

concert featuring Chinese composers. He feels that audiences are “curious” to hear the

music of composers from different cultural and national backgrounds.

Hurtado describes the group’s intentions as “paradoxical”: they want to promote

Latin America and advertise themselves as Latin American composers, yet he does not

want audiences to think about Latin America while listening to the music. He recognizes

though that audience expectations are difficult to manage:

If a person goes to an Álta Voz concert or a HGNM [Harvard Group for New Music] concert, the experience should be the same. … [that] we are Latin American composers is a flag an advertisement. But at the same time I would like people not to think about that. But it’s something I cannot avoid. It’s difficult. It’s hard to try to balance both things.

19 I plan to investigate its audience first hand during a concert this spring.


Malpica also described their Latin American label as a risk because audiences may

expect “some exotic composers and are waiting for the Guaracha or the Mexican tunes.”

But the differences in their music from such stereotypes aided their educational agenda,

according to Malpica: “That was one of the things we wanted to show, that Latin

American music has a lot of different faces like music from any other place.”

Latin American-ness in their music

Clearly the Latin American identity of Álta Voz reflects their interpersonal

affinities and their strategies for intercultural education and self-promotion. But does

their music sound Latin American? Does being from Latin America necessitate that the

art music they compose is Latin American? Nicholas Collins puts this question more

sarcastically with regard to electroacoustic music composition, “does a hand in the South

rotate knobs differently from a hand in the North, á la Coriolis effect?”20 Conversely,

should this music genre still be labeled “European” art music, even though it has been

composed in Central and South America since the early 1500s? Some scholars

emphasize cultural colonialism, insisting that the history of Latin American composition

is inherently one of imitation, for example: “In art music, the models are produced by the

imperial metropolis… which expects that the societies inside the colonial system limit

themselves to consuming regularly renewed models, or eventually reproducing them,

with an unavoidable delay.”21 Other scholars are reexamining the assumed mono-

directionality of compositional influence from Europe to the New World, and instead

present a history of interdependent exchange among art-music composers in Europe and

20 Nicolas Collins, "Introduction," Leondardo Music Journal 11: Southern Cones (2000).21 Coriún Aharonián, "An Approach to Compositional Trends in Latin America," Leondardo Music Journal 10 (2000): 3.


the New World over the past 500 years.22 This revisionism has also been extended to

address the long-ignored Latin American musical influence in the U.S.23 Akin Euba

prefers the labels “international art music” and “world art music” over “Western art

music” to describe more accurately the global production of art music rather than a genre

that always emanates from Europe or the U.S.24 So within the musical language of

international art music, what is Latin American about the music of Álta Voz composers?

Despite stylistic differences between composers, everyone can detect some

similarity in their music, a Latin American quality, however difficult it is to describe or

identify. The most comfortable describing the Latin American-ness in their music is

Grossman, who pinpointed a certain historically-connected musical drama as Latin

American:

The first concert we did at B.U. was all compositions to Latin American poems. I sat in the audiences and listened. We are all from different places, we’re of different ages, studied with different teachers. But I could pick out many similarities in our music and that made me really happy because at least there’s one more reason why we’re part of a group. All of the songs had a really strong, dramatic content that is very much present in the art of Latin America for centuries.

Qualifying that the drama he sensed may have come largely from the poetic texts rather

than the music, he noted that he has felt similarly about their instrumental concerts as

well. Two pieces that Grossman composed in Boston – “Away” (2003) and “Siray”

(2005), meaning to sow and to weave in Quechua – are his most explicit references to

22 For example, Malena Kuss, "Round Table II: Contributions of the New World to the Music of the Old World," Acta Musicologica 63, no. 1 (1991).23 See Piza: 62; Washburne.24 Euba also describes “Intercultural composition”: the way composers integrate elements from different cultures, not always nationally bound, but also regional, e.g., African, Asian, or Latin American. Akin Euba, "Intercultural Music in Africa and Latin America: A Comparative View of Fela Sowande and Carlos Chávez," in Musical cultures of Latin America : global effects, past and present, ed. Steven Joseph Loza and Jack Bishop (Los Angeles: Dept. of Ethnomusicology and Systematic Musicology University of California Los Angeles, 2003).


Peru. Tapestries of the Pre-Incan Paracan people inspired his general compositional

approach in that the crisscrossing musical lines symbolically represent both colorful

threads and the dialogues between the mythological characters depicted on the

tapestries.25 Although the analogies stop at this basic level, these pieces exemplify to him

the drama in Latin American art.

My piece “Siray” for example is based on Paracan tapestry. If you look at a Paracan tapestry it’s always very dramatic scenes, very colorful, of mythological characters. The drama is always present. We cannot really stereotype, or generalize, but there’s a lot of drama in the art of Latin America… I’m just giving you a very superficial impression, but there’s a lot there to be researched. We can argue that the presence of the drama in Latin American music or in painting or other forms of art could have a lot to do with the history, the way the indigenous cultures were almost destroyed by the conquistadors. Such radical changes in society, genocide, and all those awful things took place.

Although Grossman explicitly intends to express drama in his compositions, is there a

general trope of drama in Latin American art? Is it one of many themes that are over-

emphasized as characteristically Latin American, like magical realism in Latin American

literature?26

If drama is a dominant trope of Latin American music, in the first half of the

century it was the integration of local folk and popular music in art music, including

Indianisms – the use of indigenous Amerindian music as source material.27 Even though

Bartok and other early twentieth-century Europeans used this same technique in part to

distinguish national music repertoires, the references to Native American music is

strongly identified with Latin American nationalist composers like Carlos Chávez and

25 Orerego-Salas might classify Grossman’s goal to root his music in Latin American history and values, rather than experimentation for experimentation’s sake, in the introspective trend of “reconciliation with the past” that emerged in the 1970s. Juan Oreggo-Salas, "Traditions, experiment, and change in contemporary Latin America," Latin American Music Review 6, no. 2 (1985): 160.26 Sylvia Molloy, "Latin America in the U.S. Imaginary: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Magic Realist Imperative," in Ideologies of Hispanism, ed. Mabel Moraña (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005).27 Béhague, 126 ff.


Hector Villa Lobos. Davidovsky takes great issue with the indigenous-ness or local-ness

of the vernacular tropes that were allegedly appropriated.

When I was a young guy studying in Argentina, one of the big icons was Bela Bartok. And many composers, including Ginastera, were writing Argentinean music that sounded Hungarian, because they were looking at methods that Bella Bartok used to develop sets and material out of Hungarian folk songs. He was explicitly interested in investigating all that area of ethnomusicology, and in a way that “Salon Mexico” [by Aaron Copland] was such a success, that Mexican composers would have to write Mexican music ala Copland, because those pieces became certain models in a way. Certainly the “Sinfonia India” of Chavez was a major impact in Latin America, almost defined Latin American national music. So everyone started to sound like Mexican-Indian music. So the layers of complexity are really quite amazing when you start to think of those things.

Béhague argues that an eclectic array of compositional styles other than musical

nationalism prospered throughout the twentieth century, though he positions them as

responses to nationalism as “counter-currents.”28 The concepts of universalism and

individualism, as well as avant-garde composition techniques, appeared in Latin America

in response to nationalist aesthetics in Latin American art music before World War II.

Rather than composers bound to a national sound, the discourse of universalism

emphasizes their individuality.29 Moreover, by concerning themselves with the same

technical issues of composition as composers elsewhere and by adapting experimental

compositional techniques of the Euro-American avant-garde and more recently

electroacoustic methods, Latin American composers became less interested in

constructing a national or regional musical sound.30 In as much as international art music

acts as a universal language – highlighting individuality by delocalizing composers – it

may compare to the Spanish language in light of Hispanism, since mono-lingualism

28 Ibid., 225.29 Ibid., 283.30 Ibid., 285-6. Oreggo-Salas: 152-3. Electroacoustic, computer media, and the communications infrastructure to support them are still prohibitively expensive for most composers in Latin America. See Ricardo Dal Farra, "Some Comments about Electroacoustic Music and Life in Latin America," Leondardo Music Journal 4 (1994).


served Spain’s hegemonic project to consolidate the Castilian empire both within Spain

and in its colonies. As a language of conquest, Spanish attempts to mask, suppress, or

reject local and regional differences while allowing trans-national and trans-cultural

dialogue through a common tongue.31 Meanwhile dialects reaffirm the diversity of local

cultures and individual self-expression.

Do experimental procedures necessarily de-localize Latin American composers or

can contemporary avant-garde composers sound Latin American? Grossman clearly

believes the latter because he hears Latin American-ness in the music of Álta Voz

composers, all of whom use “experimental” techniques. But which locales do they

reference? In Lara’s compositions should we hear São Paulo, where he was raised, or

Boston, where he began composing? McDonald posed this question to me regarding

Lara’s music before stating that he hears only the individual Álta Voz composers in their

compositions. Perhaps any compositional technique universalizes a composer by using a

language of international art music, while simultaneously maintaining the ability to

localize the composer; but instead of defining that locale as regionally, nationally, or

otherwise spatially bound, composers may metaphorically localize themselves to their

experiences and spheres of influence, wherever they may be. Considering the transitory

lives of the Álta Voz composers, it might be appropriate to localize them to the many

places they have lived, studied, and composed. In Malpica’s words: “All of your

background, I really hope it reflects in your music. Whatever I am, I really hope it’s

reflected there.” Latin America is a part of those backgrounds, but in the end, they may

better be understood as individual travelers, a metaphor discussed later.

31 Mabel Moraña, "Introduction: Mapping Hispanism," in Ideologies of Hispanism, ed. Mabel Moraña (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005).


Béhague, though, affirms the presence of a Latin American quality even in light

of the most experimental trends that would seemingly serve as a “melting pot” to form a

global style.32 He concludes his music-history tome by extending Gustavo Becerra’s

notion of the Brazilian sotaque (“local, regional accent”) to describe all of Latin America:

“Admittedly, it is difficult to point out accurately where and how the sotaque manifests

itself in the considerable music production since 1950, but its existence can hardly be

questioned. Given the uniqueness of the cultural context in which his music is created,

the Latin American composer cannot escape revealing some aspects of that context.”33

Assuming the position of an ethnographer, Orrego-Salas proposes that whether or not

local distinctiveness can theoretically exist in aleatory music, in reality “composers have

often verbalized their intentions or at least their hopes of opening paths of vernacular

significance through means allied to improvisatory methods of avant-garde

composition.”34 Aharonián takes a more positivist approach, elaborating thirteen

“observable trends… that can be considered characteristic of [contemporary] Latin

America.”35 Most Álta Voz composers think similarly as Béhague, that composers cannot

help but evoke their (many) cultural contexts, Latin American being one of them,

Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, and Mexican being others, and North-Atlantic being

yet another; yet they also consider early performance training, the influence of teachers,

and personal aesthetic choices to be critical influences on a composer’s style. Pauly, who

32 De la Vega also uses the analogy of the global melting pot to describe post-1950s art music, concluding that the pot is “no longer centered exclusively in Europe but now most prominently encompasses the New World.” de la Vega, "Latin American Composers in the United States," 174.33 Béhague, 354. 34 Oreggo-Salas: 158.35 Aharonián’s thirteen trends: “1. The Latin American sense of time… 2. Non-discursive process of music pieces… 3. Expressive blocks… 4. Reiterative elements…. 5. Austerity… 6. Violence and a liking for the ‘little things’… 7. Silence… as a cultural symbol… 8. Presence of the ‘primitive’… 9. An attempt to make new technologies one’s own…10. Breaking through the borders… 11. Ideological awareness… 12. Magic… 13. Identity.” Aharonián: 4-5.


more than the others resists identifying a clear Latin American quality in their music,

likes to distinguish the composer’s backgrounds, tastes, and influences from the music

he/she creates: “influence is in the artist, not directly in art. Influence is digested by the

artist and as such (as digested information) makes its way (or not) to the work of art.”

Davidovsky’s opinion shifted subtly throughout our conversation as to whether

the Álta Voz composers sounded Latin American. At first he said they were young

students still developing original voices and therefore sounded like other contemporary

student composers, regardless of origin. After more thought, he asserted how Lara’s

music sounds Brazilian in its colorful rhythmic drama and energy, and how Hurtado’s

music, with its subtle, distilled character, sounded like a bucolic Mexican countryside. In

the end, though, Davidovsky highlighted the complexities of their backgrounds, their

idiosyncrasies, and the subtle level at which these references may operate, which have

less to do with the composer’s culture than his/her personal motives.

I don’t want to diminish the definitive character of the culture, but at the high end of high music, really, those difference are there, but much, much more subtle. It’s not the quotation of the tune, it’s the quotation of something that is much more abstract… So it comes up not on the surface of the music, nor on the secondary level of the music, but it comes up – or you can distinguish that when you hear ten pieces of a composer that you like, many, many times, and you get the essence of what is particular, unique. And in that uniqueness you will find elements of the culture… On the one hand… culture has a tremendous weight, or your roots. But in music particularly it depends what kinds of music, what music means to you. Why do you write music? Why do you bother to do that crazy thing? That really determines each composer’s idiosyncrasies.

For the Álta Voz composers, hearing their different compositional styles and

personalities is just as important as hearing their commonalities, if not more so. It is of

utmost importance for Malpica: “When people compose what they feel, I can perceive

that they are different. I can even perceive some of their personality. And I think it’s great

when I can do that because I think the music relates to them.” Because this is his main


compositional goal, Malpica considers his approach non-formalistic and therefore anti-

academic. He has been working on an emotionally self-expressive approach to

composition at the end of his studies at B.U. and then mostly at Juilliard in a series of

works called “Exabruptos” (“Outbursts”):

I don’t formalize the thing before or don’t work strictly with certain pitch contents or work with certain techniques, but I use them randomly as outbursts. Suddenly I will do something. But it’s not a collage. Even though there is certain randomness, it has to do with motion, so something’s going to change… It’s just outbursts of emotions that you put there. And instead of rationalizing them, just to feel very free. I want to feel free when composing and not being afraid that much of being crazy with a piece or crazy. And release all this energy that one has, without being so conscious about things.

To accompany the title-page graphic on the DVD of the Álta Voz concert at Juilliard,

Hurtado excerpted a lively segment of “Exabruptos 1,” for clarinet and percussion. He

explained to me that “Exabruptos” and especially another work by Malpica remind him

of the Peruvian jungle, so his visual image seemed appropriate for the DVD as a visual

medium. When I asked Malpica about references to the Peruvian jungle in his works, he

denied it; although his other work is called “Mi Silva” (“My Jungle”), the title refers

metaphorically to the jungle of one’s internal emotional strife, similar to “Exabruptos.”

Yet memories of Peru did inflect his composition: “Nothing specific to the Peruvian

rainforest, but it has some freely interpreted rhythms from Peru. I think more about the

Sierra than the jungle.” Malpica has been striving to express both an emotionality that is

personal and universal. By referencing Peru in his titles and liner notes, his work is more

easily interpreted as Peruvian rather than personal, emotional, or universally human, even

by his Álta Voz collaborator. If communicating the individual composer’s personality is

the goal, it is not easily accomplished.


The task becomes more complicated when the performance is considered in

addition to the score. Of the Álta Voz composers whose personality is most evident in his

compositions, Malpica singled out Lara, whose music he describes as wonderfully

aggressive, eclectic in influence, and ever searching. Utilizing extended techniques and

extreme dynamics, Lara’s “Livro dos Sonhos I” (“Book of Dreams 1”), was

commissioned by clarinetist Jean Kopperud and pianist Stephen Gosling. While

discussing the piece with Lara and Hurtado after watching the Juilliard performance on

DVD, the conversation switched from matters of analysis to performance, as they

compared two performances of Kopperud and Gosling to four previous performances by

clarinetist Michael Norsworthy and pianist John McDonald. Lara felt that Kopperud and

Gosling played the score more “precisely,” in terms of note-wise accuracy. However, the

heightened expressivity of McDonald in particular caught their attention: he exaggerated

gestures more and produced a more “raw or rough” character unlike the “purity” of the

others’ performance. Hurtado insisted that he “heard more of Felipe [Lara]” in

McDonald and Norsworthy’s performances. Lara immediately commented on the irony

while laughing: “But how can, Felipe writes the piece as accurately as he can. And the

less accurate is more Felipe?” After Lara’s wife Roberta joined the conversation, the

three of them concluded that although Kopperud and Gosling played the score more

accurately, McDonald was able to express Lara’s personality more accurately because he

knew Lara’s intentions, having worked with him for two years as his composition

teacher. McDonald generally agreed with this assessment.

Aside from the insights into the complex relationships among a composer,

teacher, score, and performer and the difficulties locating a musical work between a score


and performance, this anecdote answers the larger question of Brazilian-ness and

individuality in Lara’s work through its many perspectives: Lara composed “Livro dos

Sonhos” as a technically challenging piece, a type of musical drama, for its virtuosic

performers; Davidovsky briefly considered that the drama in Lara’s work may reveal his

Brazilian-ness; McDonald dismissed the idea of hearing São Paulo in Lara’s work, while

clearly interpreting Lara’s score in a more dramatic manner than Gossling; Hurtado heard

more of Lara in the rawness and drama of McDonald’s performance; Malpica thought

that the wonderful aggressiveness showed Lara’s personality, though didn’t remember

noticing any differences among the many performances of “Livro dos Sonhos.”

Everyone hears drama in Lara’s work, but it remains unclear if it reflects Brazilian-ness,

Lara’s personality and/or taste, the executions of the performers, expectations of various

listeners, or the circumstances of the commission.

References


alta voz presentation - felipe lara · web viewgrossman also introduced felipe lara to the group...

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