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 Entertainment | April 2007 
Magical Music of Mexico
 Timothy Mangan - Orange County Register
| SEMINAL WORK: "Sensemayá," by early 20th-century composer Silvestre Revueltas, is archetypal Mexican classical music. (THE PACIFIC SYMPHONY)
American Composers Festival: Los Sonidos de México
With: Pacific Symphony
With: Enrique Diemecke and Carl St.Clair, conductors; Pepe Romero and Roberto Limón, guitars; Pedro Carbonč, piano; others
April 20: Music by Padilla, Rosas, Ponce, Revueltas, others. 8 p.m. at Samueli Theater.
April 26-28: Music by Márquez, Revueltas, Catán, Ponce, Diemecke, Lara. 8 p.m. at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall.
April 29: Music by Márquez, Ponce, Diemecke, Lara. 3 p.m. at Segerstrom Concert Hall.
How much: $10-$85
Call: 714-755-5799
Online: www.pacificsymphony.org and www.americancomposersfestival.org |
Silvestre Revueltas' "Sensemayá" is a good place to start. This six-minute orchestral masterpiece by the great Mexican composer, who lived from 1899 to 1940, plays into certain expectations that we have for south-of-the-border classical music even as it shatters them.
It begins with the sinister pianissimo thrum of a gong and the almost imperceptible low boil of a bass clarinet. The bassoons enter marking the meter in staccato – we're in an unsteady 7/8, an extra half-beat in every bar, a limping lope that keeps repeating like a broken record. A high tuba wails. The other brass enters snarling with mutes on, a fortissimo sizzle that cuts across the meter. The percussion won't let go of the unsteady beat, like "Boléro" turned into a nightmare. We build and build and until finally all hell breaks loose, made all the more horrifying for the cool control of its unleashing. Then, wham, we're finished.
Leonard Bernstein recorded "Sensemayá" with the New York Philharmonic in the early '60s (we can see him jiving to it now). The work is a thrilling showpiece, a slice of exotica, just the kind of "color" we want from Mexico. And yet it is also brutal, neo-primitive and wholly modern in its unsettling language, drawing on Stravinsky and transforming it into something new. "Sensemayá" is no picture postcard.
The Pacific Symphony's annual American Composers Festival is upon us once again. This year it might be dubbed a North American Composers Festival since its focus is the rich history of Mexican classical music and its current directions. "Sensamayá" is, perhaps strangely, not on the agenda, but a good deal of other Revueltas is. At any rate, the aim of the festival (or one of them) is to go beyond what we know – or think we know – about Mexican music, to dispel some of the stereotypes we may have about it.
"How much mariachis can you take?" says composer Daniel Catán, acknowledging the preconceptions that some listeners will bring to the festival. Catán, who lives in Pasadena, has been commissioned to write a piece for the event, which will avoid trumpeters in sombreros.
"I think what the festival is trying to do is put across the idea that Mexican music is a huge variety of things, depending on what time you look at," he says. "The original music" – before the arrival of Cortez – "we have no idea what it sounded like. Then we have the Spanish colonial music and then the 20th-century styles that came from the Caribbean. There's a huge variety of things. ... Mexican music is really an amalgamation of all these influences that have gone through the country and made their mark there."
The festival, put together with the help of artistic adviser Joseph Horowitz, the author of a recent, vigorous history of American classical music, will touch on all these areas. In four programs, we'll hear imaginative re-creations of Aztec music and performances of the sacred music of Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (1590-1664), the maestro de capilla of Puebla Cathedral who wrote in a Renaissance style. Pieces by the 19th-century salon composers Juventino Rosas (1868-94) and Ricardo Castro (1864-1907), who both leaned heavily on a European Romantic models, and by the transitional composer Manuel Ponce (1882-1948), an eloquent and underrated craftsman, are also on the agenda.
The 20th-century giants Revueltas and Carlos Chávez (1899-1978), who brought Mexican music into the modern fold, are amply represented, as is the music of still-living composers such as Ana Lara(b. 1959), Catán (b. 1949), and Arturo Márquez (b. 1950), who write in a variety of modes, not always instantly recognizable as Mexican. Talks with the musicians and composers, a Web site and participants' blog, and a special book of essays will add to the informative slant of the festival.
We'll hear quite a bit of music by Lara. She studied music in Poland and the U.S. as well as with the experimental Mexican composer Mario Lavista (b. 1943) and describes her music as international and abstract in style, but subtly Mexican nevertheless.
"In general, everything that one writes is autobiographical," she said recently from her home in Mexico City. "And I think the country where you are living defines in many ways what you are writing. It has to do not only with the sounds you are surrounded by, but also I guess it's a kind of aesthetic thing, the kinds of things we like as Mexicans, and the music we enjoy listening to."
As a Mexican, she says, one of the things she especially responds to is color.
"Mexico is, not today, but normally (full of) sunshine, and it's always full of colors around us. I guess it has to do a little bit with the way we enjoy the Mexican landscape. I love flowers, for instance, and all my house is full of flowers – so those things really have a lot to do with myself, and that has to do with the music I write."
Her "Hacía la noche," for amplified flute (to be performed Friday), is all "about the color of sound," she says. In the piece, she works with the incremental microtones between notes to create a kind of "breathing sound."
"The effects that I am using are very, very subtle," she says, "so you have to use a microphone so that people can hear it."
In her "Angels of Darkness and Dawn," an orchestral work to be performed April 26-29, Lara works with basic materials, the interval of a fifth and a five-note (pentatonic) scale.
"I think it's a very direct piece," she says. "Harmonically, it's very simple and it's mainly about color again. I wanted to explore in that piece how with very simple things – simple rhythms, simple notes, simple harmony – you could make a wonderful world by using the orchestra."
Another work to be performed, "Canticum Sacrum," has Gregorian chant as its basis.
"I think that ... the Gregorian chant (is) so important because it helps you to meditate and to make you be in contact with yourself and eventually with God. For me, this is the main interest in music, that it really connects me with myself and eventually connects me with other people that have the same spiritual needs as I do."
Catán is best known as a composer of operas, including the widely performed "Florencia en al Amazonas," and the upcoming "Il Postino," written for L.A. Opera and tenors Plácido Domingo and Rolando Villazón. His festival work, "Caribbean Airs" (April 26-28), pays tribute to his life-long fascination with Cuban music, but with a twist.
"They wanted something that highlighted the percussion section," Catán said of the commission. "I have been for some years studying Caribbean music and the way it influenced Mexican music of certain regions. So I was delighted with the commission because it was exactly what I was doing at the time. I decided to write three pieces for orchestra that use the rhythmic structures of Afro-Caribbean music. As I say, the label for that music is Afro-Caribbean. But this music also became very Mexican and it spawned its own varieties of stuff in Mexico," he said. The specifically regional Mexican permutations of that Cuban music form the basis of his new piece.
Like "Sensemayá" and like Lara's work, "Caribbean Airs" should be perfect festival fare – yet another example of the variety of ways that Mexican composers (and all composers, when it comes down to it) transform musical influences into their own national voice, whether they try to or not.
"You have to remember," Catán says, "that I am Mexican, so I don't do much to be one – I don't have to do anything."
Contact the writer: 714-796-6811 or tmangan@ocregister.com |
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