Contraponientes (part 4): The Birds That Sing

"They sing. They sing.

Where are the birds that sing?

It has rained. Even the branches 

have no new leaves. They sing. The birds

sing. Where are 

the birds that sing?”

I. Loss and Renewal

Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jimenez wrote these words, from his "Canción de Invierno" ("Winter Song"), in Puerto Rico in 1956. An exile from civil war-torn Spain, the historical record is not clear as to what prompted this despondent poem of barrenness and resignation. The chronology of his life points to not one, but a compendium of personal tragedies beyond the violent overthrow of democracy at the hands of fascists in his native country: the loss of his father when young Juan was eighteen; the death of his nephew--a soldier in the Spanish Republican army--in the front lines of the bloody Teruel campaign in the winter of 1937-38; even the death of his beloved wife, poet Zenobia Camprubí, just days before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. Perhaps it’s not even relevant to know for sure why he wrote this poem, but to know only that its evocation of remoteness is so universal that we each bring our own memories of distance and despondence to its reading.  

As I spent the 2003-04 academic year researching the composers of the ‘Generation of ’51,’ I learned how the Civil War and Francoist Spain really had been--for many years--an intellectual waste land. Many of the most innovative artists, composers, poets and others were either swept up and killed in the conflict, or they fled the country. What remained in the decade or so after the conflict was what composer and philosopher Tomás Marco described as a rather ‘inbred’ situation. Not only did culture suffer at the loss of important figures, it suffered the loss of important institutions: orchestras, conservatories, etc. The flow of ideas across borders had ceased. If one considers the important, I daresay critical developments in art music that emerged in Paris in the post-war years (advances in serialism, electronic music, and so on), and then in Germany vis a vis the Darmstadt Festival, one begins to understand the situation. For many composers beginning their careers at the onset of the 1950s, there was no lack of talent, but there were deep questions about what to write--what it meant to be a Spanish artist in such a climate. Complicating factors for these composers was the sunny, touristy image of the country as projected to the outside world by Franco. This image of quaint bullrings and bullfights, beaches and sevillanas, and flamenco in tapas bars, possessed a veneer of truth at the surface, but did little to acknowledge the complexity of the beating heart underneath. No, to these composers, the Spain projected by Rodrigo’s beloved Concierto de Aranjuez simply would not suffice.

As tourism accelerated in the early 1950s, a young attorney/composer by the name of Luís de Pablo was working in the offices of Iberia Airlines. During his spare time he had two scores to study: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. and a Schumann Symphony--the only scores he was able to acquire in those days. It was through a French sound engineer named Jean Etienne Marie that his library grew to include a wealth of new resources: Schoenberg and His School, Twelve-Tone Music, My Musical Language (Messiaen), Sonatina for Flute and Piano (Boulez), the Turangalila Symphony (Messiaen). Ultimately, de Pablo was able to attend the Darmstadt Summer Courses later, he recalled, in the same year that composer György Ligeti escaped from communist Hungary. Other composers found themselves in similar situations, slowly acquiring scores and recordings of radically different music. 

Luís de Pablo and his contemporary, Cristóbal Halffter, drank deeply from the modernism of the time. Other composers, such as Antón García Abril (my research and composition mentor in Spain) took a more measured approach. García Abril’s philosophical lineage traces most clearly to his Spanish folklorist predecessors like Felipe Pedrell or Manuel de Falla, yet remained colored by an awareness of more contemporary, international trends. Subsequently, he has acknowledged a career much more illustrious within Spain than without. There have been notable exceptions as his music has been championed by the likes of Hillary Hahn and Placido Domingo. 

II. Finding the Birds that Sing

I sat in Antón García Abril’s study at his home west of Madrid for the first time in September, 2003. A spacious office flanked at one end by a baby grand piano, and an upright piano beneath a bright window at the other end--clearly his piano for composing. Shelves on the walls held a number of books and scores. We sat on two small sofas separated by a small table. He talked about the modernism of his contemporaries, and that his output had remained largely known in Spain. In point of fact, he is a huge figure in Spain, having enjoyed an illustrious career as a composer of soundtracks for film and television as well as the concert hall. “But my songs,” he offered, “my songs are known around the world.” There’s a reason for this. García Abril regards the lyricism inherent in text setting to be the heart of his music--the pinnacle of his artistic aspirations. In a talk before the Spanish Academy of Arts and Letters he once said:

Spoken language values the word as its means of communication and understanding. Every word is filled with meaning and content, and their ordering will depend on the expression of each feeling. In the same way, musical content should be ordered from the melody, as is the word from spoken language. The order and content of melodic sound are defined as the vehicle of communication without which the intelligibility of the message would be difficult to perceive (“In Defense of Melody,” December 4, 1983).

In spending time with García Abril and his music, I grew to recognize that I’d always harbored many of the same ideas about a certain approach to melody at the core of my aesthetic. I don’t simply mean to imply that a traditional approach to tonal melody with its inherent stylistic predilections and limitations is the sum of all craft. Hardly. I simple learned over time that my music almost always unfolded first from patterns of voice-leading and melody. Sometimes the melodic contour at the surface of the piece provides the principal handle for a listener. Sometimes the melody is concealed well beneath the surface like a cantus firmus that runs from beginning to end. In it some may find weaknesses and limitations; over reliance on tension-release patterns, stepwise harmonic resolutions, or structural pacing akin to a lot of older music. This predilection keeps much of my output from the arbitrary disjunction of pitch and other material that makes so much current music sound so, well, ‘new-music-y.’ Moreover, I’m certain that teachers of mine over the years grew frustrated with my refusal to assimilate some of these traits of modernism into my music. I learned that I was a disobedient student, but a marvelously obedient listener. The sound of harmony unfolding, pitch by pitch, line against line was the articulate tutoring of the ‘deep song’ within me, the primeval ‘cante jondo’ of my creative soul. As a student through the years I had wandered through many, barren, wintry valleys absent the pulse and sounds of life. But here, here I had heard music--I had found the birds that sing.

Listen to soprano Mitra Sadeghpour perform "Canción de Invierno" from Contraponientes.

Contraponientes (Part 3): An Invention for St. Vincent

Camilla in her 'sevillana' dress, courtyard of the Grand Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba

A few days after my doctoral recital at the University of Cincinnati, my teacher, Joel Hoffman, provided this incisive observation (I paraphrase): “Ethan, the music on that recital was all well and good, but it sounded like the music of someone anxious to build a career. I think there is more ‘art’ in you than that.” Some may have interpreted that comment as a criticism, a hot needle to pop the bubble of the post-recital glow. I didn’t hear it like that, though. Joel’s advice made me introspective, and I recognized the truth at the heart of what he was saying. The three years of my doctoral studies were terrifically fruitful and artistically rewarding. At the same time I was a young, married father who started the degree with one child at home, and finished it with a second. My assistantship covered my tuition and provided a stipend of $600 per month--just a bit more than the rent for our two bedroom apartment. My wife--having chosen to not put our children in day care--taught after-school french classes at several parochial schools, and then had a stipend of her own as a graduate student in french literature. We were nearly broke most of the time. I remember one experience with a mixture of humiliation and gratitude when Patricia (my wife) happened into a woman from our church at the grocery store--without a word this woman paid for the whole cart of groceries. If we were poor, it was no secret! So, yes, I did everything I could to write the kind of music that would improve my chances for employment--music that could be (I thought) immediately accessible, fun for performers to play, attention-grabbing competition winners. I spent a lot of time wondering how sound could be translated into another golden line on a CV. Joel’s words dismantled the facade of careerism on which I’d spent my strength, and I harbored them with gratitude.

A Quixote on his Rocinante on parade in Alcalá de Henares, Spain

Five months later, our little family was settling into a year-long residency in Spain. A friend’s parents actually owned a beautiful, spacious apartment that we rented in the Madrid bedroom community of Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Cervantes. Since leaving Cincinnati, and after two summer residency programs, I hadn’t written a note of music in nearly four months. This proved a valuable gestation period of detachment from what I considered the ‘circus’ of competitive artistic sport in the U.S. I was away, far away from all the harbingers of career ‘success’ in nearly hermetic isolation. Besides, these first several weeks in Spain were necessary to acclimate the children to new schedules, for me to setup my workspace at the ‘piso’ (‘flat’ in Spanish), to meet some key figures for my research, get permission to access space in the National Library, etc. 

The central square, or "Plaza de Cervantes," Alcalá de Henares

Routine around the flat quickly coalesced into a predicable pattern: after a morning run into and around the town square (the Plaza de Cervantes), I would get cleaned up, eat breakfast and set my schedule for the day. Often this would include going into Madrid (a 35-minute train ride) to the conservatory, the National Library or other archive. Patricia and the children--when I was in the city--would eat breakfast and play in the morning, watch Japanese anime cartoons on TV in Spanish, hit a local playground, have lunch and put the children down for naps. Early afternoon would mark the opening of the ice cream kiosks, more playground time, dinner, books, bedtime, etc. We did our level best to assure that Patricia, a voracious academic, made time for her own pursuits. Some days I would take the children into the city or to playgrounds, or simply outside for soccer on the spacious patio. The whole experience in those first several weeks made for an odd combination of adventure and monotony--but mostly monotony. Without a car, we walked everywhere and depended on buses and trains. All that would change soon enough.

Breakfast at the 'piso,' with special guest, Natalie Lauritsen (left)

After these initial weeks of adjustment, with daily routines settled into pattern, I started to think about composing again. The first, best thought I had about a new piece occurred late one afternoon on the commuter train out of Madrid headed home. I had been reading Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music and I was thinking a lot about absolute music--or music that refers to nothing but the material itself. I hungered to learn how to compose again, how to think more carefully about motivic development and structure; how to lose myself in the process of construction without any thought as to how that work might ultimately be received by performers or the public. My mind then turned to those greatest of didactic composition teaching pieces: the two-part of inventions of J.S. Bach. I loved the clarity of these pieces. Often I would sight read through them at the piano to clear my head before a composing session. They were pure artistic statements, technically accomplished with perfect counterpoint, and completely devoid of any emotional or psychological baggage. Wanting to effectively use the opportunity to start over as a composer, I chose to write an invention for solo piano. 

Settling into my little studio at the flat, I sketched out the very first measures.
I began with a simple, somewhat chromatic, motoric motive in the right hand in contrary motion counterpoint:

The work unfolded chronologically, starting from the beginning, blossoming into virtuosic strides across the expanse of the keyboard, but never far from the initial motive:

And with lots of rhythmic acceleration:

By no means did this new piece write itself, and despite the fact that some sections posed stubborn challenges, much of it came in fits of quick ideas replete with a sense of harmonic and gestural inevitability.  

As this new ‘invention’ came together, I began to understand that--notwithstanding the coherence the motives and gestures already enjoyed--the whole work needed some kind of conceptual model. The structure required a unique kind of inspiration so that all of those hard wrought gestures didn’t simply track the path of least resistance and go to all of the familiar, predictable places. For the first time in this work, I turned away from the material itself to an architectural structure that posed compelling questions about predictability, expectation, and unanticipated juxtapositions. Each of which could make for a suitable musical analogue. That inspiration was the Grand Mosque of Córdoba.

Arches in the Grand Mosque-Cathedral, Córdoba, Spain

The Grand Mosque is probably the most important historical attraction in the Andalusian city of Córdoba. The mosque, or ‘mezquita’ (in Spanish) is no longer a mosque at all, but a cathedral. As the Catholic monarchs defeated Moors from North Africa, sacred sites were converted from places of Islamic worship to Christian ones. By the time the Moors left their last stronghold in Grenada at the end of the 15th century, many such spaces were ‘converted,’ as it were.  The juxtaposition of Moorish architecture (pillars and arches and all) with the symbols of Christianity would be inspiration enough. However, the site of the mosque was originally the site of a Visigothic Catholic church dedicated to St. Vincent. When the Moors originally conquered southern Spain beginning in the 8th century, they too converted the sacred spaces of their vanquished to their own purposes. Hence, a church became a mosque that became a cathedral--each bearing the mark of its predecessor; each shining a light on its own culture and values by virtue of the juxtapositions. Christians and Muslims, in effect, living and worshiping side by side through the ages seemed a beautiful idea. (During the time of the Córdoban Caliphate, Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together peacefully). To extend the notion further, the distance of the holy site is but hundreds of yards from a monument honoring the Sephardic Jewish philosopher Maimonides, one of history’s great citizens of Córdoba. 

Grandma Madeline keepin' it real with the kids in the old Jewish quarter of Córdoba

As I considered this sacred space composed of unlikely companions, I considered the companionship of the two composers that had inspired my work: Stravinsky and Bach. Although the work was very much mine, their influence could be felt throughout. So, at the middle of the work, as figures swell into rapid sextuplets in what is surely to be a climax, the gesture is immediately cooled, the course abandoned, and a misty haze lifts to reveal several excerpts--quoted verbatim--of Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C-major from book two of the Well-Tempered Clavier:

Bach stands alone and apart for a while, and then I work to gently fold him into the fabric of my work:

   

                          

Taking Bach into the ‘bosom’ of the work culminates at the end, as the theme from the prelude becomes the subject of a stretto in augmentation I fashion after my own material:

I put a double barline on the work on December 15, 2003 in that little studio office in Alcalá de Henares--several weeks before I would actually step inside the Grand Mosque myself. The whole exercise of writing this work was a breakthrough for me. Of course, there would be other false starts in the years to come, my own personal “Wellington’s Victory” pieces that failed to live up to their promises. At the same time, it was a piece of firsts: the first in many years to find important early inspiration in its own material; the first to seek musical analogues (not programmatic ones) from non-musical structures; the first piece I would write as a DMA--a student in no one’s studio.

Grandpa Ed with his 'sevillana' in the courtyard of the Grand Mosque-Cathedral

We went to Córdoba two months later with Patricia’s parents Ed and Madeline Quayle in a rented car in the early light of a weekday morning. We wanted to experience for ourselves the ancient Andalusian air in the city where three great world cultures, for a time, harmoniously lived and thrived within the same walls. If art is a reflection of the world we’ve inherited, perhaps art can anticipate a world yet to be.

Pianist Nick Phillips went on to record the work for an Albany Records release. Here is a recent video showing all of the athletic finger work.

Contraponientes, Three Spanish Poets, and How I Learned to Sing 'Cante Jondo' (part 2)

Part 2: Talkin' 'Bout My 'Generation of '51'

(Posing before a poster of my mentor in Spain, 
Antón García Abril, in the city of Teruel)

I. Questioning the Canon

Whether intended or not, academia aggressively devours whatever it must to perpetuate itself. It rewards those that convert to its gospel of ‘important contributors to the field.’  This becomes particularly dicey when evaluating the arts. That’s because it’s more difficult to quantify the value of a particular composer or body of work than it is to, say, judge the calculus revealing how to propel a man to the moon. During the mid-twentieth century, as academic music departments multiplied, and greater numbers of composers were hired to fill positions availed by Great Society rhetoric and a vast expansion of higher education in the U.S., art birthed in the wilder, wider environs of culture was quantified, codified, grouped into categories and relegated to syllabi and textbooks. From an institutional perspective, value could be measured proportionally between a work and the novelty of the movement of its provenance. Born then was the diligent grad student, memorizing the names of the most important composers and works printed at the heads of textbook chapters or in bold black type. I remember a grad student colleague of mine who declared his ambition to write music that would “be in the history books.” Why? Because he, like many of us, was a convert to the institutional gospel, and if that gospel’s bible declared a truth, it was embraced without question. We became consumers of a certain telling of history, reciting mantras rife with new vocabulary like “second viennese school,” “post-serial,” “neo-classical,” “Darmstadt,” “minimalism,” etc. Dropping one of these blessed titles in conversation, and their associated saintly figure-heads provided immediate credibility and gave an instant buzz. Subsequently, composing was an act of footnoting, of appealing to authority figures, of assembling unassailable musical arguments by binding them to the ‘law and the prophets’ of origin.  

My problem is that I’d been a heretic from the start.

If an inner-ear is the ‘still, small voice,’ then I heeded that voice often. In it I heard sounds and combinations of sounds--rough-hewn at first, but with increasing clarity. Sometimes that voice spoke in unison, or at least in pleasant harmony, with the academic discourse. Sometimes there was irreconcilable discord. In time I grew to seek out the underdog, voices from vanquished cultures too slippery to grasp or too hidden from view to retrieve and place properly in the institutional canon. Hoping I might find a champion among the silenced or invisible, I turned to one of the Western world’s most illustrious underdogs: Spain. 

(Spanish-American War, Battle of Manila Bay)

II. The Preaching of a Soothsaying Sage

If there is no wiser soul than the man who gained the world only to lose it all, Spain is the soothsaying sage. A great--maybe the greatest--world power of the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish monarchs had it all: they defeated the Moors in their last Grenada stronghold in 1492, in the same year that they laid claim to lands and gold--lots and lots of gold--in the New World. Flags of the Spanish Monarchy erupted all throughout the western world, and vast riches poured up the Guadalquivir River into the port of Sevilla. The world was theirs. Then they lost it, piece by piece, starting with the likes of Lord Nelson and Simón Bolívar until, finally, the last Spanish lights flickered and dimmed in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 to the America of Teddy Roosevelt and his ‘Rough Riders.’  Spain’s heart was rent asunder, and a generation of soul-searching ensued in the poetry and writing of Miguel de Unamuno, Antonio Machado, Pío Baroja and others--the aptly named “Generation of ’98.” In the years that followed, the monarchy was abolished and reinstated, until finally the fledgling democratic Second Spanish Republic gained a foothold in 1931. Not to outdo her complexities, though, and being a nation comprised of many nations, fascists and monarchists--fueled by different memories of an ideal Spain--and their sympathists, chartered a plane across the Strait of Gibralter to Morocco to collect a banished career officer with a fateful, fearful, grip on the future: an ambitious leader of men named Francisco Franco.

In the somber years of international isolation following the Civil War (1936-39), the new, Nationalist Spain emerged in the late 1940s to a world that had defeated, and hated, fascists. Nationalists had exiled and murdered its greatest intellectuals: writers, poets, composers, including Andalucian poet Federico García Lorca. Yet in the barren, torched landscape of post-war Spain, a generation of young musicians--too young to have fought or even understood the conflict--awoke to the poignant soul-searching of their forebears. What did it mean to be Spanish? Of what importance is a national identity? In the early 1950s, dictator Gen. Francisco Franco found something of a friend in President Dwight Eisenhower, a fellow communist-hater that agreed to inject millions of dollars of aid into the Spanish economy in exchange for strategic military bases. And so, after a decade of  pestilent poverty and isolation, Franco’s Spain opened its doors to the world. The world came in great numbers bringing towels and wearing bathing suits, sunning its fair skin and bleaching its blonde hair on the beaches of Alicante, Málaga, and other resorts along the Mediterranean. A door opened that would never be closed; it was the beginning of the end of the Spanish Nationalist experiment.

(Beach-goers in Benidorm, on the Mediterranean coast)

III. The Generation of '51

Concurrent to the Eisenhower deal, the children of the Civil War graduated from the conservatories and began their professional careers. Their creative identity as composers was challenged not only by what it meant to be Spanish, but what it meant to be Spanish in a wider world of Darmstadt and European modernism. What did it mean to be of the lineage of Victoria and Falla, all the while rebuffing the tourist propaganda of Franco, shattering it with the violent strains of the avant-garde? Pioneers in search of these answers, and patrons to the generation yet to be born in democracy, included composers Cristóbal Halffter, Luís de Pablo, Anton García Abril (my eventual mentor in Spain, and recent collaborator with Hillary Hahn on the 27 Encores project) and others. Spanish radio announcer Enrique Franco (no relation to Francisco) sensed something different in the new sounds heralded by these composers, and called them--perhaps in an unwitting ‘tip of the hat’ to their intellectual predecessors who too wrestled with hard questions--the ‘Generation of ’51.’ In the music of the ‘Generation of ’51’ I found kindred spirits: spirits who, too, labored to reconcile ‘truth’ preached by the canon, and the truth of the inner voice.

(violinist Hilary Hahn with composer Anton García Abril)

(Ethan, with little Camilla and littler Asher posing in cramped quarters in Covarrubias, Spain)

Contraponientes, Three Spanish Poets, and How I Learned to Sing ‘Cante Jondo’ (part 1)

In September of 2003, my wife, Patricia, our two young children (ages three and a teething, salivary, one) and I boarded a flight to Madrid, Spain for a nine-month Fulbright Fellowship. We were adventure seekers, never ones to turn down an opportunity for travel just because, you know, children needed a predictably reliable sleep schedule and all. After all, I was barely 30, with the parental stamina and energy of three 41-year olds. Besides, Patricia was a seasoned, inveterate traveler, having traversed Europe from Portugal to the Czech Republic by the time she was in her early 20s. Mounds of luggage, strollers and port-a-cribs notwithstanding, we took our seats, buckled our seat belts, and jetted into the Atlantic night.

From the sky, the central plateau of Castilla y Leon is a sea of gold and brown in the late summer heat. Descending, one notes the pattern of town squares and bullrings that disclose an old civilization persisting despite its dry and obvious thirst. A California boy, I had never seen anything standing that was so old. If California enticed with the promise of renewal and opportunity, Spain sultrily whispered of seductive spirits and ghost stories. Its rolling hills, Mediterranean coasts, abandoned fortresses, windmills, tiles and olive groves all ancient props that have outgrown tragedy generations over. Hardly did I know that, even from the clouds, the Iberian siren had sung to me the first strains of the ‘deep song.’

García Lorca described ‘deep song,’ or ‘cante jondo’ this way: 

Like the primitive Indian musical systems, deep song is a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, a marvelous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale, eludes the cold, rigid staves of modern music, and makes the tightly closed flowers of the semitones blossom into a thousand petals.

Of course, this description calls to mind the gypsy singing emanating from the caves of Grenada, in García Lorca’s native Andalucía. Eluding, as it does, those “rigid staves” it bespeaks of impassioned serendipity, an inflamed spontaneity untempered by the syntax of measured music notation. Where noteheads and barlines suggest artifice, the symbols of sounds, cante jondo emerges only from authenticity--a most intimate, soulful truth without which it cannot exist. Just as semitones and equal temperament effectively fib and mislead by concealing the notes between the cracks, deep song exposes all, hides nothing, eradicates the boundaries between sounds and renders them counterfeit. In the summer of 2003 I walked out of the conservatory for the last time as a student, terminal degree in hand. Yet, after years, I left in search of a new mentor--someone or something that would rescue me (if temporarily) from the circus of festivals and competitions and resume builders. I left in search of a new voice, a true voice, an honest voice. Scarcely could I have anticipated the tutoring of cante jondo, and its lessons that would transcend sound itself.