"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.
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