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)