Among my current writing assignments, one in particular is occupying my time these days—an article on music from Latin America. It’s for Playbill, to run for October and November both, so throughout its two-month window of visibility a horde of people will read, or at least skim through, it. And it will remain on the SFS website more or less indefinitely thereafter. Ergo, the thing’s gotta be good.
To cover this in 3000 words, I must choose wisely
An article, not a book: at 3000 words it definitely belongs in the ‘overview’ category. But that’s just fine; folks up here don’t really know all that much about composers in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, so an introductory article is quite appropriate to the venue. Still, referring to that vastness down there as "Latin" America is a misnomer—a lot of folks in Latin America aren’t Latin, after all. And obviously one can’t make any kind of blanket statements about the music of so many people. In my article lead, I point out that Latin America accounts for 14% of the Earth’s land surface, and has an estimated population of 568 million people. It’s a heck of a lot bigger than the United States.
But we talk rather glibly about "United States" music (sometimes calling it "American", which under the circumstances is definitely not a good idea), even though the culture of the US ranges from Anglic to German to Scandinavian to Czech to Russian to Polish to Chinese to Japanese to Korean to Vietnamese to Guinean to Kenyan to Bantu to Zulu to Wolof to Arab to Hindu to Sri Lankan to…well, you get my drift. Personally I can discern very little in common between, say, John Adams and Walter Piston, both 20th-century United States composers. Or even between John Adams and Charles Wuorinen, successive composers-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony.
So if we can talk about "United States" music or "Canadian" music, or even "North American" music, I guess we can bite the bullet and talk about "Latin American" music, as long as we maintain a clear understanding that "Latin American" is only a thin blanket covering for what is more properly "Brazilian music" and "Argentine music" and "Mexican music" and "Cuban music" and "Peruvian music" and "Venezuelan music" and so forth. And those subcategories have subcategories of their own: Brazil’s music history is just as varied, just as deep, as is that of the United States, so to speak of "Brazilian music" imposes a false unity on a kaleidoscopic reality. Ditto other countries. And that’s just from the European settlement (oh, all right: conquest) onwards. The pre-Columbian cultures developed their own musical cultures, tragically mostly lost. We can make some educated guesses about Aztec or Incan music, starting from the evidence of surviving musical instruments, as well as the music of those cultures’ descendants—transformed though they are by European and North American influences. And those tribes that have maintained their aloofness may not have had much in common with those large civilizations such as the Incas, Mayas, or Aztecs.
So I consult the standard books on the subject—Appleby on Brazilian music, Chavez on Mexico, Béhague and Slonimsky on Latin America in general, Stevenson on the Aztecs and Incas, those industrious authors of the Pan American Union for their handy and broad coverage. I listen to a lot of music covering many centuries and millions of square miles. The early 19th-century Requiem of Afro-Portuguese priest José Mauricio Nunes Garcia, almost plagiarizing Mozart’s unfinished masterpiece while simultaneously looking ahead into the Romantic era. Various Baroque-era clerical and missionary folk who wrote mostly in a solid Iberian style but paid occasional lip-service to their locale—such as the Franciscan monk Juan Pérez Bocanegra’s 1631 Hanacpachap cussicuinin; apart from the Quechua language it’s indistinguishable from any other polyphonic European piece of the time. I listen to Cesare Siepi sing a lush Verdian aria by Brazil’s Antônio Carlos Gomes. By contrast, the CD accompanying John P. Murphy’s Music in Brazil: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture allows me an entrée to the popular and folk music of Brazil—a real contemporary choros, followed by an equally authentic African-inflected capoeira from northern Brazil, even an amazing electronic DJ thing set to a driving samba beat.
Alberto Ginastera—not just the wild early stuff like Panambí but also the later 12-tonal and post-serialist pieces like Bomarzo or the Cantata para America Magica. Carlos Chávez’s six symphonies, all fire and ice and primitivism and sophisticated modernism. Alberto Williams’s orchestral and piano pieces, never quite escaping from their gracious salon style but nonetheless pointing the way to the nationalists to come. Sylvestre Revueltas’ Sensemayá and Night of the Maya, extraordinary concoctions pulsating with a weird nervous energy. Mozart Camargo Guarnieri’s seven symphonies, treasures that seem to have escaped just about everybody’s notice up here in the north. Of course Heitor Villa-Lobos, he of the umpty-million compositions, very much part of my life recently as I wrote a long program note on Bachianas brasileiras No. 9, and something of an idée-fixe for me in general; I’m the only person I know who is actually familiar with all his twelve symphonies or that huge series of chorôs for various media. One-off guys like Copland and Bernstein. And that astonishing blend of judaism, Romania, Ukraine, Argentina, and the United States named Osvaldo Golijov.
Domingo Santa Cruz. Astor Piazzolla. José Pablo Moncayo Garcia. Oscar Lorenzo Fernândez. Armando José Fernandes. Blas Galindo. Juventino Rosas. Felipe Villanueva. Arturo Márquez. Innocente Carreño. Antonio Estevéz. Evencio Castellanos. Aldemaro Romero. Traditionalists, romanticists, classicists, nationalists, primitivists, modernists, atonalists, serialists, post-serialists, post-romanticists, neo-classicists.
There’s no way in the world I can cover them all, and I’m not going to try. I’m just hitting what I see as the high points, sometimes using one particular composer as representative for all the rest. Heavens, what an exploration…and even if I wind up acquiring no more depth than your basic tourist off the Golden Princess on a shopping spree in downtown Rio, it is proving to be quite a memorable journey.