Opinion

Carol A. Hess is a musicologist teaching at the University of California, Davis. A specialist in classical music of the Spanish-speaking world, she has received several awards for her work as well as recognition for teaching and mentoring. She has also taught in Latin America and Spain. Currently she is working on a book on Aaron Copland’s cultural diplomacy in Latin America.

 

What can be done today with the time-honored form of the concerto? In this article, I’ll introduce two examples of this genre by the Latin American composer Ricardo Lorenz (b. 1961). The first is Canciones de Jara: Concerto for Viola and Orchestra Inspired by Songs of Víctor Jara. (I’ll refer to it simply as Canciones de Jara.) The second is Pataruco: Concerto for Venezuelan Maracas and Wind Symphony. Both are filled with surprises. (Lorenz has also composed concertos for violin, piano, and recorder as well as a Concerto for Orchestra.) I’ll then touch on two of Lorenz’s recent CDs to give readers a taste of his remarkable music. Last, I’ll discuss another dimension of Lorenz’s multifaceted artistic personality, his reimagining of the Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim, a project that involved thirty-seven composers and to which he brings a decidedly Latin American perspective.

            Although born in Venezuela, Lorenz has made his career in the United States, where he moved in 1980. He completed his master’s degree at Indiana University, where he worked with the Chilean composer Juan Orrego-Salas. After completing his doctorate at the University of Chicago, Lorenz returned to Indiana to serve as interim director of the Latin American Music Center at the University. At present, he teaches at Michigan State University. His works have been played by prestigious ensembles such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the New World Symphony in venues including Carnegie Hall, the Ravinia Festival, and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. A Latin American composer with an international reach, Lorenz has been applauded in France, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, Turkey, and South Korea although, to be sure, he maintains strong ties with Latin America. He is especially interested in building bridges between the United States and Cuba and has lectured at Havana’s Casa de las Américas. On one trip to the island, he began researching a Cuban legend on which he plans to base an opera. Among the Latin American musicians with whom he has collaborated are Tito Puente and David Sánchez, along with well-known ensembles such as the Folkloristas de México and Tiempo Libre.

 

Ricardo Lorenz

Canciones de Jara. It was one such collaboration that inspired Lorenz’s Canciones de Jara. The well-known Chilean violist Roberto Díaz (b. 1965) commissioned the viola concerto while serving as principal violist of the celebrated Philadelphia Orchestra. Díaz had good reason for wanting to add to the literature: the viola has not always been treated as kindly in the medium of the concerto, at least not with the same interest as, say, the violin or piano. (Berlioz, Hindemith, and Schnittke all recognized the viola’s power and composed some fine examples of this genre.) Delighted to fulfill Díaz’s request, Lorenz began contemplating various ways to approach the viola. In doing so, he found himself recalling the Chilean singer Víctor Jara, whose songs had captivated Lorenz as a boy back in Venezuela in the 1970s, when he heard them played on his sister’s turntable.

            Jara’s story is well known among aficionados of nueva canción (new song), a genre that arose in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, many Latin Americans were becoming convinced that local values were fast becoming extinct in a world increasingly dominated by homogenized mass culture and consumerism. Musicians such as Atahualpa Yupanqui (Argentina) and Violeta Parra (Chile) bucked this trend by traveling through rural communities of their respective countries and collecting songs. Like most nueva canción artists, they did not sing the music they gathered on such journeys but instead composed songs strongly influenced by traditional music, often with lyrics that defied the status quo, either explicitly or metaphorically. Many nueva canción singers employed Andean instruments as a sign of solidarity with indigenous populations. The kena, one of several types of vertical flutes, and the charango, a guitar-like instrument made from an armadillo shell with steel strings, often figure in nueva canción. Other artists preferred to rely solely on an acoustic guitar and their own voice.  

            In 1970, Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile. A socialist who was trained as a medical doctor, Allende aimed to improve education and health care for the poor. He also sought to nationalize industry and banking, which meant defying local elites who collaborated with foreign-owned, profit-driven businesses, such as the big U.S. mining companies. Given that the United States massively funded his opponent and fomented labor strikes to frustrate the electorate (largely through the CIA), Allende’s electoral victory was nothing short of remarkable. The Chilean president was also an enthusiastic supporter of nueva canción. Even as a candidate, he attended the nueva canción festival at the National Stadium in the Chilean capital Santiago in 1969, where he stood under a banner that proclaimed, 'there can be no revolution without songs'. After the election, a government-subsidized label DICAP (Discoteca del Cantar Popular) released several LPs of nueva canción. Not only was nueva canción part of the soundscape of the Allende years but Jara was one of its most celebrated artists.

            Although Jara sometimes performed with other musicians, more often than not he relied on his guitar and the distinctive sound of his own voice. His songs aligned with Allende’s socialist values. In one, 'Manifiesto' (Manifesto), he declares that his guitar is 'not for the rich'. In another, '¿Quién mató a Carmencita?' (Who Killed Carmencita?), Jara sings of a young woman from a working-class Santiago neighborhood who, deceived by 'lies and bottled happiness', commits suicide, a victim of mindless consumerism. In the bitter and dramatic 'Preguntas por Puerto Montt' (On Behalf of Puerto Montt), Jara excoriates—and identifies by name—the government official who in 1969 ordered an attack on impoverished squatters in the Chilean city of Puerto Montt. In 'Aquí me quedo' (I’ll Stay Here), Jara sets a poem of the same title by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904–73), who believed in many of the same values as Jara and Allende. Unlike many of Jara’s songs, 'Aquí me quedo' was jointly written, with Patricio Castillo. Although tensions between Allende’s government and the right-wing opposition were mounting, both were nonetheless convinced that peaceful protest could effect change and in 'Aquí me quedo' Jara sang of a united country in which Chileans are all of the same mind and in which all the 'rich foreigners go back to Miami'. His simple declaration 'I’ll stay' is as dramatic as any of his musical utterances and shows him at his most optimistic.

            Such optimism was short-lived. In that era of anti-communist zeal, U.S. officials were fearful of the direction Chile was taking. Having nervously watched Allende’s socialist government, the administration of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon took action on September 11, 1973, the 'other September 11', as some have called that fateful day in Chilean history. U.S. fire bombers attacked the presidential palace in Santiago, after which Allende committed suicide and General Augusto Pinochet seized power. These events are presented in historical context in the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, inaugurated in 2010. Also well worth seeing is the 1982 film Missing, by Costa-Gavras, awarded the Palme d’Or and depicting the crackdown Pinochet immediately instituted, which involved torturing and 'disappearing' his opponents.

            Among these was Jara. Pinochet was determined to kill nueva canción, so keenly did he and his allies feel its influence. Days after the coup, Jara was tortured and executed. Legend has it that he died singing. But the assault on nueva canción continued. The kena and the charango were prohibited and DICAP was ordered to erase all its master tapes; later, the company itself was shut down and its archives were destroyed. Pinochet’s goal was to create a cultural blackout (apagón cultural) to erase any memory of the Allende era. In Canciones de Jara (Songs of Jara), however, Lorenz keeps Jara’s memory alive by combining nueva canción songs with the classical concerto. In doing so, Lorenz faces all the challenges the genre implies. After all, the term 'concerto', deriving from the verb 'concertare', can be understood in two ways: (1) to compete, in its Italian translation, or (2) to cohere, in its Latin translation. Over history, composers have addressed these parameters by searching for the perfect balance between those moments in which the soloist stands out (competes) against the rest of the ensemble (tutti) and blends in (coheres).

            Thanks to Díaz’s commission, Lorenz completed Canciones de Jara in 2010. While working on the piece, he became increasingly aware not only of the beauty, variety, and inspiring social message of Jara’s songs—recalled from his childhood in Latin America—but also Jara’s performance style, with his direct and dramatic delivery. Here, Lorenz found a link with Díaz’s playing, the intensity and nuance of which he compared to Jara’s singing. As Lorenz declared, 'the tone [Díaz is] able to produce reminded me of the human voice'. It was these ineffable yet singularly identifiable qualities that constituted the bridge between the rarefied world of the classical concerto and the street-smart orientation of the protest song.

            Lorenz chose four of Jara’s songs on which to base his concerto, planning a total of four movements for the thirty-minute work. The songs include the hopeful 'Aquí me quedo' and the desperate 'Preguntas por Puerto Montt', in which Jara rages over the murder of squatters. The other two songs are equally famous. 'Te recuerdo Amanda' (I Remember You, Amanda) describes the experience of Amanda, a woman who loves a factory worker, Manuel, who is one day disappeared. 'Canción del minero' (Song of the Miner) paints a dire picture of the miner’s lot, which includes backbreaking labor in unsafe conditions while CEOs and multinational companies profit from his efforts.

            We might expect Lorenz to weave the actual melodies of Jara’s songs into his score, since at least some listeners would recognize them. (Díaz would not have been among them: although Chilean, he was raised in Atlanta and was unfamiliar with Jara’s music.) Musical quotation generally raises some interesting questions. For example, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos quotes the Brazilian national anthem in his Third Symphony, completed in 1919 just after World War I ended and in which the Brazilian navy participated. In the final movement, Villa-Lobos depicts a battle by quoting not only the Brazilian national anthem but the British and French national anthems as well. Whereas the Brazilian national anthem might be clear enough to Brazilians, other listeners might not appreciate the reference. Does failure to recognize the quoted material affect the listening experience? If the quoted material is recognized, what does it mean? In Villa-Lobos’s symphony, the intention is clear: Brazil is firmly on the side of the Allies in World War I, i.e. the British and the French. Similarly, in Canciones de Jara Lorenz crafts his own approach to quotation with a similar long-range strategy.

            In three of the work’s four movements, Lorenz avoids direct quotation. Rather, he takes each song as a point of departure for mood, captured in the dialogue between the viola solo and the orchestra and in accordance with the premises of the classical concerto. As Lorenz himself notes, the songs 'provide a general narrative framework and a particular melodic character' to each movement, such that the viola effectively acts as Jara’s voice. The viola conveys tenderness in 'Te acuerdo Amanda' (movement 1), bitterness in 'Preguntas por Pedro Montt' (movement 2), and hope in 'Aquí me quedo' (movement 3). To be sure, in 'Aquí me quedo', Lorenz highlights the 'narrative framework' by conveying the political tension of the moment: he inserts a siren into the orchestral texture, a sound we associate with street demonstrations.

            It is only in the final movement, 'Canción del minero', that we hear a direct quotation. As the viola riffs on the basic materials of 'Canción del minero', the music trudges along, descending into a state of resignation. Lorenz decided that an acoustic guitar—Jara’s instrument and rarely part of a symphony orchestra—would directly quote the song. One challenge was to ensure that the guitar could be heard above the rest of the ensemble. An obvious solution would be a microphone. Lorenz, however, indicates in his score that the guitar be amplified through a megaphone, such as those used in street protests of the 1970s, clasped against the body of the instrument and thus offering a new perspective on the age-old question of whether the performing forces in a concerto should cohere or compete. The work concludes with only a dim echo of Jara, a musical ghost, as Lorenz puts it.

            Besides the full symphony orchestra, Canciones de Jara calls for harp and a large percussion section. Lorenz divides the percussion into four groups, each containing five to ten instruments: bells, tambourine, crotales (tuned cymbals), and timpani. Among the pitched instruments is a crystal goblet, the unusual timbre of which can enhance the quality of an entire symphony orchestra.

 

Pataruco: Concerto for Venezuelan Maracas and Orchestra. The gringo who has diligently studied Spanish is invariably taken aback by the sheer number of regional expressions throughout the Spanish-speaking world. (The uncertainty this produces is especially acute when one orders in restaurants since names of foods can differ widely from one speech community to another.) 'Pataruco' is Venezuelan Spanish for someone who says or does something provocative, perhaps to the point of coarseness, and whose behavior calls attention to itself. This fact alone would seem to relate to the nature of the concerto itself—concertare—and the balance the composer must strike between cohering and competing.

            Maracas are seldom thrust into such a competing role, at least not in classical music; indeed, they may be known to many listeners largely through Carmen Miranda-style knock-offs or as an obligatory instrument in ersatz 'Latin' music. In Venezuela, however, a long tradition of maraca playing has prevailed, one associated with several virtuosic techniques. (Some of these techniques are showcased in the cadenza of Pataruco, that is, from around 13:24 to 14:44.)  Venezuelans are especially partial to the instrument: as Lorenz explains, 'in Venezuela, the joke goes, maracas are such a cultural fixture that the name of the nation’s capital had to be changed to "Caracas" in order not to make this fixation so obvious'. Venezuelan maraca techniques have also attracted outsiders: the U.S. percussionist Ed Harrison learned them during a stint with the now defunct Caracas Philharmonic Orchestra and remained fascinated with Venezuelan maraca playing when he returned to the United States. While a member of the Chicago Lyric Orchestra, Harrison gave workshops on these performance techniques and explored whatever music he could that incorporated them. He and Lorenz became acquainted and Lorenz wrote Pataruco for him. Several percussionists have tackled the work, both in the Americas and Europe. Among them is Manuel Rangel of Venezuela, who is the featured soloist in an arrangement for wind symphony, which can be heard on Lorenz’s recent CD, King of Mangoberry. Pataruco is filled with humor and high spirits, whether in the jeering tutti utterances at the outset, the artful melting of one woodwind timbre into another in the central section, or the persistent motives of the final minutes.

            The rest of this CD contains the delightful King Mangoberry: Five Allegories for Wind Symphony, based on the idea of organic unity. (Other movements refer to 'cherrygus', i.e. cherry and asparagus, and 'walconut', walnut and coconut.) Beneath its witty exterior, however, lie profound questions on diversity and how it can be achieved in the world today. Also addressing borders, separation, and possibilities for coming together is El Muro (The Wall). In it, Lorenz combines several Latin styles (Colombian cumbia, Peruvian huayno, Mexican son among others) through a series of folk-derived riffs. But the piece also questions the very premises on which walls are constructed: for privacy? for protection? to construct a fortress against the unfamiliar? These ideas return in another CD of Lorenz’s music called Open Borders, a recording of chamber music that takes its name from a solo cello work Lorenz composed in 2006 but that now, in the age of Covid-19, is painfully relevant as we meticulously strive to distance ourselves from other human beings. Another work, Cecilia in Blue and Green, concerns the distance imposed by mental deterioration, a state of isolation experienced by Lorenz’s late mother Cecilia. In sum, throughout Lorenz’s music, humor is never far from the fragility of human experience.

 

Latin Music and the Broadway Musical? When we think of composers who have written hit musicals that incorporate Latin music—Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights—Stephen Sondheim does not necessarily leap to mind. But a project spearheaded by the pianist Anthony DeMare, who specializes in avant-garde piano music by the likes of John Cage and Meredith Monk, affords a glimpse into new interpretive dimensions to Sondheim’s well-crafted and justly celebrated music. For the triple album Liaisons: Reimagining Sondheim from the Piano, DeMare called on thirty-seven composers to seek inspiration from Sondheim’s music and write their own reinterpretations (reimaginings) of whatever songs they might choose, scored for solo piano. Besides Lorenz, composers the stature of William Bolcom, Steve Reich, Wynton Marsalis, Tania León, Michael Daugherty, and Fredric Rzewski were among these who participated. (Rzewksi, incidentally, wrote a monumental set of virtuosic piano variations, 36 Variations on 'The People United Will Never Be Defeated!' by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún, in honor of the Chilean people struggling under Pinochet.) According to DeMare, the project 'affirms that [Stephen Sondheim’s] music is as much at home in the concert hall as it is on the Broadway stage'. Naturally the composers were somewhat uneasy to learn that Sondheim himself would hear the results. As it turned out, he was quite pleased, observing that several composers had 'latched on to' certain elements of his music in ways that genuinely surprised him, taking paths he never would have imagined himself. (Not only that, but he said it was 'fun' to listen to these re-creations, the majority of which were derived from Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, A Little Night Music, Into the Woods, and Company.)

            In his reimagining of 'The Worst Pies in London', Lorenz merges this famous lament with 'A Little Priest', which occurs at the end of act 1. In the former, Mrs. Lovett despairs of her failing pastry business. In the latter, Sweeny Todd, consumed by resentment for having been unjustly imprisoned, arrives with Mrs. Lovett at the simple plan that will fulfill their seemingly unrelated needs: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street will murder his high-society clients with his trusty razor so that Mrs. Lovett can fill her pies with their flesh. In Lorenz’s hands, 'The Worst Pies in London' becomes 'The Worst [Empanadas] in London'. (Empanadas, the small pies eaten throughout the Spanish-speaking world, can be stuffed with meat, cheese, vegetables, hard-boiled eggs or some combination thereof.) As for what element of the Sondheim original Lorenz 'latches on to', we can hear the element of surprise that so often marks Sondheim’s scores, often through sudden changes of tonal center. Where Sondheim changes tonal center, however, Lorenz changes the groove in this groove-heavy work, often to humorous effect. Lorenz’s humor is in his 'performance instructions'. Not only does he mark the score 'exuberant and meaty', but he notes apropos one change of groove 'this [empanada] is made with meat of awful ballroom tango dancer'. And in another, the pianist reads 'this one made with meat belonging to merengue dancer with skanky dress'; another change of groove represents an empanada 'made with meat of pseudo-Latin jazz pianist'. Each is intended as a comment on the stereotypical view that U.S. Americans typically have of Latino culture. Thus the work asks the question 'what does it mean to be authentically Latino and what does it mean to be an imitation?' As usual in Lorenz’s music, weighty matters lie below the ingratiating humor.

Ricardo Lorenz discusses 'The Worst [Empanadas] in London' on his personal website: http://ricardolorenz.com/news/the-worst-empanadas-in-london-lorenz-pays-tribute-to-stephen-sondheim-in-2015-ecm-new-series-cd-release/

 

 

 

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