From Chicago to New York: one of the fastest trains...of thought |1|

By Pablo Santiago Chin

On May 16th of 2017 I was asked by the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago and the CSO Latino Alliance to share some words about Joaquín Turina’s music during a pre-concert talk by the CSO. Admittedly not knowing much about Turina, what only came to mind was the charms of a guitar concerto I used to hear often in my walkman |2| (back in the 90’s) during the bus rides to school in Costa Rica. Upon little research I found out the concerto was by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who was Italian! (though contemporary of Turina). After a conference call with the organizers of the event I found relief in knowing I was expected to share my experiences as a composer in order to create a sense of empathy with Turina.

Sooner than later, after bringing more pieces of this puzzle together (including the other works in the program, Turina’s style, biographical data, and historical context) I found myself scrabbling on the puzzle of my present situation: moving from Chicago to New York City in September, after living a third of my life in the windy city. While nationalism is what drives the curation of this CSO concert, in  that it brings together seemingly dissimilar composers like Dvořák, Gershwin, and Turina, migration is what I identify with in this conflation of events, i.e. the CSO program, Turina and myself as composers of “Classical” music, and my current mood before moving to NYC.

Turina’s transition from adolescence to adulthood overlapped with the Spanish-American war (1898) after which Spain lost its last colonies: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines and Guam. The once empire on which the sun never sets must have felt orphan, nostalgic about the past grandeur of Charles V and his son, Philip II of Spain, and caught behind the modernity that Napoleon failed to install, instead inspiring Goya’s bloody depictions of resistance, ever since resounding in the Spanish psyche. A contemporary of Turina and also native of Seville, poet and thinker Antonio Machado spoke of the two Spains, a concept that reached its height during the civil war of 1936, in a fierce battle to once and for all define the course of Spain’s blurred identity. 

Oh, to be born again, and to walk on ahead after finding the lost path! (Rebirth, by Machado)

In the wake of the National States instigated by the French Revolution, composers drew from folklore to draw the line between the music of their nation and those from other lands. Hence Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances for example. What is ironic is that a French composer, Emmanuel Chabrier inserted Spanish music into the Classical tradition with the impetus of his orchestral rhapsody, España (1883); and following his footsteps, Debussy’s Iberia (1905-12) and Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole (1907-08) enlightened Spanish music with the modern sounds of the new century. By the time the major orchestral works of Manuel de Falla and Joaquín Turina (modelled after the French) were heard, the new nationalist wave led by Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók had matured, rapidly evolving by the latter, and even left behind by the former, now a neo-classicist. 

Everything in our soul Is governed by a mysterious hand.  We know nothing of our souls, Incomprehensible, silent. (“Rebirth”, by Machado)

Often, historical periods or artistic movements are embodied in dual metonymies; thus the Baroque is Bach/Handel, Classicism is Haydn/Mozart, Impressionism is Debussy/Ravel, or Modernity is Stravinsky/Schoenberg. Spanish Modernity finds its metonymy in De Falla/Turina, both of whom coincided in Paris when the sounds of the 20th century bloomed along the Viennese premieres of the so-called atonal composers. Debussy’s La Mer and Jeux, or Stravinsky’s three ballets for Sergei Diaghilev culminating with Le Sacre du Printemps testify to this historical period. Around this time Turina moved to Paris, so did Machado. Never Machado knew other country.      

My childhood is memories of a courtyard in Seville And a sunlit garden with ripening lemons; My youth, twenty years in the lands of Castile; My story, some events I would rather not tell. (“Portrait”, Machado)

Machado died in exile in France, months before the onset of WWII. For his disgrace he succumbed abroad to the trauma of the Civil War. It wasn’t the case for Federico García Lorca, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, murdered few months after the war began. While Machado was pigeonholed as member of the Generación del 98, Lorca was a representative of the other constellation of luminaries from the Spanish letters, the Generación del 27. But why is Lorca in my train of thoughts? The magnificence of his verses transcended while living in New York City during the imminent menace of the Great Depression. The native city of George Gershwin left a tremendous impression on Lorca, like Paris did on Gershwin around the same time. The former wrote A Poet in New York while the latter composed An American in Paris.

Under the multiplications is a drop of duck’s blood.Beneath the divisions, the sailor’s blood-drop.Under the sums, a river of delicate blood; a river flows singing by the suburb and dormitory; is sea-breeze, silver, cement, in the counterfeit dawn of New York. (“New York (Office and Denunciation)”, Lorca)

Lorca and Gershwin were born the same year, 1898. The American died a year after the Spanish, in 1937 |3|. Short lives, immense legacies. Soon I will also live in New York City. Soon I will take walks there and be around the campus of Columbia University |4|, where Lorca studied English; soon I will return from walks like he did. Will I leave my hair grow, Heaven-murdered, among shapes turning serpent and shapes seeking crystal (from “Poems of Solitude at Columbia University”)? I know I will not find the pompous Paris Gershwin did. But neither may I merge tragic despair with the anonymity of breathing from the massive iron and concrete. Lorca left Spain motivated by romantic failure. I leave Chicago motivated by love |5|.

Gray sponge: which is mine!The neck newly severed: which is mine.The great river: mine.The wind from the zenith that can never be mine: which is mine.And my love’s cutting-edge. O wound-working edge!  (“Christmas on the Hudson,” Lorca) 

Footnotes

|1| The title makes reference to Steve Reich’s string quartet Different Trains
|2| I still have this walkman from my teens. With it I had hopelessly tried for the past year to listen to a tape by local label Parlour Tapes+, but the “jurassic” device is broken. This tape features an ambitious six-movement work for violin, chamber ensemble and electronics by Chicago-based Katherine Young. With PT+ I happened to have released an album two days after the CSO pre-concert talk. This album celebrated the fifth anniversary season of Fonema Consort, ensemble I co-founded and lead. In this album there is a piece by Young, and another one by myself. Mine is composed after a labyrinthine master story by Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The last two words of this title also stand for the name of the closing track in Young’s 2009 solo bassoon album “Further Secret Origins.” This album displays both Katie’s depth and imagination as a composer, and serious commitment as re-inventor of the instrument. I am afraid the curiosity that drives Katie to push the boundaries of arguably the most intricate wind instrument is lacking in most classically trained players. Such was my impression from the CSO bassoonist with whom I shared the Turina-focused panel. When asked about composers he had worked with, he said that composers prefer to write for flute and clarinet, in my opinion diverging the attention from just plainly answering: “I don’t normally work with living composers/I can’t name any composer I have worked with.” Then he looked at me and graciously suggested: “maybe Pablo will compose his next piece for the bassoon.” Outside the humorous allusion, a week later I’m thinking: not only many classical performers don’t normally work with living composers, but neither would occur to them that commissioning a composer is a serious endeavor to explore and expand their approach to the instrument (as opposed to a composer just waking up one day thinking “I will compose a piece for bassoon!”). 

One more comment by this bassoonist made me raise an eyebrow. Asked about the concert program, he encouraged people to listen to the folk tunes referenced by the three pieces, and focus on how classical composers elevated popular music. Did Gershwin really elevate a tradition Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington or Billie Holiday (to name a few) forged and sublimated? Did Dvořák refine Slavic tradition or Turina civilized Andalusian variants of Arabic folklore simply by giving equal temperament, “proper” progressions, and orchestral sound waves to “primitive” melodies? Béla Bartók, being a pioneer in the discipline of studying music folklore, distinguished “popular urban music” from “peasant music,” the former arising from upper classes as a mélange of “hackneyed city music and a certain exotic variation of [...] folk music.” The latter originated in the peasantry and characterized by its purity and “spontaneous expression of the people’s musical instinct.” Moreover, Bartók considered the peasant’s melodies to be “the embodiment of an artistic expression of the highest order,” though “few people appreciate melodies such as these; indeed, the majority of conservative, trained musicians hold them in contempt.” What is surprising is that almost a century later major academic sources spread the notion that routing the “unrefined” rural, cultural traditions through the urban dilettante, and later through the “Maestro,” folk tunes can find a “dignified” niche in the concert hall. Not differently from the CSO bassoonist, American historian Richard Crawford writes in the Grove Music Online that Rhapsody in Blue purported to demonstrate that the new, rhythmically vivacious dance called jazz, which most concert musicians and critics considered beneath them, was elevated by the ‘symphonic’ arrangements in which [the piece commissioner’s, Paul] Whiteman’s band specialized.
|3| I have a deep curiosity about coincidental birth and death dates of major, analogous figures. For example, Shakespeare and Cervantes died on April 23 of 1616, similar to Bergman and Antonioni dying on July 30 of 2007. Not less interesting is the fact that Pablo Picasso, Pablo Neruda and Pablo Cassals died the same year, 1973, which inspired Argentine singer, Alberto Cortez’s song “Eran Tres.” 
|4| In September of the present year I will move to NYC with my wife, Bethany Younge, who will enter the PhD composition program at Columbia University.

Post-thoughts:

As in other contexts (a thanksgiving dinner, a conversation over a flight, or a grant application!), in this conference I was asked about the Latin heritage in my music. I am not especially sensitive (to not say offended by) about the tiresome conversation of identity politics, except when opportunistically used in particular agendas to access resources. As a former teacher of Galant Music at Northwestern University used to say about reductionist looks of historical eras, there is some truth in these generalizations. There must be some truth about traces of my upbringing and early surroundings in the way I experience music. But during the conference my response instead pointed towards how new environments impact an artist’s work. Two pieces of mine from my first few years in Chicago are partial responses to new phenomena: a cardinal singing in the midst of a rough February winter, and the sound of the silence by lake Michigan after a blizzard.       

From “Rojo sobre Blanco” from 2008-09
Like a distant sun at dusk, lightly reddening the horizon but also yielding to the embracing white;like traces of fresh blood on the snow, still warm and alive, covered and uncovered by indifferent playful winds;like a tiny, fragile, red bird, singing his solitude on top of woven weary branches, a song lost on the transparent silence of the ice; like the penetrating voice of an oboe, at last emerging from colorless resonances of a small ensemble. 

From “De mi memoria fluyen soledades ajenas” from 2009 De mi canto, que brota y se propaga por espacios insípidos, fluyen soledades ajenas (From my song, that blossoms and propagates through insipid spaces, foreign solitudes flow)