Third Shade of Grey—Latin Influences

Well, Wikipedia says he’s South America’s best-known composer, and it’s arguably true. If someone tells you he or she knows only one piece of Latin-American music, you can be fairly sure it’s the Bachianas Brasileiras Number 5, scored for eight cellos and soprano. And yes, it’s a sultry, steamy affair, a bit more Brazil than Bach.

And also according to Wikipedia, the intention of the Bachianas Brasileiras was never to fuse the native music of Brazil with Johann Sebastian Bach, but to use some of the counterpoint and harmonic elements of the baroque period along with traditional Brazilian folk tunes.

And Villa-Lobos was colorful, to be sure, at least in his early days. Born in Rio de Janeiro, he ventured in his twenties out into the “dark interior” of the country, and came back with tales of near escapes from cannibals. He also, he stated, realized that he would never completely follow the European tradition in music: the folk music of his native land would always influence his work.

Don’t think, though, that this is a composer who is unfamiliar with the boulevards of Paris—he spent some five or six years there, working with Varèse, Aaron Copland, Milhaud (whom he had met in Brazil), Stokowski, and Pablo Picasso. So he got around.

Or tried to. At a later point, a military dictator blew in—they tend to in South America—and stopped all money from going out of the country. That meant that Villa-Lobos was stuck in the country, but not a problem, because he became the director of the Superindendência de Educação Musical e Artística—right, don’t have to know Portuguese to get that one—and also wrote the national anthem. He wrote sufficient amounts of propaganda that he soon was seen as reactionary, especially among the younger generation.

He also was no slouch at marketing himself, saying at one point, “I don’t use folklore, I am folklore,” and at another point, in reference to his tour of Europe, “I haven’t come to learn, I have come to show what I have made up to now.”

And this, then, is part of what he showed them….    

Not bad, hunh? Anna Moffo knows how to do it….

Now then, don’t imagine that Villa-Lobos is the only composer on the continent—there’s also Ástor Piazzolla, an Argentinian born in 1921 who spent most of his childhood in Greenwich Village and Little Italy in New York City. He was obsessed with his father’s tango records, and though he studied with a pianist who herself was a student of Rachmaninoff, he turned to playing tango when he returned to Argentina in 1935.

Like Villa-Lobos, Piazzolla gets around, eventually landing in Paris, where he studies with the woman who ranks as the all-time composition teacher of the 20^th century, Nadia Boulanger. He tries to impress her with his “mainstream” or “Western” compositions—Boulanger hems and haws. Then he plays her a tango, and she says, “hey, that’s it.”

OK—it’s like having the Delphic oracle give you directions for your life; he goes back to Buenos Aires and starts a group. And yes, he composes both tangoes and more mainstream works. And the tangoes merge elements of jazz, baroque music, and Western music—the moment I heard the piece below, I thought, ‘he’s had to have studied with Boulanger.’ Her influence is all over the place.

This piece, written in homage to his father after Piazzolla had learned of his death (Piazzolla was in Puerto Rico at the time), is classic….  

Of course, you really can’t talk about South American music without getting into Alberto Ginastera, also Argentinian but born of a Catalan father and an Italian mother. (Time out—the Italian influence is so strong that in Buenos Aires, Spanish is spoken with an Italian inflection. Oh—and what’s an Argentinian? An Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he’s an Englishman.)

At any rate, Ginastera studied at the conservatory, later studied with Copland for a couple of years, and finally ended up living and dying in Geneva, Switzerland. Notwithstanding, his music incorporates Argentine folk themes; much of his music, reports Wikipedia, “were inspired by the gauchesco tradition.” (Don’t know the term? Don’t worry, neither does the computer. The gaucho is the Argentine version of the cowboy….)

Ginastera got noticed by people other than classical music freaks when the rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer took the fourth movement of his first piano concerto and adapted it. A member of the group ran down to Argentina to clear it with the master, who responded “diabólico”. It was one of those moments when knowing Spanish (or English) would have helped—Emerson left the room crushed, not knowing that the Master, as his wife would write, had felt “you have captured the essence of my music, no one has ever done that before.”

Right—you know what’s coming.... 

Sorry, I can’t, I just can’t leave you with that in your ears—Ginastera’s approval to the contrary not withstanding. So let’s cheat a bit, and give you a composition that, if not from Latin America, is at least Spanish and of the 20^th century. And if you’ve never heard Rodrigo’s Adagio from the Concierto de Aranjuez—get ready. It’ll change your life…..