En la esencia de los estilos y otros ensayos (review)

En la esencia de los estilos y otros ensayos (review) Alan West-Duran Latin American Music Review, Volume 23, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2002, pp. 150-154 (Review) Published by University of Texas Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lat.2002.0012 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/19477 [ Access provided at 19 May 2020 19:19 GMT from Western Libraries ] 150 : Reviews vigilante”—y un oído, añadiríamos—“para no olvidar que esa lánguida atmósfera nos nutrió y que ese pesimismo acompasado mecía, en la heredad, los festones de la hiedra”.8 Ricardo Miranda, Universidad Veracruzana Notas 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Me refiero tanto a la publicación del Diario de Morales (Melesio Morales, Mi libro verde, México, CONACULTA, 2000) como a la publicación del catálogo de obras del mismo autor (CENIDIM, 2000). Carlos Chávez. “La música”, en México y la Cultura, México, Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1946, 532–33. Se trata de un texto crucial y por demás significativo, pues en él Chávez no sólo esboza el transcurrir de la música de México desde sus origenes sino que lo hace—según las palabras Jaime Torres Bodet, editor del libro—“como representante del pensamiento de la República acerca de lo que México, en términos esenciales, ha realizado en el campo de la cultura” (Introd., xiii). En realidad, veintidós pesos y cincuenta centavos, pues el recibo ampara dos obras: Sobre las olas y el chotís Lazos de amor. Helmut Brenner: Juventino Rosas, His Life, His Work, His Time, Warren, Harmonie Park Press, 2000, xix. Ramón López Velarde: “Melodía criolla”, en Obras (Don de febrero y otras crónicas), México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 477–78. Cfr. Carlos Chávez: “La música”, op. cit. El mismo “error” será repetido casi cuarenta años después cuando ni Rosas ni su famoso vals sean mencionados en una “historia” de la música mexicana publicada por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Cfr. Gloria Carmona: “Período de la Independencia a la Revolución”, vol. 3, editado por Julio Estrada, La música de México, México, UNAM, 1984). Tampoco hay una discusión técnica de la obra de Rosas. Sin embargo, Brenner ha emprendido discusiones de esta índole en distintos artículos. En particular, tal enfoque define su ensayo. Ramón López Velarde, op. cit., 479. ORBÓN, JULIÁN. En la esencia de los estilos y otros ensayos. Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2000. 165 pp., photos, music. Alejo Carpentier said “Julián Orbón is the most unique and promising figure of the new Cuban school” when the composer was nineteen (Carpenter 1946, 336). At twenty-eight years of age, Orbón’s Tres versiones sinfónicas (1953) won an award from a jury that consisted of Kleiber, Adolfo Reviews : 151 Salazar, Varèse, and Villa-Lobos. Orbón (1925–91) was the musical prodigy and genius of the Orígenes generation that also published a Cuban literary magazine of the same name from 1944 to 1956, and included the likes of José Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier, Eliseo Diego, Fina García Marruz, and Angel Gaztelu. In this collection of essays—three of the nine (plus one interview) are from Orígenes—Orbón exhibits all the traits of the “movement”: a refined, often poetic use of language, an ability to evoke what Lezama called “las eras imaginarias” or the “súbito,” and a passionate phenomenological perspective imbued with Scheler, Ortega y Gasset, and Zambrano, filtered through an unorthodox Catholicism. But despite the influences, Orbón’s analyses are never derivative, they bear his unique thought. His wide-ranging interests stretch from the Cancionero de palacio to Schönberg, passing through Wagner, El cancionero de Pedrell, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Carlos Chávez, as well as a long essay on José Martí. Chronologically, the essays are from 1946 (de Falla) to 1987 (Chavez), although most were written from 1946 to 1971. There is an excellent prologue and catalogue of Orbon’s works by Julio Estrada. The prologue includes a biography as well as a musical overview of Orbón’s career. As an essayist Orbón was as omnivorous and eclectic as he was as a composer. Indeed, almost half of the book is taken up by two essays with non-musical topics. Most of the six musical essays are not about Cuban music, so the reader who comes to this collection hoping to find essays on the son, danzón, bolero, or rumba will be disappointed, and equally so of the island’s classical tradition, where Carpentier’s book will be more useful. But Orbón is most Cuban, perhaps, when he is not speaking about Cuban music, in his selection of imagery (water, islands, light), in his delicate balancing act of historical exploration, mytho-poetic flashes of insight, and ethico-philosophical musings, regardless of whether they are embedded in a musical analysis or not. The piece written on the death of Manuel de Falla is part heartfelt evocation of a composer so important to him and part analysis of his artistic significance. Orbón, using striking images of light, situates de Falla within the great Spanish tradition of Góngora, Quevedo, Gracían, Victoria, and Herrera, what he calls a “tormented baroqueness,” but adds that it is an expansive, changing, and open style. Indeed, style is a major concept and concern for Orbón: the next essay is titled “On Transcendental Styles in Post-Wagnerian Music,” from 1947. It begins with a quote from Spengler’s Decline of the West: “With Tristan the last of Faustian art dies. This work is the giant cornerstone that ends [culminates] Western music” (31). In a densely argued ten pages, Orbón takes on the Apollonian and Faustian metaphors of Spengler with Adler’s œuvre in mind, and discusses Hindemith, Schönberg, Stravinsky, Berg, and Debussy, drawing on the writings of Stravinsky and Adolfo Salazar (1890–1958), the influential Spanish contemporary music critic who emigrated to Mexico during the 152 : Reviews Spanish Civil War. Orbón both criticizes and yet seems to embrace Spengler’s organicist metaphors of birth, growth, and decay of civilizations. He warns of using the word decadence too lightly, then proceeds to defend it, saying that it derives from a previously obtained solidity that allows an ideal freedom for the artist, leading to magic, and then creation of the new. Orbón then claims that we now live in a century of magic, not of “magical intuitions” but of “magical reasoning”(36). This allows him to see a continuity, beginning with Bach, between Wagner and Schönberg, referring to the latter as a neoclassical composer, thereby evading the pitfall of many critics that pitted Schönberg against Stravinsky (or Hindemith). Orbón sees them as a part of a Germano-Viennese tradition: Schönberg representing an over-refined baroque miniaturist spirit; Hindemith a Gothic, expansive, broad-stroked one. Three years later Orbón published “En la esencia de los estilos,” a sweeping view of musical styles from medieval to modern, often making links to painting and literature. “Tradicíon y originalidad en la música hispanoamericana” (1962) is an ambitious essay that seeks to define Latin America musically. Orbón, referring to the Conquest, says: [We] were born to history from poetry and through revelation, and this is our most important event. And when this is joined to the solar cultures of the Americas, one of the most powerful syncretisms of history was created. (51) Orbón’s placement of the Colombian enterprise within the realm of the sacred (partly from Columbus’ words that the Conquest of the Indies “fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah”) is understandable, but no longer defensible, if not balanced by the devastation and slaughter that were at its core. Orbón makes a similar flawed point in “Tarsis, Isaías, Colón” (1958) notwithstanding its often brilliant insights, also included in this volume. In trying to explain the cultural-musical syncretism, Orbón draws on the Cancionero de Palacio and other collections. In examining Spanish sources, he also credits Ramos de Paraja (the theory of regular mean-tone temperament), and Antonio de Cabezón, as a maximum representative of the expansiveness of the technique of variation, for laying important musical groundwork. For Orbón, the Cancionero defines “our ontological situation with regard to music” (53) in being a felicitous union of the popular with individual creativity, as well as a fusion of poetry with music. This “transparency,” along with an harmonic ambiance where a tonic-subdominantdominant scheme prevails (along with persistent rhythmic figures) is central to Orbón’s definition of Latin American music. He provides an excellent example by using a Venezuelan song, but probably the best case is his own joining of Martí’s “Versos sencillos” to Joseíto Fernández’s melody of “Guajira Guantanamera.” Orbón ends with a suggestive metaphor of transculturation in describing a Peruvian ceremony involving a condor Reviews : 153 and a bull locked in battle. Some will find Orbón’s definition essentialist, if not lacking in more detail; others might provide counterexamples, but Orbón has warned the reader that his essay is more a theoretical sketch than an ethnomusicological investigation. In “Las Sinfonías de Carlos Chávez” (1987), Orbón discusses the lack of a symphonic tradition in Latin American music. Again, Orbón draws a distinction between the Spanish tradition of variation which is ornamental and circular, versus a Germano-Austrian tradition that is dialectical, lineal, and teleological. Or as Orbón says, relating to themes: “ornamentation illuminates a theme; motifs reason through a theme”(150). The rest of the essay, which focuses on the Sinfonía de Antígona (1st), Sinfonía India (2nd) and the Sexta sinfonía, deals suggestively with certain constants in Chavez’s work, as well as issues of nationalism and folklore. The longest essay is devoted to José Martí, a poetic and philosophical journey that owes much to Vitier and Lezama, as well as Bergson, Simone Weil, and Maz Scheler. Orbón discusses Martí’s notion of love: “In Martí love is not so much an ethical category as an original substance, an endless fountain that floods everything” (129). Orbón claims that Martí’s vision is based on his concept of reality, basis of all morality and mysticism, in being able to name that which is unnameable. He is not claiming that love in Martí does not have an ethical dimension, on the contrary; like Martí, Orbón through his music and creativity, was trying to bring together aesthetics and ethics, a daunting task that troubled many twentieth-century artists. Most of the essay deals quite sophisticatedly with the social dimensions of Martí’s thought in terms of social change, sacrifice, revolution, and human transformation. Over all, the sins of this book are of omission. More material could have been included like Orbón’s delightful 1946 article “Las tonadillas,” (in Orígenes), and perhaps an abridged version of the second part of “Las Sinfonías de Carlos Chávez (II)” (in Pauta 1987). I say abridged because most of the essay is quite technical and could be difficult for the non-specialist reader. Another interview might have been helpful, building on the included “Díalogo con Julián Orbón.” The “Palabras a Ernesto Cardenal,” though interesting, does not truly belong in this collection, being a brief comment on the Nicaraguan poet’s En Cuba that adds nothing, intellectually speaking, to the volume. Orbón was a true outsider as an exile. Having left Cuba automatically put him in the counterrevolutionary camp until 1994, when he was “rehabilitated.” By then he was dead. His antidogmatism and critique of Cuban exile intolerance left him equally distant from anti-Castro hardliners. He died depressed and in obscurity. Inexplicably, his work is rarely performed inside or outside of Cuba. His only champion in the United States was Eduardo Mata (1942–95), conductor of the Dallas Symphony from 1976 to 154 : Reviews 1993. Both Mata, and Julio Estrada in his prologue, have spoken of Orbón’s humility as a composer. The same could be said for his writings, an unusual trait for musical critics, but not so strange in light of what he said of Martí. As composer and writer, Orbón was original, originating substance, a fountain of ideas, and images. Alan West-Durán, Northeastern University Reference Carpentier, Alejo 1946 La música en Cuba. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica.