Western thought from a transcultural perspective: Decolonizing Latin America
43
Enciclopedia della musica: L’unitá della musica, 5 vols., edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Italian edition (Torino: Einaudi, 2005), vol. 5, 32–62; French edition (Paris: Actes Sud, 2007), vol. 5, 68–102. Western thought from a transcultural perspective: Decolonizing Latin America Malena Kuss Professor of Music Emeritus University of North Texas, Denton Vice President International Musicological Society In “Questions of Conquest, What Columbus wrought and what he did not,” the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called the chroniclers “the first magical realists” (1990: 45– 53). Consider, for instance, the narrative of Antonio Pigafetta, the Florentine navigator who accompanied Magellan on his first voyage around the world and kept a “rigorous account” of his journey through the South American continent that anticipates the literature of Gabriel García Márquez. Predictably, García Márquez quoted the following passage from Pigafetta in the lecture preceding his acceptance of the 1982 Nobel prize in literature: [Pigafetta] wrote that he had seen pigs with their umbilicus on their backs and birds without feet, the females of the species of which would brood their eggs on the backs of the males, as well as others like gannets without tongues whose beaks looked like a spoon. He wrote that he had seen a monstrosity of an animal with the head and ears of a mule, the body of a camel, the hooves of a deer, and the neigh of a horse. He related that they put a mirror in front of the first native they met in Patagonia and how that overexcited giant lost the use of his reason out of fear of his own image (English translation by Roberto González Echevarría). It sounds more fantastic in García Márquez’s original Spanish:
Transcript of Western thought from a transcultural perspective: Decolonizing Latin America
Enciclopedia della musica: L’unitá della musica, 5 vols., edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Italian edition (Torino: Einaudi, 2005), vol. 5, 32–62; French edition (Paris: Actes Sud, 2007), vol. 5, 68–102.
Western thought from a transcultural perspective: Decolonizing Latin America
Malena Kuss Professor of Music Emeritus University of North Texas, Denton Vice President International Musicological Society In “Questions of Conquest, What Columbus wrought and what he did not,” the Peruvian
novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called the chroniclers “the first magical realists” (1990: 45–
53). Consider, for instance, the narrative of Antonio Pigafetta, the Florentine navigator
who accompanied Magellan on his first voyage around the world and kept a “rigorous
account” of his journey through the South American continent that anticipates the
literature of Gabriel García Márquez. Predictably, García Márquez quoted the following
passage from Pigafetta in the lecture preceding his acceptance of the 1982 Nobel prize
in literature:
[Pigafetta] wrote that he had seen pigs with their umbilicus on their backs and
birds without feet, the females of the species of which would brood their eggs on
the backs of the males, as well as others like gannets without tongues whose
beaks looked like a spoon. He wrote that he had seen a monstrosity of an animal
with the head and ears of a mule, the body of a camel, the hooves of a deer, and
the neigh of a horse. He related that they put a mirror in front of the first native
they met in Patagonia and how that overexcited giant lost the use of his reason
out of fear of his own image (English translation by Roberto González
Echevarría).
It sounds more fantastic in García Márquez’s original Spanish:
Contó que había visto cerdos con el ombligo en el lomo, y unos pájaros sin patas
cuyas hembras empollaban en las espaldas del macho, y otros como alcatraces
sin lengua cuyos picos parecían una cuchara. Contó que había visto un
engendro animal con cabeza y orejas de mula, cuerpo de camello, patas de
ciervo y relincho de caballo. Contó que al primer nativo que encontraron en la
Patagonia le pusieron enfrente un espejo, y que aquel gigante enardecido perdió
el uso de la razón por el pavor de su propia imagen (1983: 1).
This short and fascinating book in which García Márquez discerns the seeds of
contemporary Latin American novels is not, by any means, “the most surprising
testimony of our reality at that time. The chroniclers of the Indies have left us
innumerable others.”
These fables, at once fantastical yet not confined to the domain of fiction, are the
foundational writings that set the course of America’s being in history. They are
foundational because, by naming for the first time realities for which the namers had no
names—and wherein naming becomes an art of approximation or translation—they
mark a historical chasm, a rupture with the familiar that casts the past into an ontological
void. In turn, this void obsesses history with questions of origins and concomitant
fixations with identity. The “invented” historical being of America (forged by the European
imagination after its own image) took place in the domain of discourse, and, initially, in
the discourse of the chronicles. This corpus of letters, reports, diaries, and historical
narratives spans from Columbus’s letter to Luis de Santángel of February 1493
(González Echevarría 1990 in 1998: 43) to the early 19th-century writings of the Spaniard
Diego de Alvear (1748–1830), author of a Diario, a Relación histórica y geográfica de las
misiones, and a Historia natural, respectively the first and last entries in Francisco
Esteve Barba’s monumental Historiografía Indiana (1964), a definitive road map to
chronicles from “discovery” (1492) to the birth of nations.
The fact that some writers of fiction would turn to the discourse of chronicles
verging on myth in canonic works of contemporary literature (such as García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude [1967]) to penetrate a cultural essence that defies
verification, paradoxically validates them beyond the empirical level summoned by most
scholars searching for historical certitudes of the verifiable variety (as in Thompson
1993), or links to present-day practices (as in Baumann 2004). If Donald Thompson’s
lucid attempt to harness a concrete definition of areíto from elusive descriptions of this
Taíno ritual in 16th- and early 17th-century chronicles (1993) misses the mark precisely
because he approaches the task from a positivistic perspective that separates history
from legend instead of seizing the potential of legend to construct history (Ortiz 1950 in
1965: 13–104), the methods of historical positivism serve scholars well when they
summon the chronicles to anchor current oral traditions in ancient practices. Among the
latter, one of the most often quoted references to music is Garcilaso de la Vega’s
description of the principle of quadripartition in performances of monophonic melodies by
interlocking pairs of Andean antaras (Kechua for panpipes) (Stevenson 1968: 276–277;
Baumann 2004: 103), however “European” Garcilaso’s terminology may have been to
characterize an approach to holism based on the complementarity of opposites (1609 in
1982). Most of all, the observations and events recorded in the chronicles, their multiple
lines of transmission, and the utopias they fed in the course of their reception,
constructed an imaginaire whose domain is neither temporal history nor atemporal
myth—two domains that Europeans have kept safely apart (Kuss 1996). Built on the
discourse of difference, this imaginaire became as much a scaffolding for America’s
being in history as cathedrals superimposed on submerged Aztec temples—as is the
case in Mexico City—became a part of the skyline of colonial cities.
Western epistemological orders traveled first with conquerors, colonizers, and
settlers, and later on with explorers and scientists in the nineteenth century, building
layers of discursive modalities through which Americans themselves represented their
own being in history. This led Tzvetan Todorov, who made the most of linguistic
disencounters in his influential La Conquête de l’Amérique (1982, English translation
1984), to imply that America was not conquered by swords but by a mastery of
language—or control of signs. The entrenched European belief in the superiority of
written expression (verbal and musical) surfaces already in the foundational Relación of
the Ur-cronista Fray Ramón Pané (1498 in 1991), a Catalan entrusted by Columbus to
record in Spanish information on myths told to him by the Indians of Hispaniola in a
branch of Arawakan, who, according to Todorov, repeats that, “Since the Indians have
neither alphabet nor writing, they do not speak their myths cearly, and it is impossible for
me to transcribe them correctly” (1984: 41). More than four centuries later, nothing had
shaken the belief in the supremacy assigned to the culture that possessed mastery of
alphabetic writing in the mindset of the one humanist who analyzed this foundational
corpus of letters, reports, diaries, and historical narratives. In his 737-page history of
histories he called Historiografía indiana (1964), and anticipating ethnomusicologists by
computing the mental structure of the observer into the characterizations of chronicles
he surveyed with virtuoso command of the sources, the Spaniard Francisco Esteve
Barba documents lines of transmission, supplies contextual references, and probes the
lives of the authors to penetrate their motivations, but cannot escape a European
linguocentrism that assigns superiority to the written word:
Nothing escaped the intense and penetrating attention of the cronistas de Indias,
who recorded events with precision, down to the day of the week in which they
occurred. To follow the progress of discovery; recount deeds; describe the places
surveyed; record the character and customs of their inhabitants; document
whether contact was pacific or entailed warfare; and describe the products of the
earth and their characteristics, or curiosities of all kinds which the cronistas
themselves saw or heard about: these were the primary objectives of their
narratives.
However, the conquistadors stumbled upon human groups who occasionally
attempted (pretendieron, literally pretended) to record their history, albeit
achieving it only in a rudimentary way. In order to understand, govern, and
convert these groups [to Christianity], it was necessary to probe their past.
Consequently, with their superior means, and with their better knowledge of
historiographical methods, the conquistadors had to apply their efforts to
complementing the elementary procedures of the natives. The alphabet that
America received would serve to affix orally transmitted traditions, and whatever
the Indians had recorded imperfectly in their quipus (encoded information in Andean “talking knots”) and paintings would come to be transcribed.
Questionnaires, interviews, and other ingenious procedures … would succeed as
far as possible in saving this primitive American history from being shipwrecked.
Consequently, the Spaniards pursued two initial objectives: to narrate and
preserve the actual events along with observations on what they saw and heard;
and to investigate, as well as perfect (perfeccionar, or polish, refine) the history of
aboriginal peoples (Esteve Barba 1964: 7–8, translation by Kuss).
As a storehouse of images and versions of events seen from the start through the lens
of the foreign observer, the imaginaire mirrored epistemological orders from these
“perfected” histories, while submerging ways of knowing that did not conform with the
linear logic of European thought. Efforts to rescue patterns of Andean and
Mesoamerican thought, however, have engaged scholars in recent decades (see, for
instance, the pioneering Entre el mito y la historia by a group of distinguished Peruvians
[Hernández, Lemlij, Millones, Péndola, and Rostworowski 1987]; and Time and Reality
in the Thought of the Maya [1988] among other books on Mesoamerican cultures by
Miguel León-Portilla). Discourse, not praxis, forced a historical experience and the
exuberant creativity it spawned into a procrustean bed whose implications for
musicology remain to be exorcised. When musicologists apply regulative concepts
devised by Europeans for the European experience to compositions by Latin
Americans—the simplest example of which is the indiscriminate transfer of labels for
style periods and/or aesthetic movements—they are dooming one historical experience
and concomitant aesthetics to representation through the discursive modalities of
another. (A minority of brilliant young musicologists is changing this state of affairs, but
representations through received modalities of discourse prevails.) If European-affiliated
compositional techniques and procedures created analogies, links, and transformations
of the European legacy, these intersections are not homological: the primordial condition
of being in history through the discourse of difference subverted aesthetic results.
* * * * *
The “Invention” of America: How did we get into it, and how do we get out? “At long last, someone has arrived to discover me!”
—Entry for October 12, 1492, in an imaginary Private Diary of America (O’Gorman 1961:
9)
In 1958 the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman blazed a liberating trail with a text
whose revised English edition—also written by O’Gorman—was published in 1961 by
Indiana University Press. In The Invention of America: An inquiry into the historical
nature of the New World and the meaning of its history, O’Gorman argues that the idea
that America was “discovered” is both philosophically and historically untenable.
Discovery implies previous knowledge of what is found, but “not every finding is a
discovery.” “Invention,” on the other hand, is the formulation of a previously inexistent
concept, which in this case was arrived at by “intellectual wrestling.” From the
assumption that “being” (rather than existence) is a corollary of interpretation, O’Gorman
traces the construction of this “invention” from Columbus’s belief that he had reached
islands on the eastern shore of Asia on his first voyage (1492) to the publication of
Martin Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae introductio (1507) and the two maps naming the
new world “America” that illustrated it (1961: 77–78, 123). For O’Gorman, this time-
period (1492–1507) circumscribes the “quantum leap in understanding” forced upon
European thought by the appearance of the new geographic entity. In Columbus’s
system of beliefs, characterized as “static” because it was based on predetermination,
the orbis terrarum was one large mass of insular land covering 6/7 of the “world.” This
concept—from Esdras, Book IV, transmitted by Roger Bacon (1214–1294) and Pierre
d’Ailly (1350–1420)—was necessary to sustain the belief that all inhabitants were within
the reach of Christian redemption. The expanse of the orbis terrarum admitted the
possibility of “antipodal” inhabitants but only in relation to each other, thus reconciling
“antipodality” (the ancient term for the modern “Other”) with the Biblical genesis of
humankind (1961: 56–57, 154, note 19). The ancients had speculated on the existence
of partly inhabited antipodal lands, though populated by a different species of humans,
but this ran counter to Christian belief because these hypothetical antipodeans would
have had to inhabit lands beyond the Gospel’s reach (1961: 55). Within this system of
beliefs, the orbis terrarum or “Island of the Earth” was synonymous with the concept of
“world” (Oikoumene), which in the mental structure of St. Augustine and the Church
Fathers was the only place providentially designated for the dwelling of humankind
(1961: 61). Because of the concept’s basis on predetermination, this dwelling place also
was humankind’s ”cosmic prison” (1961: 87), a closed world. By 1507, this concept had
been replaced by the notion of contiguity of land, whereby the new “Land of Amerigo”
was an inhabited fourth part made of the same physical matter that had formed the
previously known trinity of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Traced to Antiquity and transmitted
to Christianity, while ever-so-deeply etched in European thought, was also the idea
(attributed to Strabo) that Europe ranked highest in the trinity because it was “the place
of origin and development of the forms of human life that embody human values with the
greatest purity” (1961: 135–136, 169, note 8). Therein lies the genesis of the idea that
“Europe’s history is also universal history and Europe the seat of the only true,
significant culture” (1961: 137), the “self-appointed judge and model of human behavior”
(1961: 139), and, consequently, the self-appointed inventor of the historical being of
America (and other Others). Although after his third voyage Columbus hypothesized that
the land mass running south might be “new” (1961: 99–101), and Vespucci used “new
world” as “newly found” in his Mundus Novus letter of 1503? (1961: 113), the term New
World carried added meaning in the Cosmographiae introductio of 1507. If the notion of
contiguity of land implied equality of its four parts because they were all made of the
same physical matter, the New World also was an “entity capable of transforming itself
into a replica of the old world” (1961: 140). Conversely, in O’Gorman’s interpretation, the
meaning for Europe of America’s appearance on the stage of history was the switch
from predetermination to self-determination, and from a closed world to an open world,
capable of random interpretive reflection (Kuss 1993: 188–189, notes 6, 7, and 8).
According to O’Gorman, and because America’s meaning in history was shaped
and apprehended on the basis of its potential to becoming another Europe (1961: 139–
140), namely invented after the image of its creator, the more America emulated Europe,
the more it became itself. The possibility of acquiring a being of its own was thus
circumscribed to two choices. The first was to adapt to the model, copy an alien form of
life, which by necessity had to be inferior to the original model, and here O’Gorman
views American colonial history as a form of historical mimesis of Europe, a period of
“life lived as if loaned.” The second option was to materialize its potential within the
possibilities inherent in the model, excelling and surpassing it (1961: 135, 141–143), an
alternative that does not release it from its epigonic condition. In his critical writings on
Alejo Carpentier (1977 in 1990) and in Myth and Archive: A theory of Latin American
narrative (1990 in 1998), Roberto González Echevarría proposes a far more convincing
a posteriori third possibility: to the structure of constraint and imitation he adds release
(1990 in 1998: 172), or subversion. The structure of constraint, imitation, and subversion
then takes on an infinite number of shapes that define different historical intersections.
If O’Gorman’s epiphany engendered controversy among historians, it also
marked a cathartic turning point in self-understanding. Whether specifically cited or not,
the premises of this text informed subsequent literary criticism, if not musicology (see
Kuss 1993, “The ‘Invention’ of America: Encounter settings on the Latin American Lyric
stage,” for its first application to musical esthesics). By 1990, the reception of
O’Gorman’s text among historians reverberated in symposia dedicated to “discovering
Europe” through the lens of its invention of America (Mate and Niewöhner 1992).
In 1988, three decades after O’Gorman’s landmark work first appeared in print,
Indiana University Press brought out V.Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa: Gnosis,
Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. If Mudimbe’s inquiry into “ways of knowing”
transcends O’Gorman’s historiographical tour de force, both works wrestle with the same
epiphany. As Mudimbe probes “processes of transformation of types of knowledge” and
“interrogates images of Africa,” he also defines one of the most important questions in
postcolonial thought:
Western interpreters as well as African analysts have been using categories and
conceptual systems which depend on a Western epistemological order. Even in
the most explicitly “Afrocentric” descriptions, models of analysis explicitly or
implicitly, knowingly and unknowingly, refer to the same order. Does this mean
that … African traditional systems of thought are unthinkable and cannot be
made explicit within the framework of their own rationality? My own claim is that,
thus far, the ways in which they have been evaluated and the means used to
explain them relate to theories and methods whose constraints, rules, and
systems of operation suppose a non-African epistemological order (1988: x).
The questions this text raises and the foundations it jolts appear to have been echoed in
Kofi Agawu’s “The Invention of ‘African Rhythm’” (1995), an essay in which he probes
the discourse that has bonded images of (or imaginings on) African music inextricably to
rhythm. Tracing this imaging through historical writings, he notes that
this notion has been promulgated by both Western and African scholars … [and]
therefore, it is not simply a case of Westerners (mis)representing African
music…. What we have, rather, are the views of a group of scholars operating
within a field of discourse, an intellectual space defined by Euro-American
[= U.S.] traditions of ordering knowledge. It is difficult to overestimate the
determining influence of this scholarly tradition on the representation of African
music (1995: 382–383).
At a metalevel, these cultures share a similar predicament: no matter how culture-
specific and profoundly different the processes by which these imaginaires were
constructed, each has affected how members of these cultures represent themselves.
As the Indianno says to Filomeno in Alejo Carpentier’s Concierto barroco (1974: 76)
when they part in a Venice train station after their adventure in “time” (defined as the
substance of rhythm and history): “Sometimes it is necessary to see things from afar,
even with an ocean in between, to see them up close” (A veces es necesario alejarse de
las cosas, poner un mar de por medio, para ver las cosas de cerca).
* * * * *
History as aesthetic construct “Fables feed the overarching tide of History. [Europeans] grasp
our things as fables because they have lost their sense of the fabulous.
For them, fables are remote, irrational tales submerged in the past.
They do not understand that the fabulous lies in the future.”
—The Indiano to Filomeno (Carpentier 1974: 77)
“De fábulas se alimenta la Gran Historia. Fábula parece lo nuestro
a las gentes de acá porque han perdido el sentido de lo fabuloso.
Llaman fabuloso cuanto es remoto, irracional, situado en el ayer.
No entienden que lo fabuloso está en el futuro.”
“Aus Märchen setzt sich die grosse Geschichte zusammen.
Märchenhaft nennen wir, was langue zurück liegt. Was irrational ist,
gestern war. Märchenhaftes aber liegt in der Zukunft”
—Concierto barroco—Montezuma (1982), film d’après Concierto barroco
by José Montes-Baquer with score by Hans Werner Henze.
Any dictionary of antonyms: fable—the opposite of—history, truth
The Cuban-born Roberto González Echevarría, Sterling Professor of Hispanic and
Comparative Literatures at Yale University, subsumed the poetics of Latin American
history in a masterful gloss of Carpentier’s famous preface to The Kingdom of This
World (El reino de este mundo, 1949), published three years after completing his history
of music in Cuba (1946). We reproduce this passage in the translation of González
Echevarría (2003):
And it is just that because of its unspoiled landscape, its historical evolution; as a
result of its ontology; the Faustic presence of Indians and Blacks; because of the
Revelation that its recent Discovery constituted; and because of the fruitful cross-
breedings that it propitiated, America is far from having exhausted its wealth of
mythologies.
Y es que, por la virginidad del paisaje, por la formación, por la ontología, por la
presencia fáustica del indio y del negro, por la Revelación que constituyó su
reciente descubrimiento, por los fecundos mestizajes que propició, América está
muy lejos de haber agotado su caudal de mitologías.
Interpreting the poetics of history as a wealth of mythologies demands challenging the
basic tenets of the holy writ (namely the concepts of history shaped by Europeans and
those within their gravitational field). It also demands abrogating the belief in assigning
truth to the process of verification through the written document, which also explains the
absence of oral traditions in canonic historical writings on European music. Moreover, it
demands conceiving cultures as interdependent wholes, instead of—as anthropologist
Eric R. Wolf put it brilliantly—“turning names into things” by endowing nations or cultures
with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally bounded objects, and thus
creating a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each
other like so many hard and round billiard balls, leading to the conception of a monolithic
West counterposed to a monolithic East, both reified categories that interfere with our
ability to understand their mutual encounter and confrontation (1982: 6). In Europe and
the People Without History, Wolf argues that we have created intellectual instruments
(names that turn concepts into “things” = culture, society, nation) leading to the
construction of static models that isolate phenomena, but have not yet devised
instruments to name the changing interrelatedness of processes that involve all agents
of history, not only the predilect victors or carriers of torches of liberty (1982: 5–7; Kuss
1991: 3). (Even the title of this essay assumes the possibility of a monolithic West.)
The characteristics that subsume the poetics of Latin American history are
manifested in the modern Latin American fiction of Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García
Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Augusto Roa Bastos, and Reinaldo
Arenas, among many others (González Echevarría 2007): an unspoiled, virginal
landscape; shape (idiosyncratic conceptions of space, or forces gravitating toward a
return to primordial shapes); ontology (ruptures that defy the illusion of continuity built
into the evolutionary and linear monological models of European history, projecting
instead a series of dialogical starts); the faustic presence of Indians and Blacks
(America’s thri-ethnic heritage); Revelation (what the Discovery revealed to Europe,
wherein O’Gorman’s text and its reception are but one possible line of interpretation);
and cross-breedings (the structure of constraint, imitation, and subversion that defines
history not as a time-line but as a web of “temporally and spatially changing and
changeable set of relationships, or relationships among sets of relationships” (Wolf
1982: 6).
The mythological dimensions of this history, prefigured in the chronicles but not
limited to their timespan, compel writers to turn to history for the themes of their fiction
and seize larger-than-life heroes or villains (as in the portrayal of Bolívar by García
Márquez in El general en su laberinto [1989] and of Trujillo by Mario Vargas Llosa en La
fiesta del chivo [2000]), or to mythological cycles of colossal proportions (García
Marquez’s Cien años de soledad [1967] and Carlos Fuentes’ Terra nostra [1975]). The
fact that reality can be more surreal than fiction also feeds an innate proclivity to
mythologize it. In his Nobel speech cited above, García Márquez observes that
“Independence from Spanish dominion did not spare us from insanity. General Antonio
López de Santa Anna, three-time dictator of Mexico, staged magnificent funerals for the
left leg he had lost in the so-called Guerra de los Pasteles (1983: 1).
History then becomes fulfilled poetic prophecy. In “Latin American fiction and the
poetics of history,” González Echevarría writes:
Modern Latin American novelists obsessively turn to Latin American history as
source because they find there the prolegomena of their narrative art—what
comes first, how events determine each other, how causality works, who are the
heroes and villains. History becomes in the works of Latin American novelists an
artistic construct whose truth is aesthetic rather than documentary or factual,
and, more often than not, runs counter to official histories found in textbooks and
government pronouncements (2007:1).
With different words, García Márquez expressed the same thought in a famous dictum:
“If historians have written fiction, it is incumbent on us, the writers of fiction, to write the
history” (Si los historiadores han hecho ficción, me parece natural que los escritores de
ficción hagamos la historia). Aesthetic constructs override documented facts because
these facts served to construct powerfully political fictions whose colonizing purpose
defined a conquest by mastery of [written] language. Always more precocious than
musicology, literary criticism offered us several decades ago a formulation of this historical predicament:
The New World occupies a doubly fictive place: the one furnished by the
European tradition, and the one reelaborated by Latin American writers [and
composers]. Writing within a Western tradition and in a European language, Latin
American writers [and composers] feel they write from within a fiction of which
they are part, and, in order to escape from this literary [or musical] encirclement,
they must constantly strive to invent themselves and Latin America anew
(González Echevarría 1977 in 1990: 28).
Mastering the code becomes then a way out of the “imperialism of context” (Ibid.: 29).
Few have mastered the code or captured the dialogue between versions of
history and the interplay of forces driving the structure of constraint, imitation, and
subversion that shaped composition in Latin America until the first decades of the
twentieth century with more command of history as an aesthetic construct than Alejo
Carpentier (1904–1980) in Concierto barroco (1974), his most musical of fictions. In this
novella, the towering figure of Cuban letters—who also wore the hats of music critic,
ethnographer, music historiographer, and opera librettist—celebrates the coexistence of
musical traditions that shape an incongruent whole through the metaphor of a
Haendelian/Vivaldian baroque concerto grosso disrupted by an African drumming that
“does not fit,” defying any received model of historical organicism or any attempt at
cultural definition. In his masterful critical study of Carpentier’s oeuvre (1977 in 1990),
González Echevarría summons “the most tremendous concerto grosso the centuries
have ever heard” as metaphor for an impossible harmony, a “cacophonous,
indiscriminate fusion” of European, American, art and popular musics and instruments of
the most varied origins, “of which there need be no synthesis,” and where the
acceptance of heterogeneity is also an abandonment of an obsession with origins.
Rather than “the autonomy of Latin American culture that Carpentier pursued in earlier
writings” (wherein identity assumes the character of a fusion, as in the magical realism of
his libretto for Alejandro García Caturla), in Concierto barroco he “demonstrates the
dialectics of dependence and independence that subtend any effort at cultural definition”
(1977 in 1990: 266, 274). Latin America was postmodern before the age of
postmodernism.
* * * * *
The fusion of traditions as prescriptive aesthetics Carpentier’s passion for music was second only to his passion for literature. Described
by Juan Marinello as “as avid of primitivism as he was enslaved by refinement” (Alegría
1970: 43), Carpentier wrote a history of music in Cuba (1946), several essays, music
criticism à la George Bernard Shaw (published in three volumes the year of his death
under the title of Ese músico que llevo adentro), and—as the W.H. Auden of New World
letters—one masterful opera libretto (1931). According to Fernando Alegría, Carpentier
perceived America as a repository of mythological forces that lie, at times dormant,
underneath a layer of superficial occidentalism. In the arts, these forces activate systems
of symbols that Europeans only can grasp at an abstract level (1970). In Manita en el
Suelo, the “mitología bufa afrocubana” for narrator and puppets in one act and five
scenes that Carpentier wrote for the charismatic Alejandro García Caturla (1906–1940),
the symbols are historical events and characters that already lived in the popular
imagination as legends. In the libretto, however, these poeticized realities appear
reorganized by an artificer who, as Marinello put it in reference to Carpentier’s Ecue-
Yamba-O! (1933), “spaces the imagery at artistically measured intervals and organizes
the myths in an unequivocally surrealist order to capture their transcendence: the art
looms in the disposition of elements” (Marinello in Alegría 1970: 44). The “marvelous
real” dimension of Carpentier’s poetic plot is mirrored in the structural symmetry and
thematic organicism of Caturla’s setting, likewise an artificer who reorders and
subsumes the genius of popular and academic invention. Completed by Carpentier in
August of 1931 and by Caturla between 1931 and 1934, this “misterio bufo afrocubano”
carries maximum accumulation of cultural knowledge within a framework of prescriptive
aesthetics whereby the possibility of an autonomous Latin American cultural identity
assumes the character of a fusion. Unlike the heterogeneity Carpentier celebrates in
Concierto barroco (1974), the early Manita en el Suelo anticipates his vision of the
continent—and Cuba in particular—as “crucible of civilizations” (Carpentier 1977; Kuss
1992a and 1993).
The conception of the libretto dates from 1930, when, already in exile in Paris,
Carpentier was revising Ecue-Yamba-O! (1933), an “ethnographic” novel written during
his political imprisonment in a Havana jail in 1927. Its characters and plot suggested to
him the idea for a stage work he had promised Caturla during the composer’s sojourn in
Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger in 1928. The libretto was written no doubt under the
spell of Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro (1919–1922) d’après Cervantes,
commissioned by the Princesse Edmond de Polignac for her marionette theater and
premiered at her Paris home in 1923.
To weave his intricate tapestry of popular tales, Carpentier brings together
traditions of different origins: the Christian legend of the apparition on the island of the
Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Patron of Cuba; the abakuá (Efík from Calabar) and
lucumí (Yoruba) religious rituals practiced by descendants of Africans in the suburbs of
Havana; and the Chinese charade, a cryptic lottery played with riddles that Gastón
Baquero described as a “cartography of dreams” (1977). According to Christian legend,
the Virgin appeared floating in the sea to three fishermen. The event, which the Church
tried to document with evidence that included an eye witness, was placed between 1604
and 1605, and is itself an allegory of all races united under the Church, for in later
versions the three fishermen become Juan Indio, Juan Odio (a Spaniard), and Juan
Esclavo (an African). Thus, the Virgin that calms the seas protects all three races, all
have an equal claim to the vessel, and the vessel is the island of Cuba (Arrom 1971:
184–214; Kuss 1992a). Equally alive as are the Virgin and her three “Juanes” in relics,
match-boxes, and popular poetry, are the syncretic religions practiced by Afro-Cubans
and the characters associated with them. One of them, the legendary Papá Montero—
described in a poem by Alfonso Reyes as “negro curro del manglar, ñáñigo de bastón y
canalla rumbero”—is the only live character in the cast, and, like the Trujamán in Falla’s
Retablo, narrates the plot. So famous was Papá Montero that his fictional death inspired
two popular déplorations: the poem by Nicolás Guillén called “Velorio de Papá Montero”
(Papá Montero’s Wake) and the classic “Rumbita de Papá Montero.” (Curros del
Manglar were emancipated slaves who settled in an old Havana suburb called El
Manglar during the colonial period. Ñáñigos or abakuá are members of secret societies
whose religious practices were brought to Cuba by African slaves from the region of
Calabar. Integral to their worship of Eribó and the cult of ancestors are songs, dancing,
and complex percussion of great beauty. The Ékue, a friction drum that fulfills a symbolic
and fundamental role in abakuá rituals, suggested to Carpentier the title of his novel,
Ecue-Yamba-O! or “Ecue, Praise the Lord”.) The protagonist, Manita en el Suelo, whose
real name was Manuel Cañamazo and actually lived in the nineteenth century, was also
a curro del Manglar and a ñáñigo power whose long arms “that could touch the floor”
had earned him the nickname. He died in a popular assault lead by abakuás in 1871 to
liberate students of medicine imprisoned in the same Havana jail were Carpentier, a
political prisoner during the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (1925–1933), wrote Ecue-
Yamba-O! in 1927. According to local lore, Manita defeated a rival power in a brawl by
predicting a lunar eclipse that occurred seconds later, thus earning the reputation of “a
Black man who could dim the moon with his will.” The Moon, already prominent in
Pierrot lunaire and Wozzeck, plays here a luminous role instead, articulating the action
at two pivotal points. Completing the cast of characters are the Captain General of Spain
and his Guards, symbols of authority; the Chino de la Charada, who walks the streets
selling his lottery of dreams; and Candita la Loca and Ta Cuñengue, both associated
with the Lucumí or Yoruba-affiliated rituals of syncretic Santería. Because each group of
characters is associated with a specific tradition, Carpentier needed a nexus, an “artifice”
through which he could link them and thus transcend their localized boundaries. This
linking role is assigned to the omnipresent Black Rooster, the Gallo Motoriongo or
Enkiko that supplies the rooster meat with which the ritual meal of ñáñigos is prepared.
Central to Carpentier’s intention of “bringing together for the first time in Cuba all the
characters from popular mythology” (1931), the Rooster takes on a life of his own, sings,
protests, demands reparation when cooked by the three fishermen caught hungry at sea
(“If the rooster is a heretic, rooster we will eat”), and appears in situations that tradition
would not have foreseen. Until Carpentier linked them through the interactive role of the
Rooster in his “mitología bufa afrocubana,” the legend of the apparition of the Virgin and
her three Juanes, the abakuá and lucumí religious rituals, and the Chinese charade
were parts of a living whole only in the minds of every Cuban in touch with popular
traditions.
In a letter to the composer that Carpentier wrote from Paris, dated July 6, 1931,
he promises to send him a “piece for puppets, with only one live character—Papá
Montero— who … sitting on the big stage … narrates the story of Manita en el Suelo,
the ñáñigo who, enraged when he learns that the three fisherman caught hungry at sea
have eaten his sacred rooster, PUNCHES the moon with his fist and creates darkness in
the world” (Henríquez 1978: 362–363). Next to Papá Montero is a small stage for the
puppets, where the action he narrates is reenacted. As described by Carpentier in
“Nochebuena” from Ecue-Yamba-O!, Manita —an abakuá and ñáñigo power (potencia
ñáñiga)—resorts to the baile de santo—a lucumí religious ritual—to summon the saints
and reveal, through Candita la Loca, the identity of the perpetrators of the death of the
Rooster. Once their identities are revealed, he invokes deities to bring disaster to the
fishermen. Disaster befalls them in the form of a tempest, which is when they invoke the
Virgin, and she appears—as in the legend—to calm the seas, protecting all races in an
IndoAfroHispanic Cuba. Threatening to kill the fishermen if they come ashore or “punch
the Moon if it comes down,”he does the latter and creates general perplexity in a dark
world without moon (“la luna nula”). This, Carpentier laments with quotations from
popular sones and sentimental poetry (“Mil cromos agonizan en la faz de la tierra” / A
thousand chromes agonize on the face of the earth). Destroying the poets’ muse,
however, is a crime for which Manita faces imprisonment and death in the hands of the
Captain General of Spain and his Guards. At this crucial juncture, the Chino de la
Charada appears in his handsome Mandarin suit as a deus ex machina to contrive a
merry ending. In a symmetrical arrangement that recalls the disposition of the Toccata
and Moresca from Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), the Chino de la Charada opens and
closes the little farce with two riddles: the first one sets the plot in motion, and the
second resolves the conflict when its answer (“Moon”) produces a new, huge and
luminous balloon, saving Manita and the world from a darker fate. For each of these
situations, Carpentier recalls the cadence of popular refrains, typical locutions, songs,
and sones.
In a second letter dated August 16, 1931 that Carpentier sent to Caturla from
Paris with the libretto, he essentially suggests a separation of traditions for the musical
setting: “Use the ñáñigo [“African”] element for Manita, the pentatonic mode for the
Chino, the guajiro and criollo elements [of Iberian roots] for the Virgin and the Juanes ….
Most of all, and this is very important, do not let Papá Montero sing! Use for him various
forms of declamation” (Henríquez 1978: 364–365). Disregarding these instructions,
Caturla created his own synthesis by unifying the work motivically while differentiating
musical traditions through their metric, rhythmic, timbric, and textural characteristics.
Central to the composer’s conception is precisely the pivotal point at which Papá
Montero sings, not unlike the Trujamán in Falla’s Retablo, who breaks out of his
monotonic delivery when he is drawn into the story he is telling.
Papá Montero narrates the action as a coryphaeus solfegging in a low-middle-
high monotonic declamation over a rhythmic accompaniment of claves (Numbers 1, 2,
and 3). However, after the three fishermen desecrate the omnipresent Rooster, Papá
Montero sings a ballad lamenting his death (No. 6). Positioned at midpoint, as is
“Possente spirto” in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, the “Elegía al Enkiko” or “Balada de Papá
Montero” is the centerpiece in a symmetrical disposition of eleven short musical
numbers (1–5 and 7–11), as well as the work’s dramatic and compositional turning point.
The ballad’s haunting tonal theme summons the style of vocal delivery of a popular
rumbero (certainly not of an academically trained lyric tenor) within the timbric framework
of a “dissonant” wind ensemble (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, 2 trumpets, and timpani)
that recalls the modernistic angularity of Stravinsky’s Octet (1923). The compositional
conception follows a masterful scheme: if in the preceding numbers (1–5) Caturla relies
on motifs whose transformations reach their full melodic formulation in the theme of the
ballad (No. 6), each of the following numbers (7–11) are variations on the ballad’s
already formulated theme. (The variation process is not only integral to Cuban popular
music but also present in Carpentier’s literature. In an interview with César Leante
entitled “Confesiones sencillas de un escritor barroco” [1964], he acknowledges that El
acoso [1956] is structured in “sonata form: first part, exposition, three themes, seventeen
variations, and conclusion and coda” [Leante 1970: 26–27].)
In his musical language, Caturla’s skillfully combines the type of symmetrical
octatonicism with asymmetrical diatonic interaction that characterizes the pitch
organization of Stravinsky’s neoclassical works (as first advanced by Pieter C. van den
Toorn in 1983), with the melodic simplicity of tunes in the popular vein, unified
throughout the opera by the generative function of a single Ur-motif (E – G – B – A – B =
Mi – Sol – Si – La – Si) (Kuss 1992a: 371–374). Caturla already had used this Ur-motif—
widespread in many forms of Cuban music, including the popular “Rumbita de Papá
Montero”—as a formative element in “Motivos de danza” from his Tres danzas cubanas
for twelve instruments (ca. 1925–1930). In more subtle ways than Carpentier had
suggested in his letter, Caturla unifies the work through the generative role of the Ur-
motif, while differentiating musical traditions through the metric and rhythmic patterns
with which they are associated. Thus, for the opening three-part madrigal of Manita,
Capitán, and Chino (No. 2), which relies on the imagery of abakuá rituals and extolls the
Rooster, he uses duple simple meter and the syncopated rhythmic polyphony associated
with Afro-Cuban music. By contrast, for the “Guajira de los tres Juanes,” a three-part
madrigal (No. 4), and the “interlude” that follows it (No. 5), he uses the duple compound
meter associated with rural folk music of Iberian roots, or guajiro tradition. In the “Baile
de santo” (No. 7), a syncretic ritual, he juxtaposes syncopated rhythmic patterns for the
responsorial chorus of “negras y negros” to ternary patterns for Candita la Loca, the
medium who summons the saints. Most of all, he reserves the Cuban son, symbol of
cultural identity and synthesis of traditions, for the Virgin who protects all races (No. 9).
The overture is—predictably—a danzón, because custom dictated the performance of
danzones to open any type of representation at Havana’s old Teatro Alhambra.
Moreover, the “differences” between musical traditions must be understood in terms of
centuries of cultural integration, as “Cuban popular music draws its identity precisely
from the synthesis of its African and Iberian roots” (Ortiz 1947: 98). This means that the
elements Caturla processes compositionally are already residual strands of multicultural
extraction. The work becomes a paradigm of the ideal of fusion because the musical
dramaturgy itself is driven by the specific intention to evoke traditions.
Manita en el Suelo also incorporates buffo elements that composer and librettist
intended as parodies of the European canon. For instance, Papá Montero’s melodrama
No. 8) in which he describes the tempest that endangers the fishermen (“the raging
horses of Santa Bárbara”) is set over a symphonic development that parodies the Ride
of the Valkyries, following Carpentier’s suggestion.
By December of 1934 Caturla had finished the orchestration of the overture, the
interlude, and the ballad. Published in a 1934 issue of the revista Social as “Elegía al
Enkiko,” the ballad was the only fragment known until the complete work was premiered
in Havana with dancers instead of puppets on February 15, 1985. The ballad’s theme,
however, was popular enough to inspire a set of piano variations by the Cuban Sergio
Fernández Barroso (b. 1946) entitled Variaciones del Motoriongo. When Caturla, who
was a judge, was assassinated at age 34, he had completed a short score indicating the
orchestration of the remaining numbers. The reconstruction for the 1985 première was
undertaken by the distinguished composer and musicologist Hilario González—
Carpentier’s close friend—with the collaboration of Carmelina Muñoz. However, the work
has not yet reached the stage as Carpentier envisioned it: with marionettes made of
cardboard tubes dressed in colorful paper, friends operating the puppets, and a mise-en-
scène based on sketches he had promised to send Caturla (Kuss 1992a).
Carpentier’s vision of the New World as a “prodigious crucible of civilizations,
planetary crossroads, place of syncretisms, transculturations, symbioses of musics still
primeval or already very elaborate” also deplores the artificial barriers between the
domains of so-called “art,” “folk,” and “popular” musics (terms that, particularly in
English, turn concepts into things or billiard balls that isolate phenomena d’après Wolf
1982). Discourse, not praxis, defined a separation of domains that, in some contexts, still
carries social prejudice. In Carpentier’s thinking, the elitism that disparaged popular
invention discriminated against the genius of musicians whose “fresh, living, and
constantly renewed invention created Latin America’s most genuine musical expressions
…. Habanera, tango argentino, rumba, guaracha, bolero, samba …, all these invaded
the world with their rhythms, typical linstruments, and rich arsenals of percussion, now
incorporated into symphonic ensembles” (1977: 14, 16–17). For Carpentier, the
archetypical Latin American composer was Heitor Villa Lobos (1887–1959), whose
“genius erupts out of nowhere” to shape a quintessentially Brazilian musical expression.
The creations of our towering musicians always have revealed harmonious
relationships with the creators of less ambitious musics …. From the time of
Conquest, popular musicians were the first inventors of our musical styles. These
styles are defined above all by contexts of performance, that is, by peculiar
inflections in ways of singing or accompanying the voice, and in manners of
playing instruments or using percussion (Carpentier 1977: 18).
In this context, Villa-Lobos embodies the concept of genius not only because he
materializes from within the ideal of fusion of traditions, but also because his exuberant
invention or apparent “spontaneity” fulfills the European 19th-century ideals of progress,
originality, popularity, and authenticity (Dahlhaus 1974). The view of “musical creation as
the volcanic eruption of a glowing soul in the grip of ecstatic revelation” that defines, in
Edward E. Lowinsky’s words, the Romantic concept of genius (1964: 324), easily can be
mirrored in discursive representations of the charismatic Brazilian, whose actual poetics
remain elusive. The legacy of the concept of genius, itself a European construct
(Lowinsky 1964), is the now-debunked “great-man theory of history” and the resilient
pantheon of canonic works, congruent with the supremacy assigned to the written
tradition of Western art music in general, and to the metaphysics of purely instrumental
music in particular. Although inverting European values in his defense of popular music,
Carpentier’s illusory transcendentalism (Latin America “must” produce its great
composers) betrays his allegiance to European masterplots of history when writing about
music.
* * * * *
The inversion of signs
Analyzing modalities of discourse (d’après Foucault) in paradigmatic narratives inclusive
of writings that “literature proper” would exclude, González Echevarría tells us that the
history of the Latin American novel has been told in various ways. The following
statement captures the problem and easily could be applied to the predicament of music
historiography on Latin America:
No matter what method the historian employs, the blueprint of evolution and
change continues to be that of European literary or artistic historiography ….
Ordinary categories like romanticism, naturalism, the avant-garde, surface
sooner or later. If it is questionable that this historiographic grid is applicable to
European literature, it is even more so regarding the literature of Latin
America…. It is a hopeless task to force texts such as these into a conventional
history of the Latin American novel (1990 in 1998: 38–39).
In Myth and Archive: A theory of Latin American narrative, González Echevarría
accomplishes a monumental task: by analyzing modalities of discourse—rather than
patterns of evolution and change supported by the scaffolding of facts of conventional
historiography—he arrives at a reformulation of historical categories that are culture-
specific. Working retrospectively from the modalities of discourse recovered in modern
fictions, he identifies three epochs, each characterized by the hegemony of a different
discursive modality—or period rhetorics—and by the structure of constraint, imitation,
and subversion. These modalities, however, are relieved of their historicity when they
appear accumulated or stored in the modern Latin American narrative or “archival fiction”
of the fourth epoch. Assigning the role of founder of archival fiction to Carpentier in Los
pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953), whose narrator/protagonist is a composer likely
modelled after Hilario González, García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967) stands
as the Archive’s archetype and Jorge Luis Borges as its guardian (1990 in 1998).
The synchronic presence of dehistoricized discourses defines history
retrospectively, as a reconstruction of the past in the present (Treitler 1989a and 1989b),
and reaches beyond Latin America’s archival fiction. The year 1967 suggests a broader
“confluence of historical coordinates”—Carpentier’s metaphor for the elusive
predicament of the region’s musics. In this particular intersection converge not only the
publication of Cien años de soledad, the advent of archival compositions such as Alberto
Ginastera’s Bomarzo (1967) and Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1968–1969 [O King, 1967],
an expanded revision of Umberto Eco’s Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle
poetiche contemporanee (published in 1962, revised in 1967), but also Foucault’s
dialogue with Raymond Bellour wherein he lends a shape to the figure of the “archive,”
published under the title of “Sur les façons d’écrire l’histoire” (1967 in 2001: 625). Asked
by Bellour how he situates himself in this “mutation” that draws the most rigurous works
of knowledge into a kind of literary adventure, Foucault responds that, “Unlike those
labeled ‘structuralists,’ [he is] not really interested in the formal possibilities afforded by a
system such as language. [He is] more intrigued by the existence of discourses, by the
fact that words were spoken. Those events functioned in relation to their original
situation, they left traces behind them, they continue to exist, and they exercise, in their
submerged subsistence in history, a certain number of manifest or secret functions.” “So
—proceeds Bellour—you surrender to the caracteristic passion of the historian, who
wants to respond to the endless murmur of the archives.” Foucault: “Yes, because my
object is not language but the archive, which is to say, the accumulated existence of
discourses. Archaeology, as I understand it, is not akin either to geology (as the analysis
of substrata) or to genealogy (as the description of beginnings and successions): it is the
analysis of discourse in its archival modality.”
The center of gravity of modern Latin American culture, it if exists at all, belongs
as much to the vision projected by Carpentier as it does to Borges because, for him, it
was never a question of rejecting the legacy of the West but rather embracing it in its
totality to reorder its signs and turn it into a fiction. When Borges turns his encyclopedia
of Western knowledge on its head, divesting it of its culture-specific contexts of
interpretation, he cancels out its meanings to map out infinite possibilities of different
associations, presenting “a vision of a place where all other places intersect” (Parks
2001: 42). Moreover, intersections are congruent with the neutral, dynamic, and
intertextual view of history as “a web of temporally and spatially changing and
changeable set of relationships, or relationships among sets of relationships” (Wolf
1982: 6). Such reorderings of the legacy of the West require an a priori act of
possession, a “mastery of the code” (González Echevarría 1977 in 1990: 29), without
which there is no possibility of escaping the epigonic fate of the original predetermination
(the ”invention” of America as a replica of Europe). Mastery of the code to then decode
and elicit multiple new readings that turn the received culture into a fiction by inversion of
signs demands a critical attitude toward its legacy and its systems of explanation.
Borges challenges the limits of this idea in “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (1938 in
1974: 444–450) when its fictive author—an absence—reproduces its source verbatim to
elicit the reading of a totally different text, not by “copying” the original but by “coming to
the story through the experience of Pierre Menard” (Parks 2001: 41). In 20th-century
music theater, the Borgean idea of appropriation and reordering surfaces in Bomarzo
(1967), the second opera by Alberto Ginastera (1916–1983) based on the homonymous
novel (1962) by Manuel Mujica Láinez (1910–1984). If the figure of the Archive, as
defined by González Echevarría in his theory of Latin American narrative, is at once
Library, Encyclopedia, History, and Sediment, the fiction that the grotteschi in Bomarzo’s
gardens suggested to Mujica Láinez subsumes all these and takes possession of the
Renaissance to invert its signs from a 20th-century perspective, as Borges
reterritorializes Cervantes in “Pierre Menard.”
The subject of Bomarzo was set initially as a Cantata in three prosas and three
cantos for baritone, narrator, and chamber orchestra. Commissioned by the Elizabeth
Sprague Coolidge Foundation of the Library of Congress and premiered at the Coolidge
Auditorium on 1 November 1964, the Cantata Bomarzo Op. 32 (1964) represents
Ginastera’s first incursion into indeterminacy (Kuss 2002c). By 1967, the haunting
dramatic potential of the subject had filled the canvas of an opera. In Bomarzo converge
Borges’ deliberate anachronism in “Pierre Menard” and Mujica Láinez’s intention to
exhume the Renaissance in order to create a modern character on the suggestive
presence of the grotteschi in the sacro bosco of Bomarzo that Pirro Ligorio designed for
Pier Francesco Orsini between 1552 and 1564. From an aesthetic interpretation of the
latent drama of the grotteschi as timeless extension of the personality of the Duke,
whose permanence would transcend the temporality of his life, Ginastera conjured up a
musical dramaturgy that abrogates dramatic movement to interpellate the limits of
primordial forces in his characters and create a music theater of gesture, incantation,
primordial cruelty, erotic ritual, and violence that approximates it to Antonin Artaud (Kuss
1984, 1987, and 2002a), whose théâtre de la cruauté coalesced in his “discovery” of the
Tarahumara of Mexico (Stoïanova 1993).
The novel, situated between 1512 and 1572, is a compendium of history, fiction,
symbols, and allusions to other texts through which Mujica Láinez, the author/narrator,
identifies himself with his alienated protagonist, coming to the story through the
experience of Mujica Láinez. Among the objects that saturate the texture and share
allegorical functions with the characters is a torso of the Minotaur displayed at the
Vatican’s Pío Clementino Museum, interpreted as a mirror of the ambiguities of the
human soul that the Minotaur must penetrate to fulfill the destiny predicted by Daedalus,
because “his true labyrinth is not Daedalus’s walls but the dilemma of a soul lacerated
by the duality of its roles” (Foster 1972: 35). The mirror that Ariadne orders for the
Minotaur to contemplate himself and despair at his irreparable peculiarity functions as a
visual metaphor in the novel and the opera, fusing the myth with the interpretation of the
grotteschi as atemporal extensions of the personality of the Duke, through which “Until
time ceases to exist, the Duke of Bomarzo will contemplate himself” (Act I, Scene 8).
Central to the musical dramaturgy of Bomarzo is the idea of permanence,
embodied in the static presentation of the opera’s basic series (the cumulative cluster
C – B / Db – Bb / D – A / Eb – Ab / E – G / F – Gb) that opens and closes the circle of
Pier Francesco’s recollections of his life at the moment of his death (Act I, Scene 1; Act
II, Scene 15). These recollections are reenacted in terms of antithetical abstractions—
innocence and guilt; dream and reality; love and rejection; beauty and physical
deformity—crystallized in the intervening thirteen scenes. Love is associated with three
images (the Florentine courtesan Pantasilea; Pier Francesco’s wife, Julia Farnese; and
the loyal Abul, a mime); innocence with the eternal “Niño pastor” who sings the
“Lamento di Tristano” and with Julia Farnese; and the Renaissance ideal of beauty with
the portrait of an anonymous nobleman painted by Lorenzo Lotto. Their antitheses
(rejection, guilt, and physical deformity) are subsumed in the personality of the Duke.
The web of associations generated by these polarities is built into a dense network of
12-tone materials, all referable to the basic series (Permanence) and its two main
derivations, associated with Dream (Act I) and Death (Act II). “Piedras” and “rocas”
weave poetic strands throughout the libretto, articulating Pier Francesco’s dream of
permanence in those timeless distortions of classical prototypes through which he will
transcend his death (“La eternidad de Bomarzo,” II/15). Presaged in the Villanella, “Si
quieres saber de mí, te lo dirán unas piedras” (Interludium XII), the process of
identification with the “monsters” that embody his eternity closes in the arresting intensity
of the “Elegía para la muerte de Pier Francesco” for strings (Interludium XIV), built on an
integration of the Dream and Death series.
Ginastera’s conception appropriates not only musical symbols of the
Renaissance in phantasmagoric passamezzi, gagliardas, mascheradas, madrigals, and
villanellas, deterritorializing them through the fictional lens of a 12-tone language, but
also identifies with the referential legacy of procedures associated with Alban Berg’s
intricate genealogies of 12-tone materials in the Lyric Suite, and, particularly, in Lulu.
Mastering the code in the manner of Berg, however, applies only to pitch organization
and does not extend to the musical dramaturgy, which renounces narrative (as opposed
to the labyrinthic narrativity of the 673-page novel) and conjures up static timbric shapes
as forms of incantation to explore “insanity [as] the most austere (even abstract) and
drastic mode of expressing in theatrical terms the reenacting of ideas.” In Bomarzo, as in
Artaud, these ideas function as sensory stimulants, as “décor, props, sensuous material”
(Sontag 1966: 166, 171). Like the grotteschi themselves, the essence of the opera can
be accessed only through a visceral experience that subtends any act of intellection. On
the other hand, the intricate web of symbolic associations built into the score itself is only
accessible through analysis which, as in the case of Lulu, neither stage director nor
performers should ignore (see Kuss 1984 for the first analytical interpretation of this
work; also 1987 and 2002). Commissioned by the Opera Society of Washington,
Bomarzo, Op. 34, was premiered in Washington, D.C. on 19 May 1967 under the baton
of Julius Rudel, who also conducted the recording of the work in 1968 (Columbia
Records, CBS stereo 32-31-0006, 3 LPs).
In different ways, Borges and Ginastera exorcised the legacy of the West by
joining it, embracing it to master it with virtuosity, only to decontextualize it from
meanings carried and reorder it in literary and musical visions congruent with their
historical destiny. The deliberate intention to fuse Borgean erudition with Carpentier’s
“crucible of civilizations” surfaces in the poetics of the Peruvian Edgar Valcárcel (b. Puno
1932–Lima 2010), Ginastera’s pupil and outstanding composer of the post-Ginastera
generation. In a series of hommages to “Western masters” that includes Ives, which we
could call “ficciones” d’après Borges, Valcárcel recovers essential features of their
languages to transform them into specific symbols of Andean culture. In the Homenaje a
Stravinsky for two pianos, flute, horn, and percussion (1982), for instance, he summons
the language of Le Sacre du printemps to explore its “peruanizing” potential as well as
the vulnerability of the source: an intervallic change can suggest a totally different
continent. If Valcárcel systematically deconstructs Bach, Brahms, Prokofiev, Bartók,
Stravinsky, Falla, and Hindemith to “honor” them as well as “void” them and resituate
them in a fictive Andean pantheon, his postmodern stance toward the received culture—
which he shares with Borges—also distances him from Ginastera’s poetics.
Intratextuality defines the progress of Ginastera’s method, rendering different
presentations as potential sources for other works, as in the recomposition of the first
piano sonata (1952) in the second (1981), and the latter in the third (1982). Moreover,
intertextuality defines the conception of, for instance, his first piano concerto (1961), a
relational event that summons his own second string quartet (1958), Bartók’s second
piano concerto (1930–1931), and the haunting slow movement of Beethoven’s fourth.
If the presence of intra- and intertextual relationships implies an interpretation of the
referential texts, Ginastera did not probe the act of criticism itself as a basis for a
compositional conception, as does Valcárcel. The same generational distance can be
established between the poetics of Ástor Piazzolla (1921–1992), who identified with the
heterochronous procedures he assimilated to transform his own culture-specific tango
tradition, and the poetics of some composers of the post-Piazzolla generation, whose
compositional strategies assume a critical attitude toward the same referential tradition.
(This topic is explored in “Nomadic tango,” a masterful essay by Ramón Pelinski
available in French and Spanish [1995 and 2000].)
* * * * *
“When music makes history” (d’après Anthony Seeger) “A mí se me hace cuento que empezó Buenos Aires:
la juzgo tan eterna como el agua y el aire”
(Borges, “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires” [1974:81])
The idea that Buenos Aires could have had a beginning seems like a tale:
I perceive it as eternal as water and air.
Each point of intersection in our relational web d’après Wolf defines different sets
of relationships between the referential traditions involved. Wolf’s value-free metaphor
for history as a web of multileveled intersections is not only inclusive of all traditions, but
also accommodates hegemonic modalities of musical discourse or “period rhetorics” with
their respective strategies of subversion, as well as “archival” composition (the
synchronic accumulation of discourses that defines modernity), which is not hegemonic
(González Echevarría 1990 in 1998). Within this neutral metaframework, however, each
intersection is a culturally value-laden gravitational center. Like Bartók, Ginastera forged
his musical language from sediments of folk traditions, processing elements that carry
cultural density as compositional materials. These elements are either progressively
submerged at structural levels or his works—as in his first opera, Don Rodrigo, Op. 31
(1964) based on one of Spain’s oldest and richest epics, whose basic series contains a
segment (Eb – E – A – Bb = E – A – Bb – Eb) derived from the guitar tuning he quotes
explicitly in earlier compositions (Kuss 1992b)—or resurface to follow one of several
purely compositional tendencies—as in the cluster of piano sonatas (1952, 1981, and
1982) whose last two enunciations symmetrize and—by abstraction—nulify explicit
cultural references in the first. Similarly, Piazzolla forges his “archival” compositions from
sediments of the tango tradition, redefining in each enunciation their relationship with
other discourses to create different intersections of this fusion. By contrast, however,
Piazzolla’s intra- and intertextual compositional thinking remained anchored in the
referential tradition, however transformative may have been the processes by which he
explored its boundaries.
Piazzolla’s viscerally interpellative art fulfills Carpentier’s prophetic vision of an
America that has not yet “exhausted its wealth of mythologies.” It also has the power to
conjure up the essence of a “place” (Buenos Aires, not “Argentina”). In “Signifying a city:
Astor Piazzolla and Buenos Aires,” the distinguished Argentine musicologist Omar
Corrado explores the composer’s capacity to construct a city through symbolic means,
clarifying that, in this context, music would be assigned a power of representation
capable of becoming a place, or the set of images associated with a place. “We believe,
with Martin Stokes, that ‘the musical phenomenon can evoke and organize collective
memories and present experience associated with a place with an intensity, power, and
simplicity denied any other social activity’” (2007). The compelling imagery of Uruguayan
Horacio Ferrer’s symbolic poetry to evoke the timeless city of Borges in such
collaborations as the “Balada para un loco” (1969) assumes the shape of myth in María
de Buenos Aires (1968), the chamber “operita” in two parts and sixteen numbers
premiered at the Sala Planeta on May 8, 1968. Like Carpentier and Caturla, whose
intention to evoke traditions shaped the text and musical dramaturgy of their “mitología
afrocubana,” Ferrer and Piazzolla created a “mitología porteña”—Virgin included—to
evoke the birth of the city’s voice, its life, “first” death, and resurrection in the composer’s
“new tango.” The choice of an allegory to capture tango’s history and prophesy its future
through the lens of the innovator who ruptured the tradition’s boundaries distances the
conception of María de Buenos Aires from its likely precedents in those comedias
musicales porteñas (1932–1961) by the legendary Francisco Canaro (“Pirincho”) (1888–
1964) and playwright Ivo Pelay (1893–1959) that are retrospectives of the genre itself.
These include La historia del tango (1941), which traces the genre from 1900 to 1940 in
a prologue and three epochs—“Origins of tango,” “Paris in 1925,” and “The present in
1940,” the golden era of traditional tango, whose final scene proclaims the dignity of
popular music and celebrates the genre in a crowning “Tanguano”; Buenos Aires de
ayer y de hoy (1943), which features the same previous characters in two eras, 1840
and 1940, with respective allusions to popular musics of these periods; and Festival del
recuerdo (1961), a retrospective of previous musical comedies, including Buenos Aires
de ayer, the first part of Buenos Aires de ayer y de hoy (1943) (Seibel 2007). Instead,
the symbolic language of María de Buenos Aires approximates it to Proserpina y el
extranjero, an adaptation of Proserpina’s myth of death and renewal set in a Buenos
Aires conventillo by Argentine playwright Omar del Carlo (1918–1975), which was
premiered in the capital on June 2, 1957 with incidental music by Piazzolla. (Proserpina
y el extranjero was already a successful opera with libretto by Omar del Carlo and music
by the noted Argentine composer and conductor Juan José Castro [1895–1968].
Awarded the Premio Verdi in 1951 and premiered at the Teatro alla Scala of Milano in
1952, its musical dramaturgy juxtaposes the symbolic domain of myth to the realistic
underworld of the city and its music [Kuss 1986].)
The semantic field of María de Buenos Aires, however, is purely symbolic: the
authors relinquish any explicit history of tango to evoke the history of its destiny. In
Ferrer’s myth, the allegorical María (tango itself, the city’s voice) is conjured up by the
spirit of the city (El Duende, a male narrator). María roams through “her” many faces
toward a first death (tango in the 1950s and 1960s?), but her bewildered Shadow defies
oblivion, seeking a rebirth. Distraught, El Duende summons her once more, luring her to
discover the mystery of conception through “the simplest means.” María’s Shadow
responds by giving birth, not to a male Jesus, but to “another” María. Is it the same
María rekindled from her Shadow or is it a different one? The question remains
unanswered. Evaristo Carriego (1883–1912), the poet who captured the soul of the
suburbs and was extolled by Borges (1930 in 1974: 101–172) lurks in the shadow of
Ferrer’s whimsical imagery. In the “Milonga carrieguera” (I/4).
conjurada su imagen y presente su recuerdo, surge el relato de la vida de ella.
Un muchacho esquinero llamado Porteño Gorrión con Sueño, describe a María
La Niña como magnetizada por fuerzas que la alejan de él. Cuenta luego de
cuando ella se marcha y él la predestina a oír, para siempre, su desdeñada voz
de varón en la voz de todos los hombres (Ferrer 1968).
The story of her life now can be told because her image and memories have
been summoned. The suitor she leaves behind in the suburb describes the
young María departing for the city’s underworld as if magnetized by forces that
estrange her from him. He also tells that, when she leaves, he predestines her to
hear the voice of the man she had rejected in the voices of all men.
In 1968, Piazzolla had found his poet of the city and the voice of María in Amelita
Baltar. Through Piazzolla’s mastery of juxtaposition, interpolation, displacement, and
suggestive instrumentation, history becomes a tapestry of interwoven allusions.
Roaming throughout the score are motifs whose fluid juxtaposition define or subvert a
theme, disguising the artifice of association as rhapsodic composition. Memories of old
valses, habaneras, and milongas interact with signatures of his style, such as the
reliance on syntactical ostinati and his 3 + 3 + 2 rhythmic stamp. The ostinati or ground
bass techniques that impart a ritualistic character to Piazzolla’s music, as mapped by
Pelinski in a penetrating article (2002), surface in their simplest forms. These are the
descending tetrachord (as in A – G – F – E), whose extension to a descending fifth
defines the second incarnation of María’s theme (I/1; I/5; II/15); the circular motion within
a minor third (as in A – B – C – B)—the stamp of his tango “Buenos Aires hora cero”
(1963)—that relentlessly mourns María’s death and the listless roaming of her Shadow
in the second part; their combination (as in A – B – C – B / A – G – F – E), which is
easily referable to María’s first thematic incarnation (I/2); and a semblance of strophic
bass, whose impassive motion suggests an irrevocable future in the “Tangus Dei” or
Sunday of resurrection (II/16).
Ferrer’s imagery—like Mujica Láinez’s in Bomarzo—inspires but does not define
Piazzolla’s musical dramaturgy. As in Caturla’s central “Balada de Papá Montero,” a
form of death separates the two parts in María de Buenos Aires (I/1–8; and II/9–16). Just
as memories of older musics and anticipations of a tradition’s rebirth are masterfully
interlocked throughout the first part (the past), images of death and reinvention are
evoked in the second (the future). A defining feature of the dramaturgy is the composer’s
conception or María’s “themes.” Her first incarnation takes its tentative shape from a
memory of old tango (I/2) and suggests the subject of the masterful fugue in “Fuga y
misterio” (I/5). Death is also memory in gestures from “Adiós nonino” (1959) that
summon the mystery latent in María’s Shadow (II/12 and II/13). Her second thematic
incarnation is insinuated by the violin in “Alevare” (I/1), resurfaces as the “mystery” in the
instrumental “Fuga y misterio” (I/5), and assumes its final shape in María’s “Milonga de
la Anunciación” (II/15). Unlike the first, which is rhapsodic, the second is confirmative in
its strophic shape, the escalation of tension by half-step progressions, and relentless
repetition of Piazzolla’s rhythmic signature (3 + 3 + 2). We suggest to the readers a
comparison between two exceptional recordings of this work: that of its première, with
Piazzolla, Ferrer, and Amelita Baltar as the magical María (Trova TLS-5020, 2 LPs); and
the superb performance led by Gideon Kremer, also with Ferrer as narrator (TELDEC
Classics International GMBH 3984-20632-2, 1998). In the second recording, we
question the wisdom of adding a contrafactum of the dénouement—the “Milonga de la
Anunciación” (II/15) in the first part (“Yo soy María,” I/3b). This addition disrupts the
teleology of the dramaturgical conception, preempting its most important ambiguity: “Is
[Piazzolla’s new tango] the same María rekindled from ther Shadow or is it a different
one?” Psychoanalysts are summoned to cleanse the past and sort out dreams and
memories in a circus atmosphere before the birth of new tango (II/12), but musical
analysts have not yet rescued Piazzolla’s art from either, misplaced musical numbers or
the classificatory obsession of colonized discourse whereby domains must remain safely
circumscribed. Consequently, any “crossings” of these borders take center stage in the
rhetoric of coltural politicians, to the detriment of other aspects of a composer’s poetics.
Just what domain to assign to this sacrilegious tanguero who transgressed the
boundaries of the “art” music space while violating the sacred tradition of tango appears
to have been the question that monopolized Piazzolla’s early reception in Argentina,
according to Carlos Kuri, one of his most penetrating exegetes (1997). This reception
also might explain Piazzolla’s absence in the otherwise informative Diccionario de
música y músicos by Argentine musicologist Waldemar Axel Roldán (1999). Precisely a
profusion of ideological literature about Piazzolla unmediated by analysis prompted Allan
W. Atlas, a distinguished U.S. scholar, to organize the first symposium dedicated to “the
musical discourse itself,” which took place on March 10, 2000, at The Graduate Center
of The City University of New York. Some of the papers presented at this conference
were published in the 2003 issue (No. 9) of the Revista del Instituto Superior de Música
of the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Santa Fe, Argentina), under the editorship of
Omar Corrado (see Kuss 2002b and Pelinski 2002). With added contributions, these
papers also were published by Leandro Donozo’s Gourmet Musical Editiones under
Estudios sobre la obra de Astor Piazzolla, edited by Omar García Brunelli (2008).
* * * * *
Epilogue Viewed from the perspective of our own archive, what Columbus wrought for Europe
was the fulfillment of another set of cultural possibilities, “defined within and yet against
its powerful totality.” Rather than the West and the rest, the rearticulation of values in the
act of adoption, assimilation, and subversion relativizes certainties and challenges the
borders of a once sacrosanct space, implicitly de-centering it and irreverently breeding
criteria for its critique. The regulative concepts of the hegemonic grid are being critically
scrutinized by some enlightened Europeans (von Fischer 1979; Finscher 1986–1987)
and challenged, more or less irreverently, by scholars in the United States (Treitler
1989a and 1989b; Tomlinson 1995). New generations of Latin American musicologists
also are engaged in dismantling the tenacious hold of colonized discourse (see also
Kuss 1998). However, a culture-specific theory of “musical discourse” mediated by
analysis and comparable to González Echevarría’s theory of Latin American narrative is
yet to emerge from musicological quarters.
The three works we have discussed above illustrate different visions of “cultural
essence.” Manita en el Suelo and María de Buenos Aires represent different
relationships to the mediation of anthropology. For these two unassuming yet
paradigmatically intentional myths, we summon González Echevarría’s definition of
Archive as Myth within the poetics of displacement:
Mythification is a version of the masterstory of escape from the strictures of the
dominant discourse through fusion with one of the main objects of that discourse:
myth. Heterogeneity of cultures, languages, sources, beginnings, is at the core of
the Archive’s founding negativity, a pluralism that is a subversion or sub-version
of the masterstory. The Archive culls and looses, it cannot brand or determine.
The Archive cannot coalesce as a national or cultural myth, though its make-up
still reveals a longing for the creation of such a grandiose politico-cultural
metastory (González Echevarría 1990 in 1998: 175).
Among Ginastera’s 53 completed works (Kuss 2002c), the choice of Bomarzo for
this essay was driven first and foremost by the fact that the composer considered it one
of his most “perfect” mature works, to which he would not make a single change.
Moreover, Bomarzo underscores the vulnerability of the stereotype that assigns “identity”
to the “mimetic pact” (González Echevarría) with the anthropological mediation to the
exclusion of other, equally powerful cultural forces. This work also subverts the
stereotypical image that cultural politicians who adhere to an epigonic national metastory
unmediated by analysis have constructed on this composer. In 1932, amidst a profusion
of constructions of identity built on the idea of nation, Borges wrote that “El culto
argentino del color local es un reciente culto europeo que los nacionalistas deberían
rechazar por foráneo” (The Argentinian cult of local color is a recent European
phenomenon that nationalists should reject for its foreignness) (“El escritor y la tradición”
[1974: 270]). In Bomarzo, Ginastera aligns himself with the fiction that Borges
inaugurates in 1938 with “Pierre Menard,” wherein mastery of the code becomes the tool
to strip the embraced culture of its hierarchies, values, and meanings, and thus turn the
legacy of the West into a fiction that reverses the terms of the foundational imaginaire
initiated in such texts as Pigafetta’s.
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