Definitely a first for NOVA Chamber Music Series, Recuerdos Musicales (March 8, 3 p.m., Libby Gardner Hall) will feature Spanish, Cuban and Mexican music by composers from the diaspora, all of whom make for one of the richest chapters of music history to be represented this season at NOVA.
Among them will be Manual Ponce (1882-1948), known for his guitar love serenade Estrellita (My Little Star), which was made famous by violinist Jascha Heifetz. As one of Heifetz’s students recalled, “In 1923 he was in Mexico City and realized he didn’t have any work by a Mexican composer. While in a cafe there, he heard … local musician…[sing Estrellita (My Little Star)]. He took notes on his napkin and that night, composed an arrangement for violin and piano based on the song. It became one of his favorite encores.” The song was also featured in the 1939 film They Shall Have Music.
Performing Ponce’s music, classical guitarist Sergio Frias has become a cultural ambassador on several fronts. Not only has Friad researched Ponce’s broader significance as a composer, but also had promoted the art of classical guitar in Utah. He will perform his own arrangement of Estrellita and Ponce’s Intermezzo No. 1 in E minor.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Frias talked about how growing up in the state of Mexico, just about 15 miles from Mexico City, he already understood that Ponce was among Mexico’s greatest and most important composers. “Everyone loved his music and my mother used to sing it while cooking,” he recalled. Frias started guitar lessons at the age of eight and continued them when the family moved to Houston.
After the revolution in the early 20th century, Ponce and later his student Carlos Chávez were among the most prominent artists and creators to help cultivate ideals about Mexico’s national identity. This included tapping into their nation’s mestizo and Indigenous musical natures. This was no different than what American composers such as Aaron Copland would emphasize in their music for the U.S., especially in works written during the 1930s and 1940s.
While Ponce studied at the Conservatorio Nacional in Mexico City, he also studied in Germany, where he was encouraged to use traditional folk music for his compositional canvas. During the revolution, Ponce lived in Cuba. He wrote at the time:
Our salons welcomed only foreign music in 1910, such as Italianate romanzas and operatic arias transcribed for piano. Their doors remained resolutely closed to the canción mexicana until at last the revolutionary cannon in the north announced the imminent destruction of the old order. Amid the smoke and blood of battle were born the stirring revolutionary songs soon to be carried through the length and breadth of the land.
Unlike Chávez, who was focused on keeping intact the pristine nature of ancient Indigenous music, Ponce emphasized the value and beauty of musical source materials from some of Mexico’s poorest communities. He dressed them up in different clothing, a metaphor the composer often used, in order to persuade the intellectual audience for music that these folk traditions were just as significant for a true sense of ‘Mexicanness’ musical culture.
Frias has extensively studied the corpus of Ponce’s compositions, including the works promulgating the mestizo canción for which the composer is known as the father of Mexican vernacular music. In his own career, Frias embodies the same sense of duality. In addition to being professor and deputy director at Mexico’s National Conservatory of Music, Frias has been offering master classes in Utah, organizing classic guitar festivals and pursuing a second master’s degree at Utah State University’s School of Music.
In Mexico, guitarists are as famous as soccer athletes and mariachi bands. In Utah, there are deep benches of pianists and violinists as well as many guitarists who play rock and jazz, known for their craft. As for classical guitar, Frias has discovered it is not as popular or well known. Just last weekend he performed the second movement of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez— arguably, a work featuring classical guitar that is universally known—with the West Jordan Symphony. “A lot of people, who had never heard of the piece, mentioned that they had no idea that a guitar could sound like that,” he said. For many in the orchestra, it is their first encounter with Rodrigo’s music.
But Frias is encouraged. A classical guitar group in the south end of the Salt Lake Valley has grown steadily from seven to 25 musicians, within a short time. In late January, USU held its annual Classical Guitar Weekend, featuring René Izquierdo, a Cuban-born guitarist now recognized as one of the world’s top virtuosi for the instrument.
From Leo Brouwer, a Cuban native born in 1939 to a family of well-known musicians, Balada de la doncella enamorada will receive its Utah premiere, if not U.S. premiere. The work is scored for guitar plus string quartet. Frias also will perform in the Brouwer work. Brouwer, now 87, was one of Frias’ professors, and Frias continues to correspond with him. “He has always been a genius for me in his guidance,” he said, adding this piece is filled with complicated patterns and syncopated rhythms drawn from Africa and Cuba.
Brouwer’s music has evolved over his lifetime. As a young man, he combined traditional classical elements with Cuban inspiration but then after the revolution during the 1960s, he was inspired by avant-garde composers such as Penderecki and Bussotti, and those working in post-serialism and aleatoric work. He later would return to Afro-Cuban roots inflected with elements of traditional classical,techniques and minimalism. Brouwer’s guitar works are well known to guitarists around the world. This piece is the third movement from the composer’s suite El Decameron Negro (1983), which was based on a 1910 collection of African folk tales with the same title.
Among the contemporary composers in this concert is University of Utah music professor Elisabet Curbelo, a Spanish composer and native of Gran Canaria, whose Mikrop for viola and electronics will receive its Utah premiere, with Brant Bayless performing. She studied piano pedagogy, voice and composition in her hometown, as well as Madrid and Istanbul. She holds a doctorate in music composition from University of California-San Diego. Her pieces have been performed in Spain, Turkey, U.S., Germany, Switzerland and Holland. Her research focuses on the use of sensors to control electronics with movement and the use of extended vocal techniques based on her research of Middle Eastern music, with its complex microtonal system to which Western listeners must adapt accordingly. Her native Gran Canaria, closer to North Africa than to continental Europe, is a unique mix of European, Middle Eastern, Latin and American cultures.
