THE INCA TRAIL/CAMINOS DEL INKA

A Musical Journey

“I invite you to join me on a musical and visual journey along the Inca Trail. Built by the Inca Empire, this extensive network of pathways unites what are now Perú, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. “Caminos de Inka” has been created to rediscover, preserve, and disseminate the musical legacy of South America. It is an effort to unearth forgotten musical gems, mix them with classical ones, and commission new music from these countries, thereby bringing new repertoire and new sounds to the concert hall.”

Miguel Harth-Bedoya

Peruvian-born conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya has been a regular visitor to the BSO, but this time, he appears with a very personal program that is part of a major project to showcase the musical past and present of his home region. Through music and visuals, this concert reveals the vibrant ethnic traditions of Andean South America, as well as some of today’s most gifted Latino composers who are drawing on them to animate their contemporary musical creations. Much of the background information in this note is drawn from the colorful and informative website <www.caminosdelinka.net>.

A Brief History

The website provides the following brief history of the development of music in Andean South America. The highlighted names are composers featured on this concert.

Native Music: “Music has existed for millennia in South America, but like the native languages (Quechua being the most important), it was not written down. The instruments used by the native people were mainly wind and percussion instruments. Among them are the queña, zampoña, toyo, taka, ocarina, pututo, bombo, and rainstick. Vocal music has also been in existence since the 1500s. It was only with the arrival of the Spaniards that local music, either original works or transcriptions of older music, was written in musical notation.

Colonial Music: “One of the earliest instrumental works that we can find was written by Baltasar Martinez y Compañón between 1783 and 1785. Martinez y Compañón not only notated music but also painted over 1,000 folios depicting activities, costumes, and musical scenes of colonial South America. This treasure allows us a glimpse of life, musical and otherwise, during Spanish Colonial times. Other important composers during this period were Juan de Araujo (1646–1712) and Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco (1644–1728), who wrote the first opera in the New World, La púrpura de la rosa.” On this program, we will hear music by Martinez y Compañón and view some of his paintings.

Music during Republican Times: “After almost three centuries of imperial domination, almost all countries in South American won their independence from the Spanish Crown between 1804 and 1824. Each country subsequently began to develop (and rediscover) its own musical identity. Many South American composers went to Europe for professional music training. Some were very successful in Europe, among them the Brazilian António Carlos Gomes (1836–1896), who composed [the opera] Il Guarany. Most of them returned home and started teaching composition to local composers. Since communication and transport between Europe and South American took a long time, many of the styles in the later part of the 19th century and early 20th century seem to be “behind” the European styles. This is why in the early part of the 20th century we find a great deal of “Romantic” music by composers like Enrique Soro (Chile, 1884–1954), Guillermo Uribe–Hoguín (Colombia, 1880–1971), José María Valle-Riestra (Perú. 1858–1925), and Alfonso Leng (Chile, 1894–1974).

“At the same time, the Indigenist movement, in which composers made it a priority to draw directly from and illuminate the native music of their countries, was also taking place. In 1913, Daniel Alomía Robles (Perú, 1897–1942) composed El Cóndor Pasa (whose tune was popularized in 1970 by a cover version by Simon and Garfunkel). This work is a zarzuela [Spanish operetta] of strong social content, having to do with a group of miners oppressed under unfair labor conditions by their foreign mine owners. Also an ethnomusicologist, Alomía Robles spent a great deal of time collecting folk music in the Andes and used some ancient Andean music in El Cóndor Pasa.

“In the second half of the 20th century, “modernist” composers Edgar Valcárcel (Perú, b. 1932), Celso Garrido-Lecca (Perú, b. 1926), Mesias Maiguashca (Ecuador, b. 1938), Blas Emilio Atehortúa (Colombia, b. 1943), and Alberto Villalpando (Bolivia) developed unique musical styles that broke boundaries previously established in traditional compositions in South America. Some experimented with electronic and aleatoric [improvised] elements, with no traditional notation. However, at the same time, they managed to incorporate local musical elements of each of their cultural traditions.

“Alberto Ginastera (Argentina, 1916–1983) and Heitor Villa-Lobos (Brazil, 1887–1959), who have become icons of classical 20th-century South American music, went through various stages of compositional styles. Some of their music was nationalistic — inspired by their native folk and popular sounds and rhythms — while other works were influenced by the styles of the international music community.

Contemporary Era: “The 21st century brings new vision to the music of South America. Reflecting the multiculturalism and global interdependence that shape modern life, the music seems fresh and connected to contemporary audiences. Osvaldo Golijov (Argentina, b. 1960) and Esteban Benzecry (Argentina, b. 1970), Diego Luzuriaga (Ecuador, b. 1955), Agustín Fernandez (Bolivia, b. 1958), Gabriela Frank (USA/Perú, b. 1972) and Jimmy López (Perú, b. 1978) have created individual voices that are wholly original yet still show a cultural commitment to their South American roots.”

A Brief Guide to the Music Being Performed

El Cóndor Pasa was composed in 1913 by Daniel Alomía Robles (b. 1871, Huánuco, Perú; d. 1942, Lima) as a song in his zarzuela of the same name. It became famous in the U.S. when Simon & Garfunkel arranged it as “El Cóndor (If I Could” in 1970. Based on Andean music of ancient times, it features the traditional Andean wooden flute and drums within a classical symphonic orchestration. Like Bartók, Robles spent much time traveling into the most remote regions of the Andes, collecting songs and music that had been passed down for generations.

Peruvian cleric Baltasar Martinez y Compañón (1738–1797) became the Bishop of Trujillo, a city in northern Perú. During visits around his diocese, he assembled nine volumes of watercolors illustrating the landscapes, architecture, and daily life of 18th-century Perú. Known as the Trujillo del Perú, this extremely valuable collection from 1783–85 also contained 19 musical works of the period. The Coleccion de Musica Virreinal (Collection of Vice-regal Music) “clearly reflects a striking contrast between the music in Perú and the music in Europe in Mozart’s time” (from the <caminosdelinca> website). The three dances we’ll hear from this collection are “Baile de Danzantes,” “Baile del Chimo,” and “Lanchas para Bailar.”

Moving forward more than two centuries, we’ll hear Responsorio, written in 2000 by Diego Luzuriaga (b. 1955, Loja, Ecuador), who is one of today’s leading South American composers. Though he was trained in Paris and New York City, Luzuriaga draws much of his inspiration from Andean folk melodies, as we’ll hear in this piece whose hypnotic and obsessive drum part drives a fast ritual dance. Today, Luzuriaga lives and teaches in Pennsylvania.

One of Chile’s first symphonists, Enrique Soro (1884–1854) began his musical studies in Concepción, but moved on to the Milan Conservatory in Italy for advanced training. In addition to his composing, he was a successful pianist and became director of the National Conservatory of Music of Chile. A composer in the Romantic style, he was more influenced by European trends than by indigenous folk culture. We will hear his “very rhythmical, energetic and at the same time lyrical” Danza Fantastica, written in 1905.

Born in Berkeley, California in 1972, Gabriela Frank draws on her mixed ethnic heritage in her music: her mother is Peruvian/Chinese and her father is Lithuanian/Jewish. Inspired by Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, she travels throughout South America to explore indigenous traditions not only in music but also in folklore, mythology, and poetry and then combines them within a western classical framework. Written in 2004 for the Shepherd Symphony Orchestra at Rice University in Houston, Texas, her Illapa is a tone poem about the eponymous Inca god of rain, storms, and thunder. Andean flutes and other folk instruments are emphasized in this spellbinding piece.

Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera (1916–1983) is one of South America’s most renowned composers. Completely trained in his native country, he first came to prominence with his ballet score Panambi, written when he was 20. In 1941, when Lincoln Kirstein came on tour to South America with George Balanchine's American Ballet Caravan (the forerunner of the New York City Ballet), he heard Panambi and commissioned Ginastera to create a ballet score on Argentinian life for the company. Ginastera responded with Estancia, named for the great cattle ranches that dot the Argentinian pampas or plains. The ballet is a South American counterpart to Copland's Rodeo, written at exactly the same time.

The four Dances from Estancia have become a popular concert extract, brilliantly expressing the energy and vitality of Argentinian folk music. We’ll hear two of them: the gentle, lyrical "Wheat Dance” and then the propulsive finale, "Malambo,” a virtual dance orgy, showcasing the brilliant sounds of piccolo, trumpets, xylophone, and a hyperactive percussion section.

There is no other composer working today who has produced more excitement in audiences around the world than Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960, La Plata, Argentina). Born into a Russian Jewish family that immigrated to Argentina to escape the Czarist progroms, Golijov describes himself as a “Jewish gaucho.” His father was a physician and his mother a piano teacher who “took me to Buenos Aires to hear opera and also … Astor Piazzola tangos. … Somehow it all came together.” Golijov’s creative voice mixes Yiddish soulfulness with Latino rhythms plus solid classical training in Argentina, Jerusalem, and at New York’s Columbia University (where he earned a Ph.D.) into a potent brew.

Just premiered by the Ft. Worth Symphony this past January, Golijov’s Mariel for Cello and Orchestra is an arrangement of his 1999 work Mariel, which was scored for cello and marimba. “I wrote this piece in memory of my friend Mariel Stubrin,” writes the composer. “I attempted to capture that short instant before grief, in which one learns of the sudden death of a friend who was full of life: a single moment frozen forever in one’s memory and which reverberates through the piece, among the waves and echoes of the
Brazilian music that Mariel loved.”

Born in Lima, Perú in 1978, Jimmy López is the youngest of our composers and yet already is establishing an international following. After training at the National Conservatory of Music in Lima, he spent seven years (2000–2007) studying at the revered Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland and is now working on a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. His marvelously exciting Fiesta! mixes ethnic rhythms and colors into music that is thoroughly contemporary in sound and style; these will be its world-premiere performances. López’s music has won major prizes in Europe, Taiwan, and the United States.

Notes by Janet E. Bedell copyright 2008