Download Luis Zubillaga (1928-1995) and his Late Style

Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advance Study,
University of London - Latin American Music Seminar (Saturday 17 May 2008)
Luis Zubillaga (1928-1995) and his Late Style:
The Reclamation of Jazz and Primitivism
My first encounter with the music of Luis Zubillaga was not from concert
performances or from listening to his recordings. What fascinates me more about this
Argentine composer is the visual spectacle of his colourful and dynamic graphic
scores as well as his personal struggle to live for his love of music. (* Show scores!) I
must say it is an unusual way to get to know the works of a composer, but we will
soon realise at the end of this paper why the composer himself persists in labelling his
music as ‘scenic’ or what I will call an ‘imagery music’, a music that evoke abstract
emotional images. This is how Zubillaga describes his music, (if you will please
excuse my Spanish)
Toda la música que yo tengo es música de escena ... [y] que yo no planifico
una obra desde lo estructural, sino desde lo emotivo. Va naciendo una imagen
emotiva...
All the music that I have is scenic music ... [and] that I do not plan a
composition from a structural point, but rather from an emotive one. An
emotive image is conceived… (end quote)
For Zubillaga, musical inspiration is derived from the pre-conceived sonic images that
will become transformed into imagery sounds. In other words, his music is not base
on a programme or a narrative, but is a dialectical play between the sounds and a
series of diegetic images that we, as listeners, are invited to create with our
imagination. His music is then one of synchrony between sight and sound, and one of
diachrony between production and reception. Zubillaga does not decide for the
listeners what they should hear or imagine, but provides a mere trigger of their senses.
That is, he composes a music that paints a series of abstract images, which will vary
from person to person. This is pertinent to Zubillaga’s aesthetics given that music,
being pre-linguistic, takes on contrasting semantics when it is projected onto the
listeners, whose experience of the very same music can range from anxiety to elation,
thus emphasising the meaning of un música emotiva. To illustrate this point, I am
going to play a short excerpt from Paisaje fluctuacion (Fluctuating Landscapes). *
CD1 Track 5
Although the composer believes that his music can convey a pluralistic
spectrum of an imagen emotiva, my aim here is to identify the emotive images that
Zubillaga had in mind before or during the composition process. At the outset, the
titles of his works are barely helpful, given that they merely provide a spatio-temporal
reference point, such as Aquella tarde en aquella casa (That Afternoon in That
House) or Nada vacias (Empty Nothingness). The best way will then be to explicate
the composer’s music via his biographical background, albeit with a sensitivity to not
objectify every theme within the music with an event in his life.
Unfortunately, the brief biography of the composer that I am providing can
only be biased towards the historical relevance of my paper, because shrinking the
composer’s life into a verbal summary will indeed do him and his music no justice.
Anyway, Luis Zubillaga was born in Buenos Aires in 1928. During the composer’s
formative years in the forties and fifties, the classical music scene in Buenos Aires
was dominated by two schools of composition: one was the nationalist music of
Alberto Ginastera, while the other was the dodecaphonic or twelve-tone music of Juan
Carlos Paz. The latter was greatly influenced by Arnold Schoenberg and his serial
techniques. Luis Zubillaga, who is a student of Paz, started to compose with the
twelve-tone technique and gradually incorporated it into other styles of composition,
such as the extensive sound colours of Polish Sonorism and the improvisatory nature
of John Cage’s music.
These influences did not come by accident. In spite of the many economic
crises and political unrests in the Argentina, there was a culture of resistance among
artists and intelligentsia in general. The numerous military juntas and changes in
presidencies from 1930-1976 did not favour a modernist attitude towards culture and
society. However, there was an influx of new music being performed and broadcast in
the 1960s and 1970s. It was the fall of the military dictator, Juan Carlos Onganía, in
1970 that brought about a burgeoning of cultural exchanges. Composers, who visited
Buenos Aires, included the American experimentalists John Cage and Terry Riley, the
Italian serialist Luigi Nono and the Polish sonorist Krzysztof Penderecki. By then,
Zubillaga, who studied the piano and trumpet, had already accumulated a canon of
musical influences ranging from the rigidity of serial technique to the improvisatory
nature of jazz. The popular form of jazz, being his foremost interest, will come to
dominate his compositions and his teaching career for the rest of his life.
It is also not surprising to grasp a sense of political militancy within his music.
Zubillaga’s personal life was deeply affected by the political situation, which resulted
in his self-imposed exile to Caracas, Venezuela, as well as his relocation between
north and central Argentina. The pieces, such as Unidades II and Trompetas en
Septiembre, with their disorganised array of bugle calls and drum rolls alternating
with the anxious sounds of disjunctive melodic lines and awkward silences, are vivid
autobiographical and political statements. I will play now an excerpt of Unidades II. *
CD1 Track 4
Another important influence is that of contemporary classical improvisation,
which is different from jazz improvisation. In the former style, there is no fixed
instrumentation or harmonic language. A thematic idea may or may not be chosen,
but members of the group will intuitively identify a musical motive when the
performance is in process. In the Grupo de Improvisación that was founded by
Zubillaga in 1970, every rehearsal was recorded and the whole group would review
the improvisation process after listening to the playback. Evidently, these experiences
play a role in Zubillaga’s music, which is infused with a sense of randomness and is
without a pre-planned structure or any repetitious passages. I will now play a video of
the Grupo de Improvisación in rehearsal. Unfortunately, the music for the film is
missing, so I have chosen another piece Oct. ’90 (October ’90) as music to illustrate
my point. * DVD + CD2 Track 3
Now, via an analysis of a work from the final years of Zubillaga’s output, I
would like to show how jazz and primitivism have ‘returned’ as musical influences.
By primitivism, I mean the textural simplicity and the sounds of drumming that is
derived from the folk music of Latin America. These features are absent from the
music that you have heard so far, given that these earlier pieces from the sixties and
seventies are predominantly avant-garde and are more experimental in nature. In
contrary, the compositions in the last five years of the composer’s life indicates a
return to tonality and co-ordinated temporality.
For instance, in the piece Bue ’93, which is a short form for Bueno Aires 1993,
the opening chord (A-C-Eb-G-Bb) is a diminished 9th, a harmony that is featured
prominently in jazz. What follows is a gradual expansion of the harmonic intervals
moving from dissonant to consonant harmony over ninety bars. The main motif, made
up of a rapid triplet, and later extended to a quadruplet, pushes the musical
momentum forward only to be interrupted repeatedly by harsh sustained dissonances
and elongated and unexpected glissandi or trills. The instrumental range starts high
but descends after two minutes into the piece. There is a more aggressive
recapitulation of the motif played by all five instruments before a musical scene
change is observed. At four and a half minutes into the piece, we witness a different
emotive image. The music changes from triple time to quadruple time, and is slower
and more homophony, resembling the style of a brass chorale. Following the
composer’s intention, I’ll not tell you the emotive image that comes to my mind, but
I’ll leave that to your imagination. *CD2 Track 6 4:30-5:30
Further, Zubillaga continues to make subtle use of serial technique with
respect to pitch manipulation, such as the rotation of notes using a technique known
as klangfarbenmelodie. That is, a melody which is made up of different sound
colours. For example, in bars 36-39 and in bar 57, the four instruments play different
notes but sounding the same chord each time. * Explain music example!
By reaching further back to his roots in his later years, Zubillaga starts to
incorporate folk elements in his music. Given the stability of the economic and
political situation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he sets up various societies and
organisations for composers and young musicians. In his position as founder and
director, he was given the opportunity to travel around Venezuela and Argentina,
which exposes him to the rural landscape of the north-western part of the country. It is
there where the chacarera argentina, or the Argentine folk music, is commonly
played, and when his childhood memories of life in the countryside are rekindled.
Also, while he was lecturing at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán
between 1964 and 1967, he became aware of the economic and social inequalities
between the Argentines living inside and outside the capital. His experiences of life
with the popular sectors made him review his own stance against the bourgeois
lifestyle of the porteño, or what the Argentines call those living in Buenos Aires.
Thereby, his contacts with musicians from the north in the early 1990s stimulated the
inclusion of folk elements in his late music, of which the use of the bombo legüero
symbolises a form of cultural and political resistance. Such is the case of Bue ’93,
among other works.
In Bue ’93, the sound colour of a two-tone tom-tom drums closely resembles
the hollow but sturdy sound of the bombo legüero, which is the Argentine drum used
to accompany dancers and singers in the chacareras. Zubillaga composes a distinct
minimalist rhythm that progresses from the trembling drum rolls at the beginning to
the rhythmic rigour of the climax when the drums are hit with intense fervent,
evoking a form of ritual music of rural Argentina. Co-incidentally, the temporal
setting of Bue ’93 in triple meter further signifies the influence of the chacareras’s
function as a dance form in triple time. I shall now show you a video of a street
parade held in Santiago del Estero featuring the bombo legüero in the Fiesta de
Bombo. * play youtube from realplayer.
From all these musical examples, I have shown how the composer, who grew
up in the city, is able to juxtapose his modernist inclinations with the usage of folk
elements derived from the rural culture. To reclaim a part of him that has been
abandoned in his earlier music is then to partake in an act of Nationalism on a level
that integrates the political struggle of his life into his art. That is, the music of
Zubillaga’s late style with his effective combination of jazz, serialism and primitivism
emphasises a social politics and aesthetic that can only be deciphered from his music.
In the year of his 80th birth anniversary, Zubillaga is considered to be one of the
modern composers of the twentieth century.
Now, before we listen to Bue ’93, I would like to finish by saying a word of
gratitude to Luciano Zubillaga, Jorge Zulueta and Jacobo Romano with whom I had
numerous occasions to listen in on their witty conversations and their fond memories
they had with Luis Zubillaga. * CD2 Track 6
Jun Kai Pow
King’s College London
15-16 May 2008
LATIN AMERICAN MUSIC SEMINAR
Saturday 17 May 2008
PROGRAMME
10:15
Coffee
10:40
Welcome
10:45
‘Klee in Concert: Luis Mucillo’s Piano Concerto’
Cintia Cristia
11:30
‘Ground, flight, cadence: Tom Jobim’s “Águas de Março”’
David Treece (King’s College, London)
12:15
‘“Saliendo del Cuarto de Tula”: gender, creativity and Cuban women singersongwriters – a case of separatism?’
Jan Fairley (Independent scholar, Fellow IPM Liverpool)
13:00
Lunch
14:00
‘Luis Zubillaga (1928-1995) and his Late Style: The Reclamation of Jazz
and Primitivism’
Jun Kai Pow (King’s College, London)
14:45
‘Back to the roots: Transcultural introspection through electronic dance
music in Peru’
Fiorella Montero (Goldsmiths)
15:30
‘Music education in Venezuela from the colonial period to the present’
Sylvia Constantinidis (Boston University)
16:15
Tea
16:30
Live music: Chilean nueva canción performed by Silvia Balducci
We ask for a contribution of £5.00 towards coffee, tea and lunch (unless giving a
paper). Please send cheques, payable to Geoff Baker, to the Music Department, Royal
Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX.