pangea lecture
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MISSOURI MUSIC TEACHERS ASSOCIATION
The Recitals of the Pangea Project: a Musical Pilgrimage across the World
By
Blas González
Paper submitted for a lecture Recital at the MMTA 2009 Conference
Performers: Ya-Ting Liou and Blas González
Good afternoon. Today we would like to talk about the purpose of the Pangea Piano
Project, a series of recitals that reflect on classical music and national identity.
Throughout the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras the epicenters of classical music
were limited to Vienna, Rome, Naples, Paris, and were only daringly stretched to the outskirts of
Western Europe (Budapest, or Prague, for instance). Since then, a gradual process of
globalization has included Asia, the American Continent, Oceania, and Africa in the participation
of art music, as we understand it today. In a world in which Chinese pianist Lang-Lang and
Taiwanese violinist Cho Lian-Ling have won unanimous acclaim, where the music of the
Argentinean composers Alberto Ginastera and Ástor Piazzolla are widely performed, and where
festivals and competitions are held in unsuspected places such as Turkey, Venezuela, Russia, or
Singapore, it is out of question that classical music has achieved the category of world music.
This is a fact that we, as musicians, must reflect upon.
Our recitals celebrate this present diversity in classical music by programming
composers from very different parts of the worlds. We also try to shade new light on works of
the standard repertoire, reminding ourselves that this encounter of cultures was an urge that
arose gradually in artists. When Mozart included a Turkish March in a piano sonata, or when
Rameau wrote the ballet Les indes galantes, these composers already addressed the issue of the
encounter of different cultures, even if their approach stressed exoticism and a naïf portrayal of
foreign cultures.
Even the discovery of neighboring European countries such as Italy or Switzerland made an
impact in Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s music, resulting in the composition of Years of
Pilgrimage. And before that, Chopin, Beethoven and Brahms were inspired by the folklore and
suggestively romantic aura of Scotland, Russia and Ireland. The cross-pollination of national
styles that happened inside Western Europe shows that even before the contact with non-
western music, the music these composers were writing was already “impure”. The myth of the
Western European composer’s metaphysic inspiration, which circulated during the Romantic
Era, was actually the deliberate invention of developed nations who were trying to create iconic
superhuman artists whose genius is solitary and beyond terrestrial grasp. But music is an art that
obeys laws of historical development, and all the musicians that have contributed to it have
looked for whatever is foreign and rare rather than close and familiar.
The difference in between the perception of music from other cultures during the
Nineteenth Century and the Twentieth Century perspective in world music is that the romantic
perspective is fundamentally prejudiced. A composer who lived in Vienna in the Nineteenth
Century would try to incorporate characteristic melodic intervals and rhythmic patterns of exotic
music into the weave of the Eurocentric “international” style. But in the first decades of the
Twentieth Century, the technological advances that allowed travels throughout the world
allowed Europeans to understand non-western cultures better. Musicology and musical
anthropology would help western musicians to understand the value of music that was foreign
to them in terms of rhythm, intonation, timbre and melodic structure.
The Paris World Exhibition of 1889 changed French composer Claude Debussy’s musical
style forever. After listening to a gamelan ensemble from Indonesia, he wrote to a friend that
this percussion music was able, through its distinct system of tuning and its irregular complex
rhythmic patterns “to express every nuance of meaning” and to make “[the Western system] to
seem like empty phantoms for the use of unwise infants”.1 The exotic music from the Middle
and Far East fascinated Debussy so much that he felt prompted to write piano pieces like
Pagodes (from Estampes, 1903) or Canope (from Préludes, Book 2, 1910), which represent
respectively China and Egypt. He explored the use of parallel harmonies and pentatonism to
suggest exoticism. In La Puerta del Vino, also from the second Volume of Preludes of 1913, the
exoticism goes to the extreme of blending different influences. A postcard representing the
Alhambra, a Moorish temple in Granada, Spain, inspired Debussy. The piece depicts how the
architectural style of the building and the cultural entourage of Granada are the result of an
encounter between Arabic and Spanish culture. Debussy symbolically represents this duality.
Spain is represented through the use of the rhythm of Habanera in the left hand.
Example 1: Claude Debussy: La Puerta del Vino, No. 3 from Préludes, Book 2 (New York: Dover
Publications, 1989), m. 3.
The guitar, Spanish instrument par excellence, is imitated in the initial bars.
Example 2: Ibid. m. 21.
And the flourishes in the right hand use Arabic sounding scales.
1 Claude Debussy, Correspondance (Paris: du Sandre, 2005), 52.
Example 3: Ibid, m. 13-14.
The hybridism of the piece is multi-layered; there is the basic mixture of Iberic and
Middle Eastern elements and also the point of view of a French composer who applies his
magnifying glass and dyes the materials with the colors of impressionistic harmonies.
In spite of Debussy’s efforts to transform his music through a legitimate absorption of
foreign models, he belongs to an era in which Western culture is still ethnocentric, as a result of
a process of territorial domination over the rest of the world. Europe speaks internationally for
the rest of the world, and does not allow the non-western cultures to speak for themselves.
In Edward Said’s own words, throughout the first part of the Twentieth Century “power,
speech, and representation are still located exclusively with the colonizer, while the colonized
are seen as powerless, silent and objectified”.2
However, a gradual process of re-acculturation is allowing Asian artists to speak for
themselves and build their own subjective view on their cultures. If in the beginning of the
Twentieth Century European western composers were incorporating elements of the East into
their music, today in the Twenty-First Century musicians from the East are receiving in their
countries an intense training that allows them to soak deeply in Western classical music. In this
way they recover musical ideas that Western composers had borrowed from them.
The artistic development of Turkey throughout the Twentieth Century is a significant
example of this phenomenon. The country has historically been a place of connection between
2 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 17.
the West and the East. During the 1700, in spite of the military conflict between the Ottoman
and Austrian Empires or maybe precisely because of it, the Middle East and Europe were in
constant cultural exchange. Architecture, cuisine, literature, painting, and even tailoring of both
cultures influenced each other. It is a well-known fact that western orchestras incorporated the
use of piccolos flutes and bass drums to imitate Turkish military music.
In the first decades of the Twentieth Century, many Turkish musicians started traveling
to the West. After the Turkish Republic was declared in 1923, “a number of talented people
were sent by the republic to various cities in Europe to study music”. The first generation of
twentieth-century Turkish composers, though, treated their folklore in an overtly naïf and
unsophisticated way when they wrote their chamber and symphonic music. But “in later stages
every composer achieved synthesis by means of abstraction”.3
Several generations later, Toga Zafer Özdemir (born 1978) has achieved a unique
mixture of popular music fundamentally from his country but also from rock and roll and jazz,
and elements of classical music. He received his education in the regions of Anatolia and Ankara,
but a later travel to the United States and several residencies in Western Europe have marked
his musical style with a particular flexibility to incorporate all sorts of influences. His
Mesopotamia Suite, in three movements, makes specific reference to the music of the region of
Anatolia. The use of compound meters 2/8 + 3/8; 2/8 + 2/8 + 3/8; and 2/8 + 2/8 + 2/8 plus 3/8
throughout the three movements of the piece are idiosyncratic, as well as the scale D- E flat- F
sharp- G natural- G sharp- A, which shapes the structure semitone- augmented second-
semitone- semitone- semitone.
3 Anonymous article in the website Turkish Cultural Foundation, http://www.turkishculture.org/music/classical-31.htm
Example 4: Tolga Zafer Özdemir, Mesopotamia Suite, No. 1, m. 1-4
Because of Özdemir’s classical training, we can hear the influence of Bartók, Debussy,
and Gershwin in his piano writing. There are several musical jokes, like the appearance of a
theme that uncomfortably reminds the listener of Ravel’s Boléro.
Example 5: Özdemir, No. 2, m. 25-27.
Or the last bars of the suite, in which a whole tone scale in contrary motion between
right and left hand is interrupted to end the piece noisily with a Major Seventh and a Minor
Seventh in extremely opposite registers.
Example 6: Özdemir, No. 3, m. 64-66
Özdemir’s irreverent sense of humor reflects a very original view on the contemporary
meaning of genres, tradition and the alleged importance and hierarchy of different kinds of
music.
On a different note, a country like Taiwan also has a peculiar story, as far as the
construction of its national identity is concerned. For years an island inhabited by cultures of a
possible Polynesian origin who spoke dialects which might have originated all the Australasian
languages and chronically a Chinese colony, the country has also received the cultural influences
of Holland and Japan mainly. Taiwan has been struggling to achieve its political independence
throughout the whole Twentieth Century. Although at present it is a parliamentary democracy
with unclear support from the United Nations and economical restrictions imposed by the
international pressure of the Popular Republic of China, Taiwan suffered for decades the
domination of that country and earlier Japan. Both dictatorial regimes suppressed Taiwanese
people’s basic civil rights such as voting or speaking in public in their own dialect. The elections
in the 1990s changed the panorama, and people’s general awareness of their own identity is
finally emerging.
Guo Zhiyuan, born in 1921, is considered the father of Taiwanese classical music. Since
Taiwan was under Japanese domination during his youth, he traveled to Tokyo to study with
composers who were deeply imbedded in the French impressionistic style. When Guo returned
to Taiwan, he reacted to the political problems that his country was experiencing. Guo
committed to write nationalistic music that would represent Taiwan as a country with its own
identity. Fantasia on Taiwanese Classical Music, written in 1956, is one of the landmarks of his
prolific piano output. To the unaware Western listener, this piece might sound like one more
example of chinoiserie. Nevertheless, if it is compared with the compositions that were written
at that time in Mainland China Guo’s independent artistry comes to the light. In the vespers of
the Maoist Cultural Revolution, composers from Mainland China tended to write with extreme
simplicity, in an epic and heroic style. The introspection and refinement of the Fantasia would
have seen, by the Chinese eyes, as decadently Western. The title’s reference to specifically
Taiwanese Classical music is not coincidental; it is a call for the memory of Taiwan’s unique
culture. Guo’s background as an ethnologist is apparent in the notation of the traditional tune.
The meter changes stress the asymmetrical inflections of the melody.
Example 7: Guo Zhiyuan, Fantasia on Taiwanese Classical Music (Taipei: Taiwanese Music
Editions, 1996), m.8-11.
The pianistic style proliferates with impressionistic and romantic idiomatic features, but
it is hard to say if they are more identifiable with Rachmaninoff, Debussy, or they are simply very
personal. What seems to be suggested by the journey though which the theme goes, is that the
past of Taiwan can be brought to the present in a spirit of change and realization.
The example of Özdemir’s and Guo’s music shows how composers from countries that
were considered peripheral until now are creating their own tradition of classical music. They
internalize Western styles and they recover elements of their own cultures that had been
utilized by Western composers in the past.
Another noteworthy issue in today’s music is the influence of avant-garde in peripheral
countries. Musicians from places like South America or Oceania do not just write music inspired
by their folklore. They also have been following the international trends of music that are
generally considered avant-garde, contemporary or new music. Let us define, in a perhaps unfair
and single-mindedly generalized way these tendencies by saying that they challenge the idea of
tonality, regular beat, and regular phrasing with different degrees of radicalism. Once avant-
garde has been introduced into the musical establishment of these countries, they followed
their own course. Consequently, avant-garde composers from countries like Argentina or New
Zealand can rightfully claim now that they are finding their own voice.
Argentina’s formation of a national identity has been achieved in several steps and
throughout very conflicting events. The period of Spanish colonization lasted for 200 years
during which the native cultures were systematically suppressed to the point that they were
nearly eliminated. The Nineteenth Century brought political independence from Spain and
about one hundred years of civil war. A new current of European emigration during the early
1900s shaped one last time the face of the country. Unlike other Latin-American countries,
Argentina is not characterized by an immediately recognizable presence of the Native American
element (the mestizo). A mixture of cosmopolitism, inferiority complex and nostalgia makes
Argentineans to constantly seek the European inspiration. But a century shaken by military coup
d’états has gradually shown the society that the country has to face its real problems and to
look for a way to generate institutional continuity.
In music, besides the cultivation of an internationally successful school of composition of
classical music that is inspired in folklore and tango, as the example of Ginastera’s and
Piazzolla‘s presence in concert programs prove, a strong and multifaceted movement of avant-
garde music has emerged since the 1960. The presence of Gerardo Gandini’s and Mariano
Etkin’s works in new music festivals in Europe, America and the rest of Latin America has
assured Argentinean contemporary music, at times, a significant relevance. As it occurs with the
rest of Latin-America‘s avant-garde movement, the sense of lack of direction and the
uncertainty of the future, both politically and culturally, is reflected. In Latin America, the
challenge is “to realize oneself in the middle of conflicts in between different temporalities that
live both in the same present”.4 According to Mariano Etkin “the essentially migratory nature of
Argentina, the elimination and consequent disappearance of great part of the aboriginal
population and a process of ‘mestizaje’ which did not penetrate in the middle class gives the
country’s culture characteristics that separates it from all the other important nations of the
area, for instance, Brazil, Mexico or Peru. Migration, interruption, syncretism… could we risk an
analogy by saying that in some of the better Argentinean music what makes it different form
Center European music is that materials change place, interrupt each other and mix?”5
Pablo Tarrats is a composer born in 1969. A disciple of Gerardo Gandini and Mariano
Etkin, he inherited this tendency to discontinuity that is inherent to his compositional style. It is
enough to sample some excerpts of his music which confirm some of the characteristics which
Coriún Aharonián considers pervasive in Argentinean and Latin-American avant-garde music:
“non discursive music processes, different sense of time, expressive blocks, austerity, violence,
primitivism and importance of silence”.6
Example 8: Pablo Tarrats, Horizontes esfumados, m. 1-4.
4 Canclini, Néstor G, “La modernindad después de la posmodernindad”. In: Belluzzo, Ana María de M. (org.). Vanguardas artísticas na América Latina. São Paulo, Memorial da América Larina/Unesp.5 Mariano Etkin, “El hombre que está sólo y espera”, catalogue of the Festival Neue Musik Rümlingen, 1997.6 Coriún Aharonián, “An Approach to Compositional Trends in Latin America”, Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 10, p. 4, 2000.
The musical ideas are bare and naked, like the woodcraft of a Native American artisan.
Horizontes esfumados, or Blurred Horizons, was especially written for this project in 2006.
New Zealand has experienced a totally different aspect of European colonization. In
spite of several skirmishes between Maoris and European colonizers for a few decades before
and after they signed the historical Treaty of Waitangi, an exemplary document that guarantees
political rights to both Europeans and non-Europeans, the cultural project of New Zealand has
been vastly inclusive. Without the need to fight militarily for political independence from
England, today the country has its own legislation and Executive power, even if formally the
maximum authority is the Queen of England. Immigration is nowadays a great factor of change
in the configuration of New Zealand’s society. The proximity to the East has attracted people
from China, Taiwan and Korea to live there. Other important sources of immigration are, in
order of importance, India, Fiji, Samoa and Turkey, with a minority of Latin-American
immigrants.
The composer who is acknowledged to be the first serious classical musician is Douglas
Lilburn, who established the first laboratory of electro-acoustic music in Wellington. Lilburn was
the first composer to be concerned with national identity in New Zealand music. His disciples
have continued in that direction, but approaching the issue from different angles.
Jack Body, born in 1944, is one of them. A very successful composer of symphonic and
chamber music and music for digital media combined with acoustical instruments, his interests
range from photography to ethnomusicology, painting to politics. After studying in New Zealand
he spent time in Germany and Holland, and after returning to his country, he worked in
Indonesia. Recording and transcribing music from this country, as well as doing the same with
music from China, the Balkans, and other parts of the world has greatly influenced his music.
“I’ve turned to transcription [of indigenous music] when I’ve been unable to focus on original
composition-as Ravel is supposed to have turned to orchestration in similar circumstances. I like
to transcribe music in which I sense a particular quality, melodic, perhaps, or rhythmic which my
ears find attractive but which I have difficulty deciphering. I want to understand what is
happening in this music to give it this special quality. My ideal is to learn something that might
be able to apply in my own compositions.”7 Drumming, from Three Rhythmics, written in 1986, is
a result of this process, and it mixes drum rhythms from different non-western traditions. There
are two very apparent processes that Body elaborates throughout the piece. One is the
appearance of solos accompanied by a drum “rolling” watered by the use of pedaling.
Example 9: Jack Body, Drummings, from Three Rhythmics (Wellington: Waiteata Music Press,
1999), m. 1-3.
The other process consists on the meter less overlapping of similar motives, reminiscent
of several drum music from Africa and Asia, in which a downbeat cannot be found.
7 Jack Body, “From Sound to Symbol and Back Again: Transcription/Composition”, in http://www.jackbody.com/sound_to_symbol.htm
Example 10: Ibid. m. 10.
Halfway the piece these processes start to interrupt and influence each other. In the
case of Jack Body’s music the idiosyncrasy of his culture is represented precisely by the
connivance of diverse influences that coexist with tolerance and generate a bold synergy.
By reflecting on the mutual influences between these different composers, many
questions are raised. Is there, today, a place in the world equivalent to the Vienna of the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, in terms of musical influence? Has the center shifted? Is
there a center? What does it mean, today, to belong to the periphery? What does national
identity mean, in music? Does it depend on the use of folklore, or on deeper spiritual concerns?
Jan Art Scholte thinks that “globalization does not entail the end of territorial
geography; territoriality and supraterritoriality coexist in complex interrelations”.8 The
extremely fluency of communication in today’s world makes human beings to face a paradox.
On one hand there is, like never before, a great deal of awareness about other cultures. On the
other hand globalization seems at times to threaten the individuality and peculiarity of different
cultures. The music that we are presenting in this lecture is the contribution of artists that turn
8 Jan Art Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (London: McMillan, 2000), 8.
globalization into a positive issue, as a possibility for an integration into the fabric of a world
that consumes relentlessly art.
We would like to finish this presentation by performing a piece by an American
composer who, without any doubt, represents how this country is constantly redefining its
national identity. George Gershwin was an American Jew who blended African-American and
European music, opening the doors to the maturity of classical music in the United States. His
Preludes for piano use these contrasting influences in perfect balance. When he introduced a
blues scale on his prelude number 2, Gershwin defined forever what a composer must do if he
was not born in Europe. According to an oral tradition, upon being requested by him to teach
him composition, Ravel said to Gershwin: “Why do you want to become second rate Ravel,
when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?”9
Thank you for coming.
9 Quoted in Jane Stuart Smith and Betty Carlson, The Gift of Music: Great Composers and Their Influence (Wheaton, IL, Crossway Books, 1995), p. 727.
Bibliography
Books
Debussy, Claude. Correspondance. Paris: Du Sandre, 2005.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Scholte, Jan Art. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. London: McMillan, 2000.
Stuart Smith, Jane & Carlso, Betty. The Gift of Music: Great Composers and Their
Influence. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.
Articles
Aharonián, Coriún. “An Approach to Compositional Trends in Latin America”. Leonardo
Music Journal, Vol. 10, 2000, p. 3-5.
Canclini, Néstor G. “La modernidad después de la posmodernidad”. In: Belluzzo, Ana
María de M. (org.). Vanguardas artísticas na América Latina. São Paulo, Memorial da América
Larina/Unesp, p. 24-26.
Etkin, Mariano. “El hombre que está sólo y espera”. Neue Musik Rümlingen, 1997, p. 3.
Online sources
Anonymous article in the website Turkish Cultural Foundation,
http://www.turkishculture.org/music/classical-31.htm
Body, Jack. “From Sound to Symbol and Back Again: Transcription/Composition”.
http://www.jackbody.com/sound_to_symbol.htm
Scores
Body, Jack. Three Rhtyhmics. Wellington: Waiteatea Music Press, 1999.
Debussy, Claude. Complete Preludes. New York: Dover Publications, 1989.
Guo, Zhiyuan. Piano Solo Album. Taipei: Taiwanese Music Editions, 1996.
Özdemir, Tolga Zafer. Mesopotamia Suite (Unpublished)
Tarrats, Pablo. Horizontes esfumados (Unpublished)
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