A Woeful Perception of Latin American Music : L.A. will get an opportunity to hear the works by composers of the Western Hemisphere

After the Los Angeles premiere of Alberto Ginastera’s “Bomarzo,” offered by the New York City Opera at the Music Center some years ago, an influential and well-known figure of the local avant-garde musical establishment spitefully commented that the opera was a second-hand rehashing of Central European contemporary music formulas.

The fact that “Bomarzo” was underlined by non-European rhythmic patterns, that the orchestral texture of the work was dissimilar from the Viennese atonal and serial tapestry, and that the vocal writing was highly different from the models it was supposed to have copied were not relevant to the supercilious accuser.

Some years later, Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha showed at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music a videotape of his opera “Baal.” That the work sounded and looked like the fourth act of Berg’s “Lulu,” and even aesthetically and philosophically paralleled it, was no deterrent for the same commentator to lavishly praise the composition.

This apparently unimportant observation is quite symptomatic: even learned scholars, and well-informed and rather sophisticated individuals, who form the cultural and intellectual backbone of the United States, seem to exhibit a deep-seated, biased and not logical disdain for things originating South of the Rio Grande, while embracing--often with blind enthusiasm or dubious judgment--anything emanating from the Old World, and more recently from the Orient, the Near East, or in lands bathed by the Indian Ocean.

This peculiar inclination extends to ways of life, the arts, politics and history--to name a few of the vital parameters which inform a culture. Americans have a horizontal East-West sense of travel and of cultural awareness, while totally ignoring the vertical North to South axis of their own hemisphere.

But now there’s an opportunity to hear work from the south. In conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Hispanic Art in the United States,” and underlining its importance, the Monday Evening Concerts will offer on Monday at Bing Auditorium a program of works by Mexican, Venezuelan, Puerto Rican and Cuban composers living in the United States, including three premieres. The concert, conducted by Juan-Felipe Orrego, will be a unique opportunity to face the aural expressions of art music by Latin American creators.

It has been said that art forms the ways of man. In this particular area, Latin America was blessed with highly developed native Indian pre-Columbian cultures. If the Indian past did not have a direct influence in the 18th and 19th centuries, Latin American music development--as it had in the unfolding of painting, sculpture and literature, and in the 20th Century in a reordering of architectural design--black music, together with Spanish and sundry European rhythmic, harmonic and formal patterns, created, through a fascinating hybridization, a magical concoction which in mid-19th Century penetrated by way of New Orleans to the North American scene and served as a basis for early ragtime.

The Contradanzas of the Cuban Manuel Saumell (1817-1870) directly influenced Louis Moreau Gottschalk, as later the Danzas of Puerto Rican Juan Morel Campos (1857-1896) left an indelible mark in the music of Scott Joplin. All through the 20th Century, Latin American folk and popular music forms continued to travel to North America. Although some of jazz idiosyncracies were developed specifically in the United States, the role of Latin American music--with its syncopations derived from the basic two dotted eighths plus one straight eighth, in a 2/4 meter--greatly and directly acted upon many of the derivations of jazz, up to the present.

Beyond all the rich popular music sounds and sonic expressions that Latin America exported during the 19th and 20th centuries to Europe and to the United States, another aspect of Latin American music, the so-called art music, has also contributed to Western culture. This art music area is even more systematically ignored by the North American establishment than the folkloric and popular aspects of Latin American music. The Cuban Amadeo Roldan (1900-1939), for example, composed for the first time solo percussion ensemble works, antedating Varese’s “Ionisation” by seven months. Not a single music history textbook, nor any substantial essay or program notes, acknowledges this today.

Julian Carrillo (1875-1965) of Mexico is the only microtonal composer who developed a complete theoretical and notational system, and who constructed instruments (beyond the two pianos of Ives tuned a quarter tone apart, or the two stacked keyboards of Alois Haba) in quarter, eighth and sixteenth of tones. Except for Stokowski’s early and short-lived interest in his music, Carrillo’s compositions are systematically absent from the United States concert circuit, while obscure, second-rate compositions from Europe or Australia, for example, are promoted and heard.

Juan Carlos Paz (1901-1972) of Argentina is the second composer in the Americas (after a couple of works written in Los Angeles by Adolph Weiss in 1929 and 1930) who created 12-tone compositions starting in 1932. This fact is equally ignored, and the works of Wallingford Riegger, Roger Sessions, Ben Weber and George Rochberg are often quoted as examples of dodecaphonic continental writing.

Even Heitor Villa-Lobos’ centennial, celebrated the world over after the proclamation of the Villa-Lobos Year in 1987 by the UNESCO International Council of Music (the first composer from the Americas thus honored), was almost ignored by the United States music establishment--Los Angeles as leader of the ignominious forgetfulness.

If the immediate past is gloomy in respect to the almost total lack of United States interest toward Latin American art music (the various stays of Carlos Chavez in New York and California, and his intimate friendship with Copland providing and exception, culminating in the commission of his Sixth Symphony for the opening of the Lincoln Center) the present is not much better.

The copious amounts of printed scores produced by Mexican, Brazilian, Argentine and Chilean publishing houses, often offered free by the state-subsidized presses, very rarely are found in U.S. libraries. The bewildering thing about this lack of even curiosity is that Latin America remains the geo-political point of interest of the United States.

The age of misconceptions, prejudices, indifference and hostility regarding artistic expressions from Latin America must come to an end. If that would be the case, composers Mauricio Kagel and Mario Davidovsky should be acknowledged as Argentines who have influenced the development of the music of the second half of the 20th Century. Ultimately, the American public will learn to respect, applaud and appreciate the serial symphonies and quartets of Roque Cordero (Panama), the vivid open forms of Manuel Enriquez’ (Mexico) chamber music ensembles, the profundity of Alfonso Letelier’s (Chile) exquisite vocal works, the exuberance of Marlos Nobre’s (Brazil) sophisticated instrumental neo-nationalism, the evocative solidity of Julian Orbon’s (Cuba) decanted “encore-Baroque” sound spectrum, the futuristic nobility of Hector Tosar’s (Uruguay) most recent compositions, the moving serenity of Mario Lavista’s (Mexico) exploration of solo instrumental writing, or the controlled elegance of Juan Orrego Salas’ (Chile) classical summing up of new, limpid revisions of tonality.

When all this civilized cognition eventuates, justice will have been better served, and the United States citizenry will have learned to look vertically to the South, beyond the boundaries of the country and the trivial inanity of considering Latin America merely as a blurred land of rum and tequila, exotic fruits and conga drums, bullfighting and side shows, somnolent peons and idiotic generals. Then, the inhabitants of the Land of Manifest Destiny will be able to genuinely immerse themselves, without fear of contamination, in the exciting waters of true Latin Americanism.

Composer De la Vega’s “Tropimalpal” will be performed at Monday Evening Concerts. He is professor of music at Cal State, Northridge.