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"The Conquest of Mexico" and "songbirdsongs" — April 11, 2003SFNM presented two concert performances of the elegiac work, The
Conquest of Mexico, by former Santa Fean Peter Garland, on Saturday,
April 11, and Sunday, April 12, 2003 at 8:00 p.m. at the Santuario de
Guadalupe in Santa Fe, along with songbirdsongs a salute to spring and nature by the composer John Luther Adams. The Conquest of Mexico is an extended suite
of baroque- and Aztec-influenced music which Garland composed between
1977 and 1980, conceived loosely in relation to the story of the confrontation
between Montezuma and Cortez. Deriving spoken text from the surrealist
Antonin Artaud's interpretation of the conquest, as well as from indigenous
sources, Garland's suite is embellished by words that form a poetic narrative. When originally premiered at the Santuario de Guadalupe in 1984 as a
full production puppet drama with dance, the work received a mixed reception.
Today, Peter Garland feels the work deserves to be heard on musical terms
alone, and that theatrical elements should not overshadow what should
be heard as an elegy to the rich cultural hybrid that is Mexico's history
and present. Hence the new Santa Fe New Music production reflected the
composer's own vision of the piece's evolution. Peter Garland was born in 1952 in Maine and is, with the recent passing
of Lou Harrison, a unique and important musical voice whose work is dedicated
to pan-cultural possibility. He edited and published "Soundings Press"
for twenty years, and has written two books of essays on American music
and culture. Garland has been a lifelong student of Native American musics,
and has lived in New Mexico, California, Maine, Michoacan, Oaxaca, Veracruz,
and Puebla. His musical works after 1971 were marked by a return to a
radical consonance and a simplification of formal structure influenced
by Cage, Harrison, early minimalism and an interest in world musics. Santa Fe New Music's Artistic Director John Kennedy has had a long affiliation
with Garland. With his New York ensemble Essential Music, Kennedy organized
the first New York program of Garland's music in 1991, and he has dozens
of performances of Garland's music in the years hence. Featured performers in these performances were Susan DeJong, recorder;
Kathleen McIntosh, harpsichord; Rosalind Simpson, harp; and David Tolen,
percussion. Program Notes Tonight's program unites two works composed contemporaneously, by composers
who are friends and share many musical and cultural perspectives. Though
these rarely performed works are over 20 years old, their joining at this
time and place seems appropriate and even needed. songbirdsongsJohn Luther Adams has lived in Alaska since 1978, and has focused his work over the years on music which he describes as "sonic geography." He writes of songbirdsongs:
This music is not literal transcription. It is translation. Not imitation,
but evocation. My concern is not with precise details of pitch and meter,
for too much precision can deafen us to such things as birds and music.
I listen for other, less tangible nuances. These melodies and rhythms,
then, are not so much constructed artifacts as they are spontaneous affirmations. No one has yet explained why the free songs of birds are so simply beautiful.
And what do they say? What are their meanings? We may never know. But
beyond the realm of ideas and emotions, language and sense, we just may
hear something of their essence. From there, as Annie Dillard suggests,
we can begin 'learning the strange syllables, one by one.' In a
letter to Adams in July, 1978, Edward Abbey wrote: "I'm working as
a fire look out on Aztec Peak in Arizona. Used to work same job on North
Rim of Grand Canyon. Your musical evocation of the hermit thrush, common
to both places, moved me to tears." The Conquest of Mexico
The conquest of Mexico and the war between the Aztec and Spanish empires
is the story of a clash between two cultures driven by imperialism and
leaders committed to warfare, economic exploitation, and the cultural
conversion of peoples deemed to have inferior cultural and religious viewpoints.
The historical outcome of this clash is morally ambiguous, but profoundly
lamentable for the massive scale of its violence and devastation. For the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés, the conquest was
a capitalist mission in which he and his generals were the chief financial
investors and benefactors. Driven by a search for gold and rumors of a
rich civilization, they exploited the ethnic divisions they found in Mexico,
enlisting as their front-line fighters armies of disaffected Totonac and
Cholulan people, armies which suffered massive casualties in combat with
the Nahuatl (Aztec) army. Assisted by superior military technology, Cortés parlayed the
conflict into a direct and personal confrontation with the Aztec leader
Moctezuma (also known as Montezuma), and Moctezuma's brother and successor
Cuitlahuac. Cortés lay siege to the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan,
overseeing its utter destruction and the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of its inhabitants. The conflict, which ended in 1521 and thus began the
Spanish cultural conversion and nation-building of Mexico, was overshadowed
by the presence of smallpox. The telling of the conquest of Mexico has been interpreted in many ways
since 1521. Among Mexicans, the story lived and evolved in the form of
pageant-drama and ballet-drama, a version of which was performed in Juárez
as recently as 1894. A modernist variant on this tradition was suggested
and outlined by the French playwright and theoretician Antonin Artaud
in the 1930's, in his manifesto The Theater
of Cruelty. The production of The Conquest of Mexico that Peter Garland presented in Santa Fe on May 11 and 12,1984, was informed
by both of these approaches. A long-evolving project, it took form four
years after the music was completed, and featured a changing creative
team that eventually included shadow puppets by Larry Reed, choreography
by Alice Farley, and lights by Dick Hogle. Sponsored by the Center for
Contemporary Arts and presented in the Santuario de Guadalupe, the work
was resurrected a year later for performance at the New Music America
festival in Los Angeles. Garland, who was living in Oaxaca at the time of this performance, wrote to me in 2002:
Garland's music for Conquest comes
from a deep familiarity with the music of Mexico, blending a quasi-baroque
ensemble and Aztec-influenced percussion with melody focused in the imperfect
intonation of a recorder. He told the music writer Mark Swed in 1985,
"... the music of Mexican Indians tends to be very lyrical and repetitive
and its static nature has a lot in common with some modern American music...
another interesting thing is that it is a unique hybrid of European and
indigenous musics—very often Indians play harps and violins. I was
looking for new ways to write for European instruments, and much of the
music in Conquest is influenced by that. The principal instrument in my
piece is the recorder. In many parts of Mexico the bamboo flute is very
common, so I kept the recorder part within one octave and wrote music
that is cyclical and repetitive." Garland's music for Conquest does not
attempt accompaniment or illustration of narrative. Rather, the music
is a series of evocations and elegies which trace an arc from before Cortés
to after. These performances of Conquest are the first since the original
productions, and thus the first to feature the music only. This presentation
cuts some of the original numbers and forms a suite of the major musical
works. Harpist Rosalind Simpson is the lone returning musician from the
first performances, though Jack Loeffler, who played percussion the first
time around, is the recording engineer once again! The first two movements are from the Overture, "Tzintzuntzan",
which was the ancient Tarascan capital and which translates as "Where
There Are Hummingbirds." It is an evocation of the Mexican land and
its Indian civilizations. The two "Mayacamas Songs" are music
for the well-documented omens that appeared to the Aztecs prior to the
arrival of the Spaniards. The first is "The Dance of the Bird of
Mirrors," a bird which danced before Moctezuma with a mirror in its
head, in which Moctezuma saw the advancing Cortés; the second is
"The Dance of La Llorona," or the weeping woman. "The Songs of Quetzalcoatl" pay homage to this deity of pre-Columbian
Mexico, a feathered man-serpent believed to have been the creator of all
life and civilization. Quetzalcoatl was thought to have been a kind and
benevolent past ruler who introduced metallurgy, agriculture, government,
and the arts to the people of Mexico. His reign was during the golden
age of peace and abundance, and he was opposed to war and human sacrifice.
The Aztecs believed he would return, and it is said that Moctezuma mistook
Cortés for Quetzalcoatl. The titles of these movements are "Kukulcàón,"
the Mayan name for Quetzalcoatl, and "Copan," a Mayan ruin in
present-day Honduras with a temple to Kukulcàón. "Flor de los Muertos" refers to the orange marigold, known
as cempoalxochtli, still to this day the principal flower used to decorate
shrines for the Day of the Dead. Subtitled "The Dance of Montezuma
and Death," it evokes Moctezuma's confusion between the prophecies
of Quetzalcoatl's return and the arrival of the Spaniards. The entrance
of the drum signals the entrance of Death, who dances with Moctezuma as
the music takes on greater momentum. "Frieze" is the climactic movement of this work, and is the
Dance of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec God of War to whom they offered human
sacrifices, and who was the principal Aztec deity of this time. This dance
is meant to embody the cosmological significance of human sacrifice, and
in the end, after the opposing armies have clashed, only Huitzilopochtli
emerges triumphantly. Conquest concludes with the postlude "Conductus and Canción."
A conductus is a 13th Century form of polyphony with note-against-note
melodies; in this case, the recorder and harp play in 6/8 meter while
the harpsichord plays in 3/4, with the two different but parallel paths
finally merging in the song of "Canción." It is an evocation
of Quetzalcoatl and a lament of the passing of a world. Recasting this as music only is today a fortuitous opportunity. It allows us to hear this elegiac music more clearly and to form our own narratives of conquest, our own cultural stories and reflections, our own past—and present. We do this in a shrine to Guadalupe, a hybrid religious figure and the "mother of the new creation," whose cult of peace and reconciliation arose almost immediately from the ashes of the conquest.
— John Kennedy, Artistic Director, Santa Fe New Music |
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