Chris: Tonight we have an all-Latin fest where we'll be looking at the use of folk elements in musical composition. Sue, you've been to Brazil recently, you go first.

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Sue: That trip strongly reinforced my interest in Latin harmonies and rhythms. Before I went, I wrote 'Latin Lament'  [Richard Conviser, violinist] (listen to soundclip). It was inspired by my previous interest in Latin music - particularly Antonio Carlos Jobim - but also by the third movement of Rachmaninoff's Symphony #2 in E minor. There are two themes in the third movement that were made into a pop song ['Never Gonna Fall in Love Again', 1975, written by Eric Carmen]. These themes are considered by many to be the sweetest and most beautiful lyrical phrases Rachmaninoff ever wrote. The relation of the harmonies and melody in that movement really affected me. To me, they express extreme sadness, and that was the mood in which I wrote the piece. The sadness just poured out of me, and I kept writing and writing. Finally I just needed to stop, sort through and structure the material. Without realizing it, I used the same chord progression Rachmaninoff used in theme one, but mine is a half-step higher because I was writing in F. Mine goes G minor- C7- A minor - D minor - G minor - C7 - F. I use that progression after the introduction as I move to the main body of the piece. Then I modify the chords as I modify my melody, and more Latin-sounding chords emerge. I'm totally chord-driven.

Chris: Your violinist is very good. When you presented this piece at our composer society concert, several people commented on his gorgeous tone and expressive playing. I noticed there were some slides in his phrasing.

Sue: I wrote the slides but he was very good at interpreting and adding to what I wanted. He suggested going up an octave in spots and it worked beautifully.

Igal: The chord progression is very simple but a lot of composers work that way. They'll take a simple pattern and make it very personal so that it could only be Bach or Rachmaninoff and nobody else.

Chris: It's interesting you went to a classical piece for inspiration to write in a folk vein. Usually it's the reverse - classical composers using folk elements in a classical piece.

Sue: There are many ways to work. Sometimes folk tunes get inserted into classical works to recycle music that people want to hear. As for the folk elements I used, I started with a bossa nova beat for the beginning, then it goes into a tango - a very mild tango - in the middle, and the bossa nova comes back at the end.

Igal: When the Rachmaninoff starts with the clarinet, it's very intimate and personal. But then all the other equipment enters - all the tanks and the artillery. I wonder how one would convey these two different dimensions - the intimate and the exuberant - with a violin and piano.

Sue: My piece is completely intimate, and touches a place people prefer to keep to themselves.

Igal: Yes, but you use some tools for dramatic effect. You change the dynamics [loud and soft volume] and you go up an octave sometimes. The effect goes beyond the intimate and personal to something more dramatic and exciting. It's like when your voice raises in pitch when you're excited or want to make a point. It can change the whole meaning. Think of what would have been implied if [former President] Bill Clinton had said 'I didn't have sexual relations with THAT woman' in talking about Monica Lewinsky. Have you thought about orchestrating this piece?

Sue: Do you want the job? Somebody should orchestrate it, but I prefer just to write the themes, then see what others can do with them.

Igal: I guess you like being the architect and letting the arranger be the structural engineer.

Sue: I'm also looking for a lyricist (in English of course) for this piece.

Chris: Let's go on to your piece, Igal.

Igal: 'Over the Line' [ see score pages - 1 2 3 4 5 6 ] is also for violin and piano. It's been performed in a church in Italy and a concert hall in Israel. The performance in the church sounds like someone trying to eat a bowl of soup at the bottom of a swimming pool. It's hard to distinguish between two liquids and that's the way it sounded in the church. Acoustics are very important and you have to find the right space to get the right meaning for your piece. Churches are good for choirs and pipe organs but not usually good for chamber music, depending on the piece of course.

Chris: You have a Latin background, right?

Igal: My father was raised in Bolivia and my mother was born in Uruguay. Our family is still spread throughout Latin America - Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. I was raised in Israel speaking Spanish. When I was five, I got hooked on the music of Bolivia. Later, I went to Bolivia to find the essence of this music, but it wasn't easy to find the pure gems that manifest the Andean quality. You have to distinguish between what's authentic and what's not. And also be able to tell what's a good mixture. There are lots of unsuccessful mixtures, where they try to throw East and West into the same oven but end up with sushi and ketchup. My process is like panning for gold nuggets. When I find the pure nuggets, I can melt them down and make them into anything I want. That's the connection between folk music and the music I write.

Chris: So what are some of the nuggets you found?

Igal: There's a lot of friction in salsa music, the guiro in particular [an instrument where a stick is rubbed against a resonating body]. I tried to implement the idea of friction in the violin part. Another element is the missing bass on the first beat. You expect the bass to show up on the first beat of the bar but it makes its point by being absent. It often comes in between the second and third beat, leaving the first beat empty. It creates a constant tension and that's what I call a pure gem. It's quite simple and can be implemented in many ways. I used the idea in my piece not only in individual measures but also in more remote ways. The piano doesn't sound in the lower register until towards the end.

Chris: What is salsa music?

Igal: It depends on where you are. The music in Puerto Rico is different from the music in Colombia and within each region there are again many different styles. I'm drawn to a particular line of Cuban music. I think highly of this music. I listen to it avidly.

Sue: It's in your blood.

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Chris: Cuban music has gotten more popular lately with the Buena Vista Social Club. Now that I've heard your piece, I would that say that the average listener wouldn't find anything particularly Latin about it. One time I heard a story on the radio about a musician who was trying to explain the music of Bartok to a friend who didn't understand it. First the musician played a simple folk tune, then a classical piece incorporating the melody, then another classical piece two steps removed, and finally a Bartok piece. The friend got the point, which is that composers sometimes abstract the folk elements and use them in indirect ways. The abstracted use of folk elements, does that describe your process accurately?

Igal: Yes. I'm not using folk elements literally. I've abstracted the gems and if it doesn't sound Latin, it means that I've succeeded in hiding my tracks. But in essence, this might be more Latin than my overtly Latin songs.

Chris: I hear the guiro idea. There's a lot of friction coming from the fast tremolos in the violin and the trills in the piano [both techniques involve the sounding of two adjacent notes quickly and repeatedly for effect]. It's very screechy, like the shower scene in 'Psycho'.

Igal: There's also friction coming from the lack of synchronization between the violin and the piano. They come in at unexpected times. You don't know when they will speak. Like the singers in salsa music.

Chris: The singers go over the bar and don't stay right on the beat. It's freer, there's more rubato.

Igal: I wanted my performers to take liberties with the score and make it personal. When I was younger, I wanted my performers to play my music exactly as I intended, but now I want them to connect to the music in their own way. I can't expect my neighbor to say good morning the same way I do.

Sue: What else did you have in mind when you sat down to write this piece?

Igal: I knew the violin player. He's very energetic, so I thought about how I could use that quality.

Sue: How are the fast piano parts Latin?

Igal: A lot of Latin music uses repeated patterns in the piano. I don't make them continuous like in salsa music, but I drop them in at different points in double-time.

Chris: The piece is very modern and I don't hear what ordinarily would be considered a melody. What were you attempting? Were you trying to be emotional? Intellectual? Expressive?

Igal: It's all those things at once. That's my ideal of creation. I'd be disappointed if it was only one of those things. It's partly analyzable and partly not. It's like having a son - part of the enjoyment is in the making and part of it is a vocation, continuing the line. Or to use another analogy, you want your bread to be tasty and nutritious at the same time.

Chris: What about melody?

Igal: Not every piece has to have a melody as commonly defined. The concept of melody is relative to what you are accustomed to. You can expand the definition of melody and include any instance where you go from one pitch to another in some kind of pattern. In my piece, the piano leaves F and rests on A. I started with a Gregorian chant idea and added trills. My melody is stretched out but it's essentially F - A - A - C-sharp - F - low A - G-sharp - F - A. Let's play it again to see if you hear a melody now....

Chris: I hear what you're talking about.

Sue: It sounds Middle Eastern to me, Israeli even.

Chris: I hear it, too.

Igal: Schoenberg had a concept he called 'klangfarben melodie' - melody of colors. Paraphrasing, you might start with apple - orange - pineapple and derive a melody from the relationships between them. The traditional concept of melody connects in my mind to a village with a school, a pharmacy, and stores at the center, then the houses and the fields as you go further out - very different from a modern city setup where the stores are all over or people buy off the Internet. There's no timeline in Web surfing. We live in a different world. It's possible to compose melodies that reflect our different circumstances. But it's also possible to broaden the definition of melody so much that it loses all meaning.

Chris: That reminds me of the story when Satie's music was criticized for not having any form. He sat down and wrote 'Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear'  [Amazon Link Below] to poke fun at his critics. My piece is for synthesizer and entitled 'Legados de los Antepasados' - legacies of our forefathers (listen to soundclip). I don't know why, but some of my music comes out Spanish. I came up with that title because I started in Spain but ended up somewhere in the Andes. South America would not be what it is today without the Spanish language and cultural influences. I wanted to capture the idea that South American music is so good in part because of all that went before and got mixed in. I use the empty downbeat - my bell comes in on the two. There's a part where the trumpet leaves the beats and becomes more free, not something I could notate adequately.

Igal: You have a very long line of stories, different episodes, and it was all connected without repeating itself.

Sue: So many chapters, it's extraordinary.

Chris: I've only recently started studying classical forms like sonata and fugue. Up to this point, most of my music has been episodic, like movies and TV. The music changes when the scene changes. I have a gypsy campfire dance followed by something more contemplative.

Igal: Please don't read any more books about form.

Chris: There's two schools of thought about creativity. One school says 'don't study anything, just express yourself' but the problem with that is you end up repeating what somebody did 500 years ago. The other school is called 'saturation of knowledge'. Not that I want to write sonatas and fugues, but I do want to know how the masters organized their material, solved organizational problems, and made their transitions from one section to the next. I think of it, not as a set of rules I must follow, but as a big menu of choices that will make me more resourceful in solving compositional problems as I go along. The final form will be dictated by my material.

Igal: In his writings, the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borjes claims to set out what happened at two different points in time. Then he opens it up and tells the story of how the character got from one to the other. Don't let your knowledge keep you from being fresh.

Chris: All good things must come to an end. This has been great. Thank you both.

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© 2004 Christopher M. Wright
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