The story of Cuban classical music is a narrative of monopolies and exclusions. In the 19th century, Ignacio Cervantes (1847-1905) was expelled from Cuba by the Spanish police because his danzas, the rage of Havana society at the time, had become an affront to colonial authority. José Manuel (“Lico”) Jiménez (1851-1917), a contemporary of Cervantes’s, and perhaps one of the greatest piano virtuosos Cuba has ever produced, left the island early on for lack of an audience and settled in Paris, where one night he broke it big replacing Liszt at a concert, and later went on to become a frequent performer at the Weimar Court, at List’s invitation, at Leipzig, and at the Dresden Court, due to his friendship with Wagner. Examples of internal monopoly during the same century are equally as depressing, though sometimes for the opposite reasons. Cuba soon became a musical desert impermeable to any new trends beyond Wagner and succumbed to the silly ditties of endless zarzuelas. No less arid was the fate of classical composers after the 1959 so-called Revolution, that sad harbinger of Modernity. With the delineation of a canon based on who’s in or out of state-sanctioned art, the Communist regime enthroned official, and mediocre, hacks, and banished and silenced any potentially dissident artist. The story’s greatest irony, perhaps, comes not from these failures, colonial or revolutionary, but from the phenomenal “success story” of Cuban popular music. Ask anyone today what he or she understands by música cubana and they’ll shoot off a detailed chronicle of the cha-cha-chá. However, they won’t be able to mention the name of a single Cuban classical composer, and perhaps will go so far as to deny that there’s such a thing. And so, at the end of the day, one wonders who’s been our worst enemy: the colonial cop, the cultural commissar, or the man on the street.





Aurelio de la Vega (b. 1925) is a Cuban composer who has lived most of his life in the United States. That fact should tell you something: he’s better than most. Exile and official exclusion shaped him, and since then his work has been a struggle to make himself heard while banished from his native country, living in an indifferent exile community, and among hosts who, at times, have been hostile.


Three things, Paul Valéry wrote once, define a classic: quantity, excellence and variety. All three abound in Aurelio de la Vega. Yet given the relatively marginal character of his artistic production, it is no surprise that some of his major pieces, among them his orchestral works, should not be as well known. The appearance of this CD confirms how much of a classic de la Vega has become over the years. His numerous works are as excellent as they are varied. The four pieces at hand demonstrate how much so.





The four —beginning with the 1954 Elegía and ending with Variación del Recuerdo (1999)— span over nearly half of the 20th century, from the composer’s early to late maturity. Their joint appearance here betrays a compendious sweep, as if by gathering them together for the first time, and despite their non-chronological order, de la Vega had wished to provide them with an emcompassing range —the whole of his register. I am aware, of course, that this CD does not collect de la Vega’s complete orchestral canon. I am referring to a symbolic, not literal, structure, and so I use the adjective encompassing deliberately and at the risk of a pleonasm. For compass, both object and concept, provides the metaphorical foundation of the collection. Besides being the word for the instrument that measures and draws direction, compass, in English at least, means the entire range of tones of a voice, or of a musical instrument —its comprehensive register, in its double and complementary sense of enclosure and understanding. Indeed, the verb to compass means to consider, to ponder, to seize or to grasp, to comprehend and achieve, and therefore, and by extension, to measure. Thus what a compass measures is both space and time: geographical (or geometric) extension and, of course, musical rhythm. Like Borges’ Aleph, a compass not only allows us to envision the universe; it is itself the universe.


Is it by chance that the compass, totality or register, that de la Vega chooses to feature here should be built upon the number four? After all, four is, in Western culture at least, the numerical paradigm of totality. The cardinal points are four, and so are the basic elements, not to mention Hesiod’s fabled Ages of Man. Indeed, four may be a universal, and not just a cultural, paradigm. Octavio Paz pointed out once that the Mesoamerican vision of the world was also based on the number four: “four cardinal points, four winds, four colors, four aspects of each divinity, four destinies.”⁽¹⁾ Martin Heidegger used to refer to the fourfold (das Geviert) as the basic “four ‘aspects’ of Being… the earth, the sky, the divinities and the mortals”.⁽²⁾ T.S. Eliot chose that magical number for his famous Four Quartets (1935-1942), yet another encompassing collection. Without four most domestic objects, from pets to tables and chairs, would not exist. Thus, the number “four” provides stability, cyclicality, totality.


English compass contains such totality through its semantic link to any circular object, such as the figures that the instrument helps us draw, or imagine. And yet, the same English word obscures the musical or, more precisely, rhythmic connotations that echo so loudly in cognate Spanish: idioms like marcar el compás, llevar el compás, seguir el compás, ajustarse al compás --the equivalents for setting, following, or adjusting to rhythm. Indeed, Spanish compás translates as English measure, the temporal unit. Both cognates (compass, compás) derive from Latin passus, foot, which, as is well known, names units of length and of stress, in physics and in prosody, respectively. Thus by assembling a collection of musical pieces that aims to encompass a life´s work, and by doing so in such symbolic terms, de la Vega alludes to the rhythmic foundation of any and all totality. Like Wagner, de la Vega believes that Music is the ultimate ontological foundation: the measure of all things.


Four sets up not only the number of the pieces. I would also venture —to my woefully untrained ear— that it provides the deep structure of each. That is, like Eliot’s Four Quartets, de la Vega’s collection gathers four modernist works each of which, in turn, is structured upon four sections. Each of the four consists of single movements, but those single movements are in turn made up of four sections. Thus, for example, Elegía, the first work, both in chronology and in sequence, is divided into four distinct sections:⁽³⁾ ms. 1-26 a mournful adagio —a variation on Monteverdi’s Lamento di Arianna- that quickly swirls onto a vertiginous hallucinatory sequence, as if suggesting a descent into the anguish (hence the title) that originated that mourning; ms. 27-80, a chromatic sequence of Cuban dance rhythms, in both più mosso (moderato) and andante tempos, suggesting the nostalgia of an earlier, perhaps more innocent time, that in turn dissolves into ms. 81-105, a ricorso of the first anguished movement which builds up to a passionate crescendo of screeching high notes and climaxes, becoming an instrumental scream or cry, ending with ms. 106-125 -a coda of calmer andante tempo that suggests reconciliation or resignation. I have written elsewhere that by 1953, with de la Vega’s first return to Cuba, a break occurred in his work that took form in the disturbingly mournful pieces he wrote at the time, such as the important Epigrama, for piano.⁽⁴⁾ This mournful turn has to do with de la Vega´s break at the time with both the local Cuban musical context, with which he bitterly disagreed, and with his own artistic trajectory. I can now add, after considering Elegía in the context of this collection, that this piece, too, from 1954, partakes of this same temporal break, and that it does so through a four-fold structure that will recur throughout de la Vega’s major orchestral works. Waxing bold, then, one could say that four is everywhere. Not only in similar four-section structures that recur in each of the remaining three pieces, four is also present in “the four primary aspects of Cuban music that, according to Ronald Erin, “form a major part of de la Vega’s compositional language.”⁽⁵⁾ The presence of “four”, even appears in the 2X4 (or 4X4) that de la Vega inserts, playfully and astutely, in each one of his works and that constitutes his “rhythmic signature”.


In expounding on the symbolism of the number four, Octavio Paz noted further that its matrix is the number two, “duality, original and supreme, first and last”. Two is the couple, primary and primeval, that structures all dialectical process, a duality that also happens to be an important feature of de la Vega’s collection, in its dialectic of two “national” (Elegía and Variación del Recuerdo) and two “post-national” pieces (Tropimapal and Adiós). That is, the first and third pieces, in which Cuban musical elements are more overt, constitute national statements shot through by a melancholy nostalgia; the second and fourth, where national elements give way to less grounded, more experimental features, regale in formal freedom. The streamlined “national” pieces, for string orchestra, empathize with the past; they are, as the second title states, “variations on memory”. The more complex “post-national” ones abandon such nostalgia and celebrate the future and the adventure of exile; somehow, they say adiós to the fatherland. From nation to post-nation, from simple to complex, from sadness to joy.


By “national” I mean what we normally understand by this concept and term: the use and celebration of a local culture and identity, in this case musical; by “post-national” I mean the transmutation of such national elements, and identity, onto a global, or world, cultural consciousness. To what nation, or region, does Tropimapal (the title being a play on “map of the tropics”, or on “tropical palm”) refer to? Cuba, Brazil (where de la Vega, incidentally, first conceived this piece), Africa, India? Perhaps the clearest statement of such post-national consciousness in the CD is Adiós, the last piece, a work of monumental proportions built upon collage and quotation principles. Composed as a homage to Maestro Zubin Mehta upon his departure from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it brings together the works of Bach, (BACH motive used near the end as a background structure), Mahler (2nd,3rd, 5th, and 9th symphonies), Beethoven (the 5th), Bruckner (7th), and Strauss (a suggestion on one of the main motives of the Alpine Symphony) —among Mehta’s and de la Vega’s favorite composers— along with the national anthems of Cuba, the United States and India. Adiós mocks nationalist nostalgia by playing the dual, and opposite meanings of the Hindi namasté (hello, good bye) against each other. For as all wised-up exiles (like Mehta and de la Vega themselves) have learned over the years, every departure is also an arrival, every loss a gain or success. The post-national message comes through most strongly in the piece’s playful, at times satirical, at times lyrical, quotation of the three anthems, plus one important theme of de la Vega’s first orchestral composition, Obertura a una Farsa Seria (1950), as if by bringing them together within such an encompassing view they meshed together in a global melting pot that disallows overt national distinctions.





De la Vega’s compass is here for us to hear, though not without the risk of missing its innermost symbolic strategies. Time is the substance of all Music, and so the destruction, and recreation, of Time is the composer’s ultimate horizon, his secret craft and purpose. Notice therefore that within the collection’s encompassing strategies there is also an opposite, and complementary, move towards the destruction of sequential chronology. That is, in the CD the pieces do not, indeed cannot, succeed each other chronologically, thus undoing the idea of an ordered “orchestral works” collection. In the CD’s sequence, Elegía, from 1954, is followed by Tropimapal, from 1983, and these in turn are followed by works that skip around to 1999 (Variación del Recuerdo) and then back to 1977 (Adiós). How could such a “disordered” sequence possibly narrate a chronology? The destruction of chronological sequence, yet another way to devaluate History or Biography, therefore leads us to an alternative, symbolic, even mythical reconstruction of the life’s work. This is, once again, nothing less than what elsewhere I once called de la Vega’s invention of “the other time,” the artist’s alternative moment of vision, passion, anger, and joy that true Music and Art offer us.


That Aurelio de la Vega, a maestro now in his eighties, should be able to offer us this collection as a symbolic distillation of his life’s work is a golden opportunity consonant with his own name. Aurelius, the name given to emperors and philosopher-kings, means literally the man of gold. Golden, therefore, is the compass with which de la Vega continues to charm the world; thanks to that compass, golden too is now our human time, our appetites, and our senses.






Enrico Mario Santí, who wrote this essay in Claremont, California, on September 1, 2008, is an international scholar who has authored several important books. At present, he is William T. Bryan Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky (Lexington).


Notes:
(1) There may be others. See his preface to “El tres y el cuatro,” in La utopía mexicana del siglo XVI (1992).
(2) One is also reminded of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Gang of Four, the Fantastic Four and, for sports fans, the Final Four.
(3) Several musicologists and writers have divided the Elegía into five, not four, sections. To my inexperienced ear, and for the purpose of this essay, I have telescoped the second and third sections into one.
(4) See my “The Other Time: Reflections on Aurelio de la Vega’s Piano Works,” Centennial Review (2005).
(5) Thus I propose, in Tropimapal (ms. 1-64, 65-113, 114-120, 121-205), in Variación (ms. 1-68, 69-87, 88-103, 104-125), and in Adiós (ms.1-78, 79-222, 223-312, 313-400). According to Erin, the four aspects of de la Vega´s works are: the clave 3-2 rhythm pattern, the call-and-answer construction, rhythmic counterpoint, and percussive instrumental color. See his “Cuban Elements in the Music of Aurelio de la Vega,” Latin American Music Review (1984). Four also happens to be the symbolic cipher of Severo Sarduy’s meditation on Cuban identity; see his important novel De donde son los cantantes (1967). Sarduy, in turn, alludes to Martin Heidegger’s concept of the Geviert, the four-fold structure of Being within his analytic of Dasein.