Latin American music facing off against clickbait-creators and lazy critics

The recent debut recordings of the masterly symphonic cycle by Ecuadorean composer Luis Humberto Salgado reminded me—yet again—of the persistent neglect (and condescension) classical music and musicians outside of Europe and especially Anglo-America are regularly subjected to. Why this occurred historically is a complex matter, but that it should continue today is inexplicable, much less excusable. Especially when various talking heads have taken to fashionably lambasting classical music for reasons that curiously coincide with larger issues that media outlets would never dream of exploiting cynically for page-clicks and ad revenue. But however one may feel about such criticisms, what makes no sense is why virtually none of these critics have done anything meaningful to rectify what they believe are classical music’s obstructions to being more diverse and inclusive. For example, would it not make sense to simply start programming and regularly champion music from outside Anglo-America and Europe? Not in some special interest series treated as something apart from mainstream repertoire, but sitting side-by-side with Beethoven and Brahms where such music belongs? Will the New York Philharmonic make good on the “classism” it purported to decry in a recent podcast it co-produced and give a symphonist like Salgado a central place on its programs? 

With typical irony, too, the chattering clickbait-creators reveal their ignorance by overlooking how important the likes of Beethoven were to non-white composers. “From a very young age I loved Bach and Beethoven,” wrote Silvestre Revueltas. “I enjoyed wandering about with large strides through the romantic boulevards of Chapultepec, hair tousled, and arms folded behind my back. Those lithographs and etchings which showed poor Beethoven looking like a loner always had a great influence upon me. I could do no less.” Moroi Saburō, perhaps one of the greatest of Japan’s composers, not only bears the strong imprint of Beethoven in his own symphonies, but also wrote several books of biography and commentary on Beethoven which remain highly regarded in his homeland to this day. Luis Humberto Salgado was in some ways Beethoven-obsessed, yet found his own creative and highly original musical voice, his idol becoming an inspiration rather than a burden. If Beethoven is such a symbol of racial oppression or whatever, how does one explain his formidable influence on composers from such diverse racial and national backgrounds? 

Sometimes what well-meaning bien pensants in classical music tend to say about composers from Latin America is even more revealing. It has become a cliché, for example, to liken the music of the region, whatever the actual individual style of the composer in question, to the “magical realism” of Gabriel García Márquez. According to Wikipedia, “magical realism” is “a style of fiction and literary genre that paints a realistic view of the modern world while also adding magical elements, [and] often deals with the blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality.” The term has become a reliable catch-all for our redoubtable Mark Swed for whenever he is confronted with music south of Calexico:

• “Southwest Chamber Music has just issued an all-[Gabriela] Ortíz recording, "Aroma Foliado," in which you can hear the past sneak up on the present through a kind of musical magical realism.”

• “[Alberto] Ginastera's Piano Concerto No. 1, written in 1961, is a work of brutalist, magical realism.” [Swed continues by describing the music’s “unusual evocations of eerie rain-forest weirdness,” which is funny as Ginastera was born and raised in Buenos Aires, a city as much a rain forest as Manhattan, lived in the United States for long stretches of time, and spent his final years in the curiously un-tropical climate of Switzerland. Not exactly the sort of places where Swed may have expected our presumably spear-chucking composer to have lived.]

• “It is a little easier, although still somewhat problematic, to come to terms with [Daniel] Catán's old and new in the L.A. Opera revival. Part of what made it easier was the outstanding conducting of Grant Gershon, who unraveled new layers of wonder in Catán's orchestration. The pit, more than stage, is where most of the magical realism is realized.”

• “The text for “Cantata Criolla” is an important Venezuelan poem by Alberto Arvelo Torrealba, the director’s grandfather, that celebrates the dusty, perilous, mysterious llanos (plains) of Venezuela and presages magical realism with a singing contest between a brazen coplero (a troubadour of the llanos) and the devil.” [In that case, why are Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale or Gounod’s Faust also not forecasts of “magical realism?”]

The less a critic or musicologist knows or cares about Latin American music, the more you can expect them to describe it as “magical realism.” Not exactly an enlightened attitude.