Folklore, Serialism, and Clicking Keys: A Brief Survey of the Literature for Unaccompanied Flute from Latin America
The mid-20th century saw the growth of a struggle throughout Latin America to reconcile local or regional influences within the framework of European formalism—and particularly to serve the sonic possibilities of the unaccompanied solo flute.
by John L. Walker ince 1938, Latin America’s composers have turned repeatedly to the !ute as a vehicle not only to explore its artistic and technical possibilities but also as a way to push the boundaries of their compositional styles when applied to a medium Sas intimate as that of the solo wind instrument.
!e Historical Background Although there was virtually no interest in concert music for the !ute until the "rst decades of the 20th century, the pronounced partiality for the !ute that began some 78 years ago may be due to three historical factors. First, although it is di#cult to make sweeping generalizations about the music of indigenous populations prior to the Spanish conquest, !ute-like instruments were not only used throughout that region but were probably highly respected; evidence suggests that in many pre-Conquest cultures the !ute was “considered the closest representation of the human voice.”1 Second, Catholic missionaries undertook an enormous e$ort to evangelize the indigenous population of Latin America by establishing missions and schools where they taught the indigenes to play the !ute and other European instruments. During the mid-16th century in Ecuador’s San Andrés School, for example, the indigenous musician Juan Bermejo rose to such prominence as a !utist and keyboardist that “upon his reaching maturity the cathedral dra%ed him as organist and chapelmaster.”2 Lastly, the !ute continued to be cultivated in Latin America during the late 18th century and into the 19th, principally by musicians of European origin, such as Juan Daniel Ericourt, who from 1783 to 1814 was not only a highly respected !utist in Lima, Peru, but also trained many "ne students; and later, by peripatetic musicians such as Francisco Pennella, who advertised his services as an instructor of !ute, piano, and harp in the newspapers of Curaçao, Guayaquil, Ecuador, and San Francisco, California (and perhaps in other areas as well) from about the mid-1840s until around 1860.
Seeking an Authentic Voice Although the beginning of the 20th century witnessed the incorporation of the !ute into various chamber music compositions—one of the most important of these is Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Sexteto místico (1917, Mystic Sextet)—it was the German-born composer and !utist Hans Joachim Koellreutter (1915–2005) who introduced the concept of writing for the !ute as a solo instrument to Latin America. Because his own family denounced his engagement to a Jewish woman, in 1937 he was exiled to Rio de Janeiro, where the following year he began teaching in the Brazilian Conservatory of Music. His work for unaccompanied !ute, Improviso (1938), however, came on the heels of a period of stylistic reorientation in instrumental composition in Latin America. Indeed, not long a%er the "rst examples of this kind of music began to appear, from about 1915 until 1945, Latin American composers began to look for ways to disassociate themselves from European music and create an authentically Latin American musical language. &is movement manifested itself in several di$erent ways. For example, many of the early works of Brazilian Villa-Lobos (1887–1959) relied on folklore, ambient sounds particular to Brazil’s !ora and fauna, and urban street music that he combined with Western classical music. Another Brazilian composer, Luciano Gallet (1893–1931), “was particularly concerned with de"ning the exact nature of his country’s folk and popular music and of devising an adequate manner for utilizing their characteristics in his compositions.”3 In other parts of Latin America, composers developed an indigenist style by using