Cubaneo in Latin Piano: a Parametric Approach to Gesture, Texture, and Motivic Variation
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Cubaneo In Latin Piano: A Parametric Approach To Gesture, Texture, And Motivic Variation Orlando Enrique Fiol University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Music Theory Commons Recommended Citation Fiol, Orlando Enrique, "Cubaneo In Latin Piano: A Parametric Approach To Gesture, Texture, And Motivic Variation" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3112. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3112 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3112 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cubaneo In Latin Piano: A Parametric Approach To Gesture, Texture, And Motivic Variation Abstract ABSTRACT CUBANEO IN LATIN PIANO: A PARAMETRIC APPROACH TO GESTURE, TEXTURE, AND MOTIVIC VARIATION COPYRIGHT Orlando Enrique Fiol 2018 Dr. Carol A. Muller Over the past century of recorded evidence, Cuban popular music has undergone great stylistic changes, especially regarding the piano tumbao. Hybridity in the Cuban/Latin context has taken place on different levels to varying extents involving instruments, genres, melody, harmony, rhythm, and musical structures. This hybridity has involved melding, fusing, borrowing, repurposing, adopting, adapting, and substituting. But quantifying and pinpointing these processes has been difficult because eachariable v or parameter embodies a history and a walking archive of sonic aesthetics. In an attempt to classify and quantify precise parameters involved in hybridity, this dissertation presents a paradigmatic model, organizing music into vocabularies, repertories, and abstract procedures. Cuba's pianistic vocabularies are used very interactively, depending on genre, composite ensemble texture, vocal timbre, performing venue, and personal taste. These vocabularies include: melodic phrases, harmonic progressions, rhythmic cells and variation schemes to replace repetition with methodical elaboration of the piano tumbao as a main theme. These pianistic vocabularies comprise what we actually hear. Repertories, such as pre-composed songs, ensemble arrangements, and open- ended montuno and solo sections, situate and contextualize what we hear in real life musical performances. Abstract procedures are the thoughts, aesthetics, intentions, and parametric rules governing what Cuban/ Latin pianists consider possible. Abstract procedures alter vocabularies by displacing, expanding, contracting, recombining, permuting, and layering them. As Cuba's popular musics find homes in its musical diaspora (the United States, Latin America and Europe), Cuban pianists have sought to differentiate their craft from global salsa and Latin jazz pianists. Expanding the piano's gestural/textural vocabulary beyond pre-Revolutionary traditions and performance practices, the timba piano tumbao is a powerful marker of Cuban identity and musical pride, transcending national borders and cultural boundaries. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Music First Advisor Carol A. Muller Keywords Afro-Cuban Popular Music, Cuban Piano, Improvisation, Latin Music, Nonliteral Repetition, Variation Subject Categories Music | Music Theory This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3112 1 Foreword Sound As Home Music is often exalted as a "universal language," a sonic grammar evoking time, space, memory, meaning, and feeling. What gets sent and received in a musical moment depends on a complex interactive system of gestures, textures, timbres, and traditions, creating a sense of mutual intelligibility for all involved. This interactive cultural/aesthetic system pivots precariously between the polarities of familiarity and unfamiliarity, what Kofi Agawu calls "home" and "away from home."1 An anthropological understanding of culture as home usually includes geographical boundaries, language, ethnicity, folkways/mores, kinship networks, and a myriad symbolic physical objects in the enveloping environment. All these elements coalesce into stylized behavioral norms of individual and collective expression of home as culture. However, sound in general—and music in particular—can constitute a different kind of home, one where the creative imagination provides its own possible realities. A central pitch, the tonic key, the downbeat, the cycle's beginning, closure to a central resolution, lyrical rhyme, a timbre arriving at the expected time: all are symbols of sound as "home." But sound as home is not only a familiar and comforting place, a sanctuary of resolution and repose. Home is also mobile and fluid, portable and cyclical “home” may also be scavenged from repurposed and borrowed elements forged by creative idealism 1 Kofi Agawu, Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romatic Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 2 and curious imagination. When "home" is sound, the familiar and unfamiliar switch places as in a game of musical chairs. Culturally meaningful materials are recombined, permuted, and shifted in time and space, making familiar and unfamiliar appear in unexpected contexts. Eventually, the familiar comforts of home give way to a yearning for adventure away from home, albeit with a map back. The experience of making and interacting with music, as with any artform, is an act of trust. Senders and receivers beckon each other towards unfamiliarity, inexplicability, and even discomfort. Treading the winding paths away from and back home, a snippet of distant song makes its way into something new and relevant, without the creator or audience consciously aware of its origins. A rhythmic cell is shifted into syncopation, making everyone fumble for the downbeat, guessing as they listen or dance. A poetic word, artfully deployed, suddenly means something far different from what we expect, catapulting us into a new universe where we must grope to make sense of every new element or entity we encounter. Yet this tension can never last too long, lest the thread be lost and the line broken. There must always be a way back home, even when the adventure has been exhilarating and transformative. In large part, musical authenticity resides in the ability to find one's way back home to a musical tradition constantly enriched and rejuvenated by adventurous departures. Being totally blind from birth and a musician from early childhood, sound has always been my home, my refuge from the visual world's dizzying, baffling, barely comprehensible barrage. In the absence of visual cues that contextualize so much of 3 "home" to the sighted, sound has consistently been a safe, creative space, a place of well being, a welcome respite from the sight-dominant world in which I so often feel disadvantaged in terms of what is visually available to most. Unable to observe nonverbal physical and behavioral differences between people—part of what we might call “culture”—I have been more powerfully drawn to the world of sound, embracing an exciting counterpoint of sounds in my "homeland," wherein painstaking musical practice, performance, and analysis have rendered me able to aspire toward rarified membership in the sound tribe of people so devoted to music that it becomes our whole life’s daily work. Unfettered by physical borders and kneejerk prejudices, I have felt at home in surprisingly variegated musical contexts, from Western classical and jazz piano, to Latin and North Indian percussion. In all the musical environments where I have tried to establish my homestead, I have learned to distinguish between the real and fake, authentic and inauthentic, profound versus cursory understanding of the sonic organization schemas that each musical system prizes. As both a musician and theorist, defining, cultivating and maintaining musical authenticity has therefore been fundamental to all my endeavors—a way to celebrate a sonic communion with people and cultures I have come to love and appreciate through my remaining senses. Listening with cultural “natives” to intensely memorable performances, I have learned why they murmur and cheer, nod their heads in acknowledgement or rhapsodize about memorable music for years after its sustaining echoes have faded. I have joined 4 thousands of Cubans and other Latinos bursting with hope and cultural pride during a performance by Los Van Van at the 2000 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where lead vocalist Mario Rivera practically prayed for his people’s survival in the song “Ay Dios, Ampárame.” I have felt timba’s thundering climaxes at the band Bamboleo’s Sounds of Brazil performance in New York City in 1999, each percussion and bass break piercing all earthly pretenses and shattering our stayed musical expectations. I have heard Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdés at a solo concert at Philadelphia’s Mann Music Center catapult a sedate and polite audience from silently rapt attention to wild applause after just a few bars of a traditional piano montuno. My own arms have shot up into the air along with thousands of others during a Cubanismo concert in Camden, New Jersey, the rhythm section full of timba all-stars taken from the top Cuban bands. On a deeper level, my hands have been “washed in honey and holy water” by the orisha Ochún of the Afro-Cuban Lukumí pantheon during consecrated batá drum ceremonies as I negotiated that ancient yet contemporary tradition on the lead drum. My face