Much More than the Notes

Episode 3: Alejandro L. Madrid 

AM: My name is Alejandro Madrid. I'm a professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at Harvard University. I'm the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of music there.

[Audio: Andrés Segovia. “Sonata Mexicana: I. Allegro Moderato” from The Segovia Collection (Vol. 6): Manuel Ponce Sonatas. MCA (1967/1989)]

Alejandro Luis Madrid is a cultural theorist of sound and music who works in the fields of Latin American and Latinx studies. He was born in Houston, Texas, in 1968 but lived in Reynosa until he was a teenager, on the border between Mexico and the United States. The border has been a crucial concept for him throughout his career. In 2008, Madrid published Nor-Tec Rifa!, a book detailing his research on the emergence of Nortec in the late ‘90s, a Tijuanan collective that fused electronic music with local sounds. In this work, he highlights his interest in re-articulating the past and future of national and peripheral imaginaries. These were issues he had already brought up in his promising PhD thesis, also published in 2008, Sounds of the Modern Nation. In it, Madrid focuses on the post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1920s and composers such as Carlos Chávez, Manuel Ponce, and Julián Carrillo. Carrillo was a pioneer and a forgotten figure of microtonalism, and Madrid dedicated another book to him in 2015, In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13. 

Madrid’s tireless academic work led him to co-edit Experimentalisms in Practice. Music Perspectives from Latin America, together with Ana R. Alonso-Minutti and Eduardo Herrera, which was published in 2018. This collective endeavour makes an important case for musical experimentation being a notion situated within the specific contexts in which it arises. This line of reasoning opens up new ways of approaching music and composers outside the canonical Anglo-American idea of experimentation.  

Alejandro Madrid has also dedicated works to Cuban danzón, Danzón. Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance, in collaboration with Robin D. Moore, and to the Cuban-American composer and conductor Tania León: Tania León's Stride. A Polyrhythmic Life.

This interview took place at Alejandro Madrid's apartment in Berlin on May 22, 2023, in the final days of a research stay for his upcoming book: The Archive and the Sounded City [the final title of this book is The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge and the Politics of Listening].

AM: I was born in Houston, Texas, of Mexican parents. It was really a random situation. My father was getting his master's degree at Rice University. He's a geologist and that's the reason why I was born there. And then, when I was one year old, we went back to Mexico. We lived for almost fifteen years of my life in different cities at the border, the Mexican-American border: Reynosa, which is the border with Texas, the Texan city of McAllen, and we lived in Ciudad Juárez for a little while, with the border with El Paso and other cities in the north of Mexico, Guaymas and Tampico, and other places, before the family moved to Mexico City in 1982. Then I lived in Mexico City for about nine years, before I moved back to the United States to study and basically stayed in the United States after that.

[Audio: Flaco Jiménez. “Viajando en Polka” from Un Mojado sin Licencia. Arhoolie (1977/1993)]

Growing up in the Borderlands

Living at the border was an interesting life, especially because I grew up at that particular geographic region when it was very different from what it is today. It was in a way a little bit more open, even though formally it wasn't. Now you have NAFTA and you have all these different trade agreements that supposedly allow for the flow of goods but not necessarily the flow of people. Back then there was not much flow of goods but the flow of people was actually easier. And so we would cross the border for anything. We would go to do grocery shoppings in McAllen, celebrate birthdays there and rent spaces there for parties and stuff like that. So I grew up, sort of, moving back and forth.

I wouldn't say that I grew up bilingual, because that region of the border is basically Spanish — the Spanish population and Spanish is the dominant language. I didn't grow up speaking English, but I grew up listening to the language. I basically started really speaking when I moved back there. I moved to Boston in 1990. Like I mentioned, I basically stayed there.

But the way that I look at the world was very much influenced by living and growing up at the Mexican-American border. Life was very different and politics were very different back in the 1970s, so the discourses of national belonging were actually quite different. And living at the border with all this American culture right in our faces, we related to the discourses of national belonging in Mexico very different from people like my cousins, who lived in Mexico City or other cities in more central Mexico. We related very different to those ideas, for example, many of the icons of Mexican culture like mariachi music and things like that. I didn't really grow up listening to those things.

I grew up listening to norteño music, which back then in the 1970s was considered too folksy and not very sophisticated, and it was not really played in the Mexican airwaves, on TV or the radio, but that was the music that in that particular region was listened to. My grandfather was a big fan of that music. So I grew up listening to norteño music basically, and classical music because my grandmother was a pianist and I started playing the piano when I was very young. But it was mostly a hobby. I really started playing music more seriously when I moved to Mexico City and when I started playing the classical guitar; that was maybe when I was fourteen years old. That was basically my childhood. We moved to Mexico City when I was fourteen, and I lived there until I was twenty-one. And that's where I really started my formal training in music, with counterpoint and the traditional musical training.   

[Audio: Andrés Segovia. “Sonata Mexicana - III. Allegretto In Tempo Di Serenata” from The Segovia Collection (Vol. 6): Manuel Ponce Sonatas. MCA (1967/1989)]

A Conflicted Relationship with the Musical Tradition

I have a very conflicted relationship with the tradition, with musical tradition, because I loved that music, and I grew up listening to that music, and I was trained in that music. And I was actually… when I moved to the United States, back to get my degree in music from the conservatory, it wasn't going to be a degree in classical music performance. I was a classical guitarist.

And it was not until later when I started, sort of little by little, realising how it is that the European canon is enforced in these schools and how all the training and the curriculum is articulated by that canon, and in that canon many of the things that I was interested in didn't really belong. When I was maybe in the second or third year of the conservatory I started being very interested in contemporary music and, yeah, I mean, there was a scene of New York and Boston, a big scene of contemporary music, but at the same time that's not what you were taught when you took the music history classes and what you took, the harmony or the counterpoint classes, you didn't get all the way to this music. They were really there but they were not part of the curriculum.

So slowly I started questioning. First I realised, “this contemporary music, this experimental music, is not part of the canon”. And then, when it comes to experimental music from Latin America and from Spain that I was somehow closer to it's even more invisible, that it's really not part of the canon at all. So I started to question the canon and sort of my questions about the tradition and about what is it that teaching this tradition to younger folks implies, in terms of the colonisation of knowledge, that I sort of started shifting gears and I started thinking more about “maybe I don't want to be a performer, maybe I want to do something else with music” and I became a musicologist.

[Audio: Los Tucanes de Tijuana. “Arreando las Vacas” from Nuestras Primeras Canciones, Vol.1. EMI Latin (1991/1998)]

Borders  

I think there's a couple of different ideas about what the border is. When it relates to what I do. One, I think the very first moment, when I actually understood that there was a border, was that moment of “okay, there's things that do not belong, they belong on the other side of that border, the border of the canon,” let's put it that way. So I understood that there was a border there that I was interested in crossing but that it was very much enforced by the institutions, the conservatory, the curriculum, the training. That's the first border that I was, sort of, thinking about. And then there's also the physical border, the border between the two countries that I sort of lived through when I was a kid and that changed a lot during the 1990s, which was when I moved to the United States, because NAFTA happened in the 1990s and that changed everything.

NAFTA

NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement. In Spanish they call it Tratado de Libre Comercio, TLC, and that is a commercial agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada that changed how business and work and how finances, how money, basically, moved between the three countries. And obviously in that particular context the United States and Canada are the very strong economies and Mexico was the weaker economy, and that had an implication in what kind of dynamics were, sort of, happening when the agreement was signed. There were a lot of maquiladoras, these factories that were put in Mexico because of the wages, basically cheaper wages, cheaper labour, and that's sort of the relationship that was established. But that also allowed for more flow of money, especially for migrants from Mexico who were sending money to Mexico and in such a way that those remittances became the second most important source of income for the country. Everything changed a lot after NAFTA. And that was sort of the moment when I was living in the United States. So that also made me think a lot about: “What does it mean for a Mexican to live in the United States and to move back and forth between the two countries?” And in a way it was something that reminded me of my own upbringing as a kid, because we have family in Mexico City and we have relatives in the central part of Mexico and they always saw me somehow different, and my family, because we came from this region of the country that we had access to goods that the rest of the country didn't, because we would just buy them in the United States. So we wore different clothes; we had different gadgets.

So that's the second sort of idea of the border that I'm interested in and that became very, very relevant when I started doing work about Tijuana and electronic dance music at the border, because these musicians that I was writing about were musicians who had the same experience that I had. Kids growing up in the ‘70s, some of them actually living in the United States but having relatives in Mexico, some of them going to school, to high school, in the United States but living in Mexico, but mostly all of them having access to technology that people in Mexico City didn't have, just because of the fact that you were living there and you could just access it right there. So that's a second instance of the notion of border that I was interested in. How is it that technologies allow you to cross certain borders? How does access to knowledge allow you to cross certain borders? And in that particular moment, which is also the end of the 1990s and the Nortec Collective and these sort of very influential musical and art movements that happened at the border in Tijuana; also the shift between the idea of Central Mexico being, sort of, at the source of national identity and national belonging to the border.

And now the border became, especially in those years, it became sort of the centre of culture for people outside of Mexico. So people in New York were going to Tijuana, people in Chicago were going to Tijuana as opposed to going to Mexico City, you know. So that to me was also very important to start thinking: “What's happening here? How is it that these cultural flows are not only changing how we think about the border but actually how we think about the nation state”.

[Audio: Hiperboreal. “Tijuana For Dummies” from Tijuana Sessions Vol. 1. Palm Pictures (2001)]

Nortec Collective 

The Nortec Collective started working in 1999, at the turn of the century. But I would say that all of that happened in the ‘90s. That really is the decade of big change, because of the signing of NAFTA. I can't remember the year when NAFTA started. I believe it was ‘92 or ‘93, ’93 when it started. It was signed in 1992 maybe. I don't remember the years, but that decade for sure is a decade of big change. And the fact that these electronic dance music collectives at the end of the ‘90s started doing this kind of work to me is sort of symbolic; something completely changed here and it's no longer Mexico City dictating what it is to be Mexican. It's now coming from the margins.

[Audio: Bostich. “Polaris” from Tijuana Sessions Vol. 1. Palm Pictures (2001)]

Musicology and its Sibling Disciplines: Music Theory and Ethnomusicology

Musicology is usually understood as the historical study of music or music in historical contexts, usually done through archival work. There's two sibling disciplines: Music Theory is one of them, and that used to be mostly the study of musical systems and analysis of music, formal analysis of music in terms of pitch and harmonies, in terms of counterpoint, in terms of form, and then the other one, the other sibling, was Ethnomusicology, and Ethnomusicology, or Comparative, Systematic Musicology, as it was called when it was created, was basically the music that didn't belong to the European tradition. So Musicology as a historical discipline dealt with the music of Europe, and music theory as a theoretical discipline dealt with the systems of music that came from Europe, and that in itself is very problematic because that is basically, in a way, implying that these other cultures do not have history, and obviously that's not the case. So there's a lot of problems in how the different constituencies of the field were created, and the reason why I want to say that is because I don't believe in those boundaries, those borders between the different sub-disciplines of the field.

Ethnography was the method for doing Ethnomusicology, archival work was the method for doing Historical Musicology and different analytical systems were the method to do Music Theory. I believe that all of those were our tools to answer specific questions and in my training I was trained formally as a historical musicologist but I took classes of Fieldwork and Ethnography because, in the end, I thought that at some point they were going to help answer the kinds of questions that I had from these materials. And funny enough, actually I started as a musicologist with a very strong interest in music theory, in set theory. Set theory is sort of the analysis of pitch and the pitch relationships and it tells you a lot about a very particular repertoire and it tells you a lot about a lot of other repertoires that are not basically centred on certain tonal functions. So I was interested in all of these methodologies because at different moments they allowed me to answer different questions that I had from these musical materials.

My approach to the field of Musicology, just to answer more holistically, is that one should know all of it in terms of all of the methods, and this is what I try to do with my students. You should be trained in all of these methodologies because they are going to allow you to see things from different perspectives. So, yeah, the field has been defined in that way. I don't believe in it as such and I think I'm of a generation that's sort of trying to change that.

Looking at the Canon Critically

I think the canon is very important, but it's very important to look at it critically. Why is it that we have a canon or a canon formation or a canon episteme, a way of understanding the world, not necessarily a body of works, not because the canon changes — it changes all the time. But what doesn't change, or what tends not to change so quickly, is the idea of why we want to have a body of works and what are the central ideas around which this body of works is created. And they have to do with European understandings of the world. And I think that that's very important because we have a history of 500 years of colonial encounter and the canon tells us about that. So I don't want to get rid of the canon. I don't think that the expansion of the canon is the answer, because there was a reason why the canon was formed and that reason has to do with the colonial encounter and with the celebration of a particular culture and with the celebration of particular values that are attached to that culture, and it is important that we recognize them as such. And this is the reason why I say “okay, let's look at the canon critically. I don't want to get rid of the canon, but introducing this music, this marginal music, what does it do to the canon?” It's the same conundrum that Richard Taruskin found himself in when he started studying Russian music, because also Russian music is somehow marginal to the canon. Yeah, it is there. Tchaikovsky is there, but is there in the margins, just like Alberto Ginastera is in the canon but is in the margins because it's not quite the canon.

So I think it's more important to look at how is it that people, and why is it that people are trying to introduce these particular scenes and these particular historical figures into the canon — why are they trying to do it? — than to actually make a canon that includes everything. Because when we do that, it's a little bit like this story of Borges, La Biblioteca de Babel, in which he writes about a library that includes everything. So I like to think about the canon, about that, in such a way that, “okay, what happens when the canon includes everything?” Then it becomes meaningless. You have to have a specific articulation of the canon, and then it becomes something.

[Audio: Julián Carrillo. “Balbuceos para piano metamorfoseado (1958)” from Música de Julián Carrillo. Sony Music (1997)]

Julián Carrillo

Julián Carrillo is a Mexican composer. He's somehow present in the canon because of the fact that he was one of the first microtonal composers in the Western art music tradition. He started composing microtonal music in 1924. And then… he's a composer whose training was actually in Leipzig, so conservative Leipzig, at the end of the 19th century and went back to Mexico and he was one of the first composers to actually present the nine symphonies as a conductor, the nine symphonies of Beethoven and the quartets. And so he was, sort of, very, very influenced by German music because of his training. He composed symphonies in a very organicist type of German style with differences and he's borrowing those techniques but he's doing something different with them, and this is logical because he's not German, he comes from a different background. So that's my point. And in the 1920s he starts writing microtonal music.

Microtonal Music

Microtonal music is a contested term. Some people say that we shouldn't use it, shouldn’t use this term because there's no such thing as a microtone, but anyway it's being used as a convention and what it means is music that uses intervals smaller than the half tone. So the typical explanation would be you have a keyboard, the piano keyboard, you have white and black keys that are adjacent and the smaller interval between those cases, the one between a white key and the adjacent black key, and that's a half tone. This is music that is smaller, uses intervals that are smaller than the half tone.

In the case of Carrillo, there were quarter tones, eight-tones, and actually he went down from quarter tones using also thirds of a tone, fourths of a tone, fifths of a tone, sixths of a tone, all the way down to sixteenths of a tone. There are very, very small intervals and it's very difficult to actually perceive the difference between the pitches in such a way that it sounds almost like a glissando. When you play a scale using these scales, these intonations, tunings, it almost sounds like a glissando, and a lot of his music sounds a little bit like that. In a way it's like an exploration of the continuum before Xenakis came and started doing that more systematically. So Carrillo came to start composing some of this music in the 1920s and he spent the last forty years of his life composing microtonal music.

I wrote about him in a book called In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13, in which I treat the subject in this sort of transhistorical way, not only his music, not only him, but also the reception and his critics and his followers and everything that's sort of built around his figure. But I also wrote about him in my first book, which was my doctoral dissertation: The Sounds of the Modern Nation. And the argument at that moment was it had to do with being against the construction of the nation state and sort of the mythology about the construction of the nation state in Mexico after the revolution. The mythology is sort of very theological and it leads you to believe that everything happened very organically and that after the nationalists then came the modernists who were reacting against them, and then the avant-gardists who were trying to break away from all of that. In history it doesn't happen like that. It's much messier and it's complicated and that's what I tried to do with that particular book. The 1920s in Mexico as a reaction to the collapse of Mexican culture, which happens after a revolution. The institutions are gone and sort of the ground is shaken where all of these people were standing on. So a lot of them had to reinvent themselves. And that's what happens with Carrillo. He reinvents himself as a microtonal composer. Manuel Ponce is also another composer who was active before the revolution, who also reinvents himself as a modernist composer. And in a way, many of them are reacting to the discourse and the language and the rhetoric, sort of the revolutionary rhetoric of “okay we have a new nation state; that has been revolutionary, so now we have to do revolutionary music”. This is how Carrillo writes about his music. He says: “I'm doing a musical revolution that's going to destroy the music system that was there before and this is something new”. Again, it's been understood in a sort of very literal sense, and has been very revolutionary, but actually when you look at the details it isn't quite as revolutionary as you think. It's very conservative in many ways, actually.

[Audio: Julián Carrillo. “Preludio a Colón (1924)” from Música de Julián Carrillo. Sony Music (1997)]

Transhistoricity

I like to think about culture not as something — the particular cultural manifestation that I'm interested in studying — not as something that is fixed, but as something that changes through history. And this is why I use this idea of transhistoricity or the transhistorical method, in a way, because I believe that music happens at a particular moment in time and it acquires “moment” because of those processes, the dynamics of production and consumption in that particular moment. But we are consuming and listening to this music 300 years later or whenever, and it has to change. Obviously we don’t consume this music… it doesn't circulate in the same way that it circulated 100 years ago or 300 years ago. It cannot mean the same to us in the world that we live. So the meaning changes throughout history.

It's very clear when we think about music and about particular pieces of music that meant something, for example when Bach composed the St Matthew Passion, and when it was rediscovered in the 19th century and when it's performed today. Clearly, when we think about music, we can see that this thing happens. That meaning is acquired in a transhistorical process and in a transhistorical perspective. But it also happens with our objects of study or our subjects of study, and to me it was very clear when I was writing about Julián Carrillo and his microtonal music and his microtonal crusade, because my particular lens for looking at his music and at this historical figure was the present, or my present, when I learned about this music. I learned about it when I was a kid and I learned about it through the Mexican media. But it was a very, sort of, particular moment in which this music was somehow rediscovered in the 1970s, ten years after Carrillo had died, and his students were presenting this music in the media, and the way they presented it, the discourse that they surrounded this music by, was completely different from what Carrillo had done when he was alive. He was presented as a very esoteric type of music that had a connection to the harmony of the spheres and the universe, and there was a little bit of that in Carrillo that he wrote about, himself. But largely it was a different take on his music and that's how I entered, that's how he became important to me when I was a kid, because of what I saw on those TV shows, and then when I was in high school, we went to a performance in one of the planetariums in Mexico City and they happened to be playing some of the instruments that he created, that he designed and that definitely coloured my vision when I went to the archive and started looking at his music, at his actual scores and his writings and what people had written about him. So there was no way that I could interpret him as a historical figure back in the 1920s or in the 1930s without… I could not get rid of this cultural baggage that I had.

So I understood that Carrillo… there was no way that I could understand Carrillo as a historical figure without all the other background that happened after he died and that influenced me as a researcher. So I understood that this was more of a cultural complex, that Carrillo was not simply him or his works or his students, but it was everything.

[Audio: Julián Carrillo. “Sinfonía Número 1 en Re Mayor (1901)” from Música de Julián Carrillo. Sony Music (1997)]

Mimetism or Cosmopolitanism?

The reason why people speak about mimetism goes back to: What is it that we're using to measure? What is our measuring criteria? And when you're measuring criteria is Western European art music, then everything is going to be mimetic, unless it's radically different. But everything that sort of engages it is going to be mimetic because that's the criteria. And that happened to Carrillo.

Some of the early critiques of Carrillo was “okay, he wrote the symphonies, but they are just like Brahms”. They're not just like Brahms. And that's one of the things that I set myself up to prove, when you actually analyse that symphony, that yes, of course, there's many things that come from that tradition, because he was trained in that tradition, but there's no way that he's going to be completely different because he's coming out of that tradition. But once you analyse it, you also see how he's actually tweaking that tradition. It's not quite Brahms. The first symphony is the most, to me, blatant example. There's no development in the symphony, no development at all. There's an aesthetic section in which harmonies are not moving, not even moving. They're just like there, and Brahms would never do anything like that. You can always, you can already see some of those ways of moving away from that tradition, even though when you actually read his writings he's always saying “I'm coming from that tradition, this is what I'm doing. Even my microtonal music is a way of expanding that tradition”. But then when you go into the details and you look at the details, you start saying “okay he clearly comes from there, but he's doing something different”. He's not just expanding it, but that's actually tweaking it and making it into something that someone from that tradition wouldn't have done.

The early microtonal works of Carrillo are very eye-opening. For example, Preludio a Colón, is the most famous, his most popular piece, and it's the most atypical. And it's the most atypical because that's a piece in which he is actually literally struggling between the two worlds. And when you see how his idea of harmony in that early microtonal piece is thirds, he's thinking of chords and he's even still thinking about major and minor chords. But this is something that he's going to move away very quickly and those who say, “okay, he's copying these European models and that's all he's doing”. Most of them do not know what he did after that, because they go with the most famous pieces. But if you look at the string quartets, in the string quartets you see that development and that process, that creation of a language that responds to his concerns. And then he moves away from tonality, he moves away from major and minor, he moves away from triadic harmonies into something that's completely new, in terms of the structure. Of course, when you look at the forms, he was trained that tradition. He's using A-B-A forms or he's using something that may resemble sonata forms or rondos or whatever. But you cannot blame him because that's where he's coming from. He's sort of in between those two worlds, and that's exactly what happens to someone like Schönberg. Schönberg is doing the same. He has these materials that he organises in the twelve-tone method, but he's writing gavottes and he's writing these things. To me, Schönberg and Carrillo are very, very similar cases of people who are in between two worlds. And then if you simply say, “okay, Carrillo is just imitating the Europeans”, then you are not understanding what's really at the core of that. And you are not understanding because your criteria of measurement, of evaluation is that, and then you can only measure it against that. You cannot measure it against something that's not that.

[Audio: Café Tacvba. “7” from Revés/Yosoy. WEA (1999)]

Experimentalisms in Practice. Music Perspectives from Latin America

The project of the book started in a session of, I believe, it was the Society for Ethnomusicology. So anyway, we decided to put together a panel just to explore. The project started with Ana Alonso-Minutti, who's a professor of Music History and Ethnomusicology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and with Eduardo Herrera, who's now a professor of Ethnomusicology and Folklore at Indiana University, and me. So we put together this panel, basically because we had been friends and colleagues in the field doing similar work for a long time and we were interested in some of the same ideas. So we decided to put together this panel and explore the question of: “What is experimentalism? What are these strange Latin American composers that do not fit into the descriptions? And how, sort of, putting those in conversation would actually challenge the very idea of what experimentalism is”. And we invited a colleague of mine at Cornell back at the time, Benjamin Piekut, who had also written a book about experimentalisms in New York, mostly about the conventional ideas of what experimentalism is. Originally he started working on John Cage and then he expanded it to the New York experimentals in the 1960s and ‘70s, but anyway… Eduardo Herrera represented some of his work on the CLAEM, the Center of Latin American Contemporary Music (Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales), that was started by Ginastera in Buenos Aires and that brought a lot of the European avant-garde composers of the 1960s and ‘70s to Buenos Aires to work with a cohort of Latin American composers. Ana presented about this group of noise composers from New Mexico who had training in music but also were coming from different scenes, so yeah, and they were sort of engaging with questions of ethnicity and border crossing in their music. So it was experimentalism that was very… a sort of social critique through experimental music.

And by then I presented about something that's not what came up in the book; I presented about Julián Carrillo and a group of followers of Julián Carrillo that tweaked his ideas and made them into something different. And the point of that particular presentation was to see how it is that, looking at what these guys are trying to do, that was so different from what Carrillo wanted to do, actually shed some light on Carrillo. So I wanted to establish these sort of transhistorical conversations. After the session we had lunch with Benjamin Piekut and we were like “well, why don't we think about maybe putting together a book, making a call, announcing a call for a papers, and putting together something that's larger, about Latin America, not only about sort of the centres”. You think about Latin American music, and there's Mexico, there's Argentina, there's Brazil and then maybe Cuba. So we said, “okay, let's try to incorporate other regions and other practices”.

And this is when we came to the idea of “let's also talk about popular music. So what is experimentalism in popular music?” When you put Latin Americans in the mix, it already challenges how this notion has been defined of experimentalism. And then when you throw popular music into the mix, it completely falls apart, like the traditional understanding of experimentalism doesn't make any sense anymore.

It was even difficult, for actually… when we put together the group of collaborators for the book and we met, we had a sort of colloquium in New Jersey at Rutgers University. Even for those who were already collaborating they found it very difficult to understand. “Okay, but why is this experimental? It doesn't sound experimental to me”.

It was very difficult to move away from that sort of disciplining. That was a way of trying to expand and include as many things as possible that would actually challenge the conventional understanding of what experimentalisms were.

[Audio: John Cage “Amores (1943) - Solo For Prepared Piano” from Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 1. Wergo (2009)]

The idea behind Experimentalisms in Practice was that there's a canon of experimentalisms and in the United States it's very clear; it's a canon that revolves around American music. It revolves around John Cage, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, maybe some of the microtonal, you know, Harry Partch, the Americans, but for the Americans it is something that's very American. So then it sort of merges with this question of nationalism that I tried to engage earlier, because then experimentalism becomes, in a way, an American nationalism. Of course, it is also expanded, and then you have the Anglo-European experimentalists. But then, what happens with these definitions of experimentalisms that are usually done in the present? So it's the present looking at the past. So in the 1970s, people who started writing — in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s — who started writing about experimentalism, they were looking at the past and saying, “this is the path of American music, or some European composers might be part of that too, but there's a very clear tradition that leads to us in the present”. So in a way it's a very teleological understanding of history. So they define experimentalism in that way.

But when you go actually to earlier sources, and this is fascinating, because you go to the people writing about experimentalism. You go to Cowell, to John Cage, and they're writing about not only Americans; they're writing about Mexicans and about Cubans. And then you start looking at what Amadeo Roldán was doing in Cuba and then his relationship with Varèse. This happened actually when I was writing the book about danzón, and one of the basic rhythmic patterns of the danzón is the cinquillo, this Cuban quintuplet. And at that time, for some reason, I went to a performance of Varèse's Ionisation and I started hearing the cinquillo everywhere and I'm like “this cannot be”. And then I went to the score and the cinquillo was there and I'm like, “how?”.

[Audio: Edgar Varèse. “Ionisation” from Arcana / Amériques / Ionisation / Offrandes / Density 21.5 / Octandre / Intégrales. Sony Classical (1977/1990)]

Ionisation is considered to be the first percussion piece when you go to the history books that you learn from in the United States and in Europe. So the first percussion piece. But the fact is that there's an earlier piece (Rítmica No. 5) that was composed by Amadeo Roldán, and once you start looking at the rhythmic patterns and things that Varèse was using in Ionisation you see that there's a lot of connections with this other percussion piece that sounds somehow more traditional because it might be connected to the tradition of rumba playing from Cuba, but it's also not rumba, it's something else, and the reason is that Varèse and Amadeo Roldán were friends; they knew their music, they knew each other's music and then once you learn about them, those little cinquillos in Ionisation make sense because they're coming from that conversation and it's a conversation that has nothing to do with nationalism. It's a conversation about cosmopolitanism. These composers saw each other as equals. And it has nothing to do with an American composer, or “I'm a French composer who's now living in America and I'm coming from this very strong tradition and I'm representing this tradition and you are not someone…” That was not in their mind. Just to say that once you start thinking about those relationships, the things that were weird in something like Ionisation to me at the beginning all click and they make sense. Yeah, everything makes sense when you put them in that sort of strange conversation.  

[Audio: Amadeo Roldán. “Two Ritmicas (1930) - No. 5. Tiempo de Son” from Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 1. Wergo (1961/2009)]

Amadeo Roldán: Rítmica No. 5

So, to the point, the early experimental composers were thinking about it not in terms of America or the United States, but they were thinking about it in terms of pan-Americanism and other notions that are transnational. So when we were thinking about going back to this experimentalism: Where do these Latin American composers fit into this new understanding that was developed at the end of the 20th century of what experimentalism might be? Well, what they do is actually they break the very idea of what experimentalism can be. The presence breaks it because it moves away from that national rhetoric. But at the same time, we thought, once we start introducing this, we can introduce something else, which is all those experimental practices that come from popular music. And this, again, was something that I had encountered when I wrote the book about Nortec electronic dance music, the Nortec Collective, because these guys were DJs and computer music producers. They were always talking about “yeah, I'm experimental, I'm always experimenting”. And back then, because I came from the tradition of the European understanding of what experimentalism was, I could never really understand what they were talking about, because I was like: “What is experimental about what you're doing? I mean, you're putting loops. There's nothing experimental to me”, but that was my problem, it was not their problem. I just didn't understand how it is that they were defining the notion of experimentalism. Then, later, after talking to them and really understanding, “okay, oh, I see what they mean when they say that they're experimenting”. The first thing that I realised is that the notion of experimentalism is a contextual notion. It has to do with where you are coming from, where you are, what your traditions are, and it cannot be a universal idea. Experimentalism has to be contextualised in historical moments and in geographical places, and it cannot sound the same, which was something that was somehow implied in the more conventional description or definition of experimentalism. It has to be atonal, it has to be a breakaway from tonality, it has to be harsh, dissonant. Well, that was my understanding of experimentalism and that's why I couldn’t understand why these very harmonically pleasing sounds that they were doing to me could not be experimentalism, until I understand that it has to do with something else, with a different understanding of how you relate to your culture and to your music and your tradition, and they come from different traditions.

So they were breaking away from those traditions that they were coming from, but they were not the ones that I thought. “You are an experimental. You should break away from that tradition, not from this one”. So then, that was a basic idea in the book. Experimentalisms are different in different places, just like the very idea of modernism is different in different places.  

Much More than the Notes was researched, written and produced by Rubén Coll, and presented by Sarah Pilar Iacobucci.