MISSOURI MUSIC TEACHERS ASSOCIATION

The Recitals of the Pangea Project: a Musical Pilgrimage across the World

By

Blas González

Paper submitted for a lecture Recital at the MMTA 2009 Conference

Performers: Ya-Ting Liou and Blas González

Good afternoon. Today we would like to talk about the purpose of the Pangea Piano

Project, a series of recitals that reflect on classical music and national identity.

Throughout the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras the epicenters of classical music

were limited to Vienna, Rome, Naples, Paris, and were only daringly stretched to the outskirts of

Western Europe (Budapest, or Prague, for instance). Since then, a gradual process of

globalization has included Asia, the American Continent, Oceania, and Africa in the participation

of art music, as we understand it today. In a world in which Chinese pianist Lang-Lang and

Taiwanese violinist Cho Lian-Ling have won unanimous acclaim, where the music of the

Argentinean composers Alberto Ginastera and Ástor Piazzolla are widely performed, and where

festivals and competitions are held in unsuspected places such as Turkey, Venezuela, Russia, or

Singapore, it is out of question that classical music has achieved the category of world music.

This is a fact that we, as musicians, must reflect upon.

Our recitals celebrate this present diversity in classical music by programming

composers from very different parts of the worlds. We also try to shade new light on works of

the standard repertoire, reminding ourselves that this encounter of cultures was an urge that

arose gradually in artists. When Mozart included a Turkish March in a piano sonata, or when

Rameau wrote the ballet Les indes galantes, these composers already addressed the issue of the

encounter of different cultures, even if their approach stressed exoticism and a naïf portrayal of

foreign cultures.

Even the discovery of neighboring European countries such as Italy or Switzerland made an

impact in Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s music, resulting in the composition of Years of

Pilgrimage. And before that, Chopin, Beethoven and Brahms were inspired by the folklore and

suggestively romantic aura of Scotland, Russia and Ireland. The cross-pollination of national

styles that happened inside Western Europe shows that even before the contact with non-

western music, the music these composers were writing was already “impure”. The myth of the

Western European composer’s metaphysic inspiration, which circulated during the Romantic

Era, was actually the deliberate invention of developed nations who were trying to create iconic

superhuman artists whose genius is solitary and beyond terrestrial grasp. But music is an art that

obeys laws of historical development, and all the musicians that have contributed to it have

looked for whatever is foreign and rare rather than close and familiar.

The difference in between the perception of music from other cultures during the

Nineteenth Century and the Twentieth Century perspective in world music is that the romantic

perspective is fundamentally prejudiced. A composer who lived in Vienna in the Nineteenth

Century would try to incorporate characteristic melodic intervals and rhythmic patterns of exotic

music into the weave of the Eurocentric “international” style. But in the first decades of the

Twentieth Century, the technological advances that allowed travels throughout the world

allowed Europeans to understand non-western cultures better. Musicology and musical

anthropology would help western musicians to understand the value of music that was foreign

to them in terms of rhythm, intonation, timbre and melodic structure.

The Paris World Exhibition of 1889 changed French composer Claude Debussy’s musical

style forever. After listening to a gamelan ensemble from Indonesia, he wrote to a friend that

this percussion music was able, through its distinct system of tuning and its irregular complex

rhythmic patterns “to express every nuance of meaning” and to make “[the Western system] to

seem like empty phantoms for the use of unwise infants”.1 The exotic music from the Middle

and Far East fascinated Debussy so much that he felt prompted to write piano pieces like

Pagodes (from Estampes, 1903) or Canope (from Préludes, Book 2, 1910), which represent

respectively China and Egypt. He explored the use of parallel harmonies and pentatonism to

suggest exoticism. In La Puerta del Vino, also from the second Volume of Preludes of 1913, the

exoticism goes to the extreme of blending different influences. A postcard representing the

Alhambra, a Moorish temple in Granada, Spain, inspired Debussy. The piece depicts how the

architectural style of the building and the cultural entourage of Granada are the result of an

encounter between Arabic and Spanish culture. Debussy symbolically represents this duality.

Spain is represented through the use of the rhythm of Habanera in the left hand.

Example 1: Claude Debussy: La Puerta del Vino, No. 3 from Préludes, Book 2 (New York: Dover

Publications, 1989), m. 3.

The guitar, Spanish instrument par excellence, is imitated in the initial bars.

Example 2: Ibid. m. 21.

And the flourishes in the right hand use Arabic sounding scales.

1 Claude Debussy, Correspondance (Paris: du Sandre, 2005), 52.

Example 3: Ibid, m. 13-14.

The hybridism of the piece is multi-layered; there is the basic mixture of Iberic and

Middle Eastern elements and also the point of view of a French composer who applies his

magnifying glass and dyes the materials with the colors of impressionistic harmonies.

In spite of Debussy’s efforts to transform his music through a legitimate absorption of

foreign models, he belongs to an era in which Western culture is still ethnocentric, as a result of

a process of territorial domination over the rest of the world. Europe speaks internationally for

the rest of the world, and does not allow the non-western cultures to speak for themselves.

In Edward Said’s own words, throughout the first part of the Twentieth Century “power,

speech, and representation are still located exclusively with the colonizer, while the colonized

are seen as powerless, silent and objectified”.2

However, a gradual process of re-acculturation is allowing Asian artists to speak for

themselves and build their own subjective view on their cultures. If in the beginning of the

Twentieth Century European western composers were incorporating elements of the East into

their music, today in the Twenty-First Century musicians from the East are receiving in their

countries an intense training that allows them to soak deeply in Western classical music. In this

way they recover musical ideas that Western composers had borrowed from them.

The artistic development of Turkey throughout the Twentieth Century is a significant

example of this phenomenon. The country has historically been a place of connection between

2 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 17.

the West and the East. During the 1700, in spite of the military conflict between the Ottoman

and Austrian Empires or maybe precisely because of it, the Middle East and Europe were in

constant cultural exchange. Architecture, cuisine, literature, painting, and even tailoring of both

cultures influenced each other. It is a well-known fact that western orchestras incorporated the

use of piccolos flutes and bass drums to imitate Turkish military music.

In the first decades of the Twentieth Century, many Turkish musicians started traveling

to the West. After the Turkish Republic was declared in 1923, “a number of talented people

were sent by the republic to various cities in Europe to study music”. The first generation of

twentieth-century Turkish composers, though, treated their folklore in an overtly naïf and

unsophisticated way when they wrote their chamber and symphonic music. But “in later stages

every composer achieved synthesis by means of abstraction”.3

Several generations later, Toga Zafer Özdemir (born 1978) has achieved a unique

mixture of popular music fundamentally from his country but also from rock and roll and jazz,

and elements of classical music. He received his education in the regions of Anatolia and Ankara,

but a later travel to the United States and several residencies in Western Europe have marked

his musical style with a particular flexibility to incorporate all sorts of influences. His

Mesopotamia Suite, in three movements, makes specific reference to the music of the region of

Anatolia. The use of compound meters 2/8 + 3/8; 2/8 + 2/8 + 3/8; and 2/8 + 2/8 + 2/8 plus 3/8

throughout the three movements of the piece are idiosyncratic, as well as the scale D- E flat- F

sharp- G natural- G sharp- A, which shapes the structure semitone- augmented second-

semitone- semitone- semitone.

3 Anonymous article in the website Turkish Cultural Foundation, http://www.turkishculture.org/music/classical-31.htm

Example 4: Tolga Zafer Özdemir, Mesopotamia Suite, No. 1, m. 1-4

Because of Özdemir’s classical training, we can hear the influence of Bartók, Debussy,

and Gershwin in his piano writing. There are several musical jokes, like the appearance of a

theme that uncomfortably reminds the listener of Ravel’s Boléro.

Example 5: Özdemir, No. 2, m. 25-27.

Or the last bars of the suite, in which a whole tone scale in contrary motion between

right and left hand is interrupted to end the piece noisily with a Major Seventh and a Minor

Seventh in extremely opposite registers.

Example 6: Özdemir, No. 3, m. 64-66

Özdemir’s irreverent sense of humor reflects a very original view on the contemporary

meaning of genres, tradition and the alleged importance and hierarchy of different kinds of

music.

On a different note, a country like Taiwan also has a peculiar story, as far as the

construction of its national identity is concerned. For years an island inhabited by cultures of a

possible Polynesian origin who spoke dialects which might have originated all the Australasian

languages and chronically a Chinese colony, the country has also received the cultural influences

of Holland and Japan mainly. Taiwan has been struggling to achieve its political independence

throughout the whole Twentieth Century. Although at present it is a parliamentary democracy

with unclear support from the United Nations and economical restrictions imposed by the

international pressure of the Popular Republic of China, Taiwan suffered for decades the

domination of that country and earlier Japan. Both dictatorial regimes suppressed Taiwanese

people’s basic civil rights such as voting or speaking in public in their own dialect. The elections

in the 1990s changed the panorama, and people’s general awareness of their own identity is

finally emerging.

Guo Zhiyuan, born in 1921, is considered the father of Taiwanese classical music. Since

Taiwan was under Japanese domination during his youth, he traveled to Tokyo to study with

composers who were deeply imbedded in the French impressionistic style. When Guo returned

to Taiwan, he reacted to the political problems that his country was experiencing. Guo

committed to write nationalistic music that would represent Taiwan as a country with its own

identity. Fantasia on Taiwanese Classical Music, written in 1956, is one of the landmarks of his

prolific piano output. To the unaware Western listener, this piece might sound like one more

example of chinoiserie. Nevertheless, if it is compared with the compositions that were written

at that time in Mainland China Guo’s independent artistry comes to the light. In the vespers of

the Maoist Cultural Revolution, composers from Mainland China tended to write with extreme

simplicity, in an epic and heroic style. The introspection and refinement of the Fantasia would

have seen, by the Chinese eyes, as decadently Western. The title’s reference to specifically

Taiwanese Classical music is not coincidental; it is a call for the memory of Taiwan’s unique

culture. Guo’s background as an ethnologist is apparent in the notation of the traditional tune.

The meter changes stress the asymmetrical inflections of the melody.

Example 7: Guo Zhiyuan, Fantasia on Taiwanese Classical Music (Taipei: Taiwanese Music

Editions, 1996), m.8-11.

The pianistic style proliferates with impressionistic and romantic idiomatic features, but

it is hard to say if they are more identifiable with Rachmaninoff, Debussy, or they are simply very

personal. What seems to be suggested by the journey though which the theme goes, is that the

past of Taiwan can be brought to the present in a spirit of change and realization.

The example of Özdemir’s and Guo’s music shows how composers from countries that

were considered peripheral until now are creating their own tradition of classical music. They

internalize Western styles and they recover elements of their own cultures that had been

utilized by Western composers in the past.

Another noteworthy issue in today’s music is the influence of avant-garde in peripheral

countries. Musicians from places like South America or Oceania do not just write music inspired

by their folklore. They also have been following the international trends of music that are

generally considered avant-garde, contemporary or new music. Let us define, in a perhaps unfair

and single-mindedly generalized way these tendencies by saying that they challenge the idea of

tonality, regular beat, and regular phrasing with different degrees of radicalism. Once avant-

garde has been introduced into the musical establishment of these countries, they followed

their own course. Consequently, avant-garde composers from countries like Argentina or New

Zealand can rightfully claim now that they are finding their own voice.

Argentina’s formation of a national identity has been achieved in several steps and

throughout very conflicting events. The period of Spanish colonization lasted for 200 years

during which the native cultures were systematically suppressed to the point that they were

nearly eliminated. The Nineteenth Century brought political independence from Spain and

about one hundred years of civil war. A new current of European emigration during the early

1900s shaped one last time the face of the country. Unlike other Latin-American countries,

Argentina is not characterized by an immediately recognizable presence of the Native American

element (the mestizo). A mixture of cosmopolitism, inferiority complex and nostalgia makes

Argentineans to constantly seek the European inspiration. But a century shaken by military coup

d’états has gradually shown the society that the country has to face its real problems and to

look for a way to generate institutional continuity.

In music, besides the cultivation of an internationally successful school of composition of

classical music that is inspired in folklore and tango, as the example of Ginastera’s and

Piazzolla‘s presence in concert programs prove, a strong and multifaceted movement of avant-

garde music has emerged since the 1960. The presence of Gerardo Gandini’s and Mariano

Etkin’s works in new music festivals in Europe, America and the rest of Latin America has

assured Argentinean contemporary music, at times, a significant relevance. As it occurs with the

rest of Latin-America‘s avant-garde movement, the sense of lack of direction and the

uncertainty of the future, both politically and culturally, is reflected. In Latin America, the

challenge is “to realize oneself in the middle of conflicts in between different temporalities that

live both in the same present”.4 According to Mariano Etkin “the essentially migratory nature of

Argentina, the elimination and consequent disappearance of great part of the aboriginal

population and a process of ‘mestizaje’ which did not penetrate in the middle class gives the

country’s culture characteristics that separates it from all the other important nations of the

area, for instance, Brazil, Mexico or Peru. Migration, interruption, syncretism… could we risk an

analogy by saying that in some of the better Argentinean music what makes it different form

Center European music is that materials change place, interrupt each other and mix?”5

Pablo Tarrats is a composer born in 1969. A disciple of Gerardo Gandini and Mariano

Etkin, he inherited this tendency to discontinuity that is inherent to his compositional style. It is

enough to sample some excerpts of his music which confirm some of the characteristics which

Coriún Aharonián considers pervasive in Argentinean and Latin-American avant-garde music:

“non discursive music processes, different sense of time, expressive blocks, austerity, violence,

primitivism and importance of silence”.6

Example 8: Pablo Tarrats, Horizontes esfumados, m. 1-4.

4 Canclini, Néstor G, “La modernindad después de la posmodernindad”. In: Belluzzo, Ana María de M. (org.). Vanguardas artísticas na América Latina. São Paulo, Memorial da América Larina/Unesp.5 Mariano Etkin, “El hombre que está sólo y espera”, catalogue of the Festival Neue Musik Rümlingen, 1997.6 Coriún Aharonián, “An Approach to Compositional Trends in Latin America”, Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 10, p. 4, 2000.

The musical ideas are bare and naked, like the woodcraft of a Native American artisan.

Horizontes esfumados, or Blurred Horizons, was especially written for this project in 2006.

New Zealand has experienced a totally different aspect of European colonization. In

spite of several skirmishes between Maoris and European colonizers for a few decades before

and after they signed the historical Treaty of Waitangi, an exemplary document that guarantees

political rights to both Europeans and non-Europeans, the cultural project of New Zealand has

been vastly inclusive. Without the need to fight militarily for political independence from

England, today the country has its own legislation and Executive power, even if formally the

maximum authority is the Queen of England. Immigration is nowadays a great factor of change

in the configuration of New Zealand’s society. The proximity to the East has attracted people

from China, Taiwan and Korea to live there. Other important sources of immigration are, in

order of importance, India, Fiji, Samoa and Turkey, with a minority of Latin-American

immigrants.

The composer who is acknowledged to be the first serious classical musician is Douglas

Lilburn, who established the first laboratory of electro-acoustic music in Wellington. Lilburn was

the first composer to be concerned with national identity in New Zealand music. His disciples

have continued in that direction, but approaching the issue from different angles.

Jack Body, born in 1944, is one of them. A very successful composer of symphonic and

chamber music and music for digital media combined with acoustical instruments, his interests

range from photography to ethnomusicology, painting to politics. After studying in New Zealand

he spent time in Germany and Holland, and after returning to his country, he worked in

Indonesia. Recording and transcribing music from this country, as well as doing the same with

music from China, the Balkans, and other parts of the world has greatly influenced his music.

“I’ve turned to transcription [of indigenous music] when I’ve been unable to focus on original

composition-as Ravel is supposed to have turned to orchestration in similar circumstances. I like

to transcribe music in which I sense a particular quality, melodic, perhaps, or rhythmic which my

ears find attractive but which I have difficulty deciphering. I want to understand what is

happening in this music to give it this special quality. My ideal is to learn something that might

be able to apply in my own compositions.”7 Drumming, from Three Rhythmics, written in 1986, is

a result of this process, and it mixes drum rhythms from different non-western traditions. There

are two very apparent processes that Body elaborates throughout the piece. One is the

appearance of solos accompanied by a drum “rolling” watered by the use of pedaling.

Example 9: Jack Body, Drummings, from Three Rhythmics (Wellington: Waiteata Music Press,

1999), m. 1-3.

The other process consists on the meter less overlapping of similar motives, reminiscent

of several drum music from Africa and Asia, in which a downbeat cannot be found.

7 Jack Body, “From Sound to Symbol and Back Again: Transcription/Composition”, in http://www.jackbody.com/sound_to_symbol.htm

Example 10: Ibid. m. 10.

Halfway the piece these processes start to interrupt and influence each other. In the

case of Jack Body’s music the idiosyncrasy of his culture is represented precisely by the

connivance of diverse influences that coexist with tolerance and generate a bold synergy.

By reflecting on the mutual influences between these different composers, many

questions are raised. Is there, today, a place in the world equivalent to the Vienna of the

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, in terms of musical influence? Has the center shifted? Is

there a center? What does it mean, today, to belong to the periphery? What does national

identity mean, in music? Does it depend on the use of folklore, or on deeper spiritual concerns?

Jan Art Scholte thinks that “globalization does not entail the end of territorial

geography; territoriality and supraterritoriality coexist in complex interrelations”.8 The

extremely fluency of communication in today’s world makes human beings to face a paradox.

On one hand there is, like never before, a great deal of awareness about other cultures. On the

other hand globalization seems at times to threaten the individuality and peculiarity of different

cultures. The music that we are presenting in this lecture is the contribution of artists that turn

8 Jan Art Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (London: McMillan, 2000), 8.

globalization into a positive issue, as a possibility for an integration into the fabric of a world

that consumes relentlessly art.

We would like to finish this presentation by performing a piece by an American

composer who, without any doubt, represents how this country is constantly redefining its

national identity. George Gershwin was an American Jew who blended African-American and

European music, opening the doors to the maturity of classical music in the United States. His

Preludes for piano use these contrasting influences in perfect balance. When he introduced a

blues scale on his prelude number 2, Gershwin defined forever what a composer must do if he

was not born in Europe. According to an oral tradition, upon being requested by him to teach

him composition, Ravel said to Gershwin: “Why do you want to become second rate Ravel,

when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?”9

Thank you for coming.

9 Quoted in Jane Stuart Smith and Betty Carlson, The Gift of Music: Great Composers and Their Influence (Wheaton, IL, Crossway Books, 1995), p. 727.

Bibliography

Books

Debussy, Claude. Correspondance. Paris: Du Sandre, 2005.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Scholte, Jan Art. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. London: McMillan, 2000.

Stuart Smith, Jane & Carlso, Betty. The Gift of Music: Great Composers and Their

Influence. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

Articles

Aharonián, Coriún. “An Approach to Compositional Trends in Latin America”. Leonardo

Music Journal, Vol. 10, 2000, p. 3-5.

Canclini, Néstor G. “La modernidad después de la posmodernidad”. In: Belluzzo, Ana

María de M. (org.). Vanguardas artísticas na América Latina. São Paulo, Memorial da América

Larina/Unesp, p. 24-26.

Etkin, Mariano. “El hombre que está sólo y espera”. Neue Musik Rümlingen, 1997, p. 3.

Online sources

Anonymous article in the website Turkish Cultural Foundation,

http://www.turkishculture.org/music/classical-31.htm

Body, Jack. “From Sound to Symbol and Back Again: Transcription/Composition”.

http://www.jackbody.com/sound_to_symbol.htm

Scores

Body, Jack. Three Rhtyhmics. Wellington: Waiteatea Music Press, 1999.

Debussy, Claude. Complete Preludes. New York: Dover Publications, 1989.

Guo, Zhiyuan. Piano Solo Album. Taipei: Taiwanese Music Editions, 1996.

Özdemir, Tolga Zafer. Mesopotamia Suite (Unpublished)

Tarrats, Pablo. Horizontes esfumados (Unpublished)