Townsend: El Decameron Negro, I El Arpa del Guerrero by Leo Brouwer

One of the recording projects I have been most happy with was my recording of Leo Brouwer's El Decameron Negro. It was written in 1981 and published in 1983. Mine was the first recording, in 1987. I sent a copy to Leo in Havana and when I next saw him, in Quebec at a Guitar Foundation of America conference, he was very gracious and complimented me on the tone quality of the recording.

This piece represents a major shift in Brouwer's approach to composition. With this piece he turns away from the atonal, aleatoric avant-garde style he had been using since the early 1960s and returned to a style that used tonal harmonies, though often in new ways. I attended a panel of composers in Toronto in the 1980s that included Brouwer, Stephen Dodgson and Gilbert Biberian and posed to them all the same question: why are you returning to using tonal harmony? Brouwer's answer at the time was that atonal music caused a fatigue to write and listen to. He later gave a much more complete explanation:

…I became saturated with the language of the so called old avant- 

garde…the atomized, crisp, and “tensional” language of this kind 

suffered, and still suffers today, a defect related to the essence of 

compositional balance, a concept that is present in history: Movement, 

tension, with its consequent rest, relaxation. This “law of opposing 

forces” – day-night, man-woman, ying-yang, time to love-time to hate 

– exists within all circumstances of mankind….The avant-garde lacked 

the relaxation of all tensions. There is no living entity that doesn’t rest. 

This is one of the things I discovered….In this way, I made a kind of 

regression that moves toward the simplification of the compositional 

materials. This is what I consider my last period […which] 

encompasses the essential elements from popular music, from classical 

music, and from the avant-garde itself. They help me to give contrast 

to big tensions.

This is exactly the point I have tried to make on several occasions on this blog. If you search under "harmony" you will probably find over a dozen posts on the issue, but here is a typical one.

El Decameron Negro consists of three movements of which "El Arpa del Guerrero" (The Warrior's Harp) is the first (though Brouwer has indicated the movements can be played in any order, everyone usually follows the printed order). Brouwer has said that the inspiration was a collection of African folk-tales. The original Decameron is a 14th century collection of 100 tales by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375). I cannot find, however, the African collection that was the direct inspiration. What I do find is a 1972 Italian film directed by Piero Vivarelli entitled Il Decamerone Nero which consists of five African folk-tales. Perhaps this was the inspiration.

In any case, "El Arpa del Guerrero" is a brilliant and lyric re-interpretation of both tonality and sonata form. It is set in an irregular 5/8 time signature that tends to give everything a different lilt. There are two main themes, the 5/8 arpeggio you hear at the beginning and a tranquillo contrasting passage in chords with rising appoggiaturas. These two ideas are developed in interesting ways and the movement ends with a brilliant ascending passage and a statement of simple E major harmony. Up until then, the movement has been rather coy about what the tonic chord might be: D flat? A minor? But this ending resolves the tensions.

I have accompanied the recording with a photo of the first page of the original manuscript, the original published cover, the first page of the published edition (if you look very closely, you can see some red ink marking misprints in the printing), a photo of Leo Brouwer, a couple of photos of my right hand and a photo of me. Here is the first movement of El Decameron Negro, "El Arpa del Guerrero":