Townsend: Preludios epigramaticos by Léo Brouwer

In 1974 I made one of the smarter choices of my life. I was determined to become a capable classical guitarist, but I had been running out of teachers. Every six months, it seemed, I reached the limits of the knowledge of my teacher and had to look for a new one. This was largely because, in the early 70s on Vancouver Island, Canada, there were no really good classical guitarists. In fact, in Canada at that time, there probably were no more than one or two competent teachers and they were in Montréal and Toronto, not way out on the West Coast. I did however, find a pretty good teacher in Vancouver, so every Saturday morning I would commute over on the ferry. The one-hour lesson would take about seven hours including six hours travel time. But my teacher, Téo Bagchus, did know his stuff. After six months he suggested that I go and study with his teacher in Spain, José Tomas, who lived in Alicante, Spain, on the Mediterranean coast. "I can do that?" I said. "What do I do, write him a letter, phone him?" Téo said, no, don't bother. He doesn't answer letters and I'm not sure he has a phone. Just go knock on his door. That sounded pretty crazy, but I had already contacted José Ramirez' shop in Madrid about buying a real concert guitar, so I decided to save some money and go.

I had already done two years at the University of Victoria in music, but the only problem there was that they wanted me to play the piano. They also had me playing lute in an early music ensemble. Nothing wrong with that, but the main reason I was there was to become a guitarist and they didn't even have a teacher! So I dropped out after second year and went to Spain. I picked up a great concert Ramirez in Madrid and headed for Alicante. When I knocked on Tomas' door, I told him I was a student of Téo's in Vancouver and he was all smiles: "How is Téo?" Then he asked what I was working on and I said the Etude No. 8 by Villa-Lobos, which seemed to pass muster. So I started lessons with José Tomas. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was just about the best place to be. There was a whole community of international guitar students there from Japan, the US, France, Belgium, England, Ireland, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Finland and the Philippines. Here's a group photo of some of us at the end of the course. I'm kneeling down, second from the right and next to me, first on the right, is my good friend at the time, the Finnish guitarist Klaus Helminen who spoke at least seven languages. In the photo are guitarists from Canada, France, Scotland, Belgium, Mexico, Ireland and the girl whose leg I am clutching, was a fine guitarist from the Philippines.

When I went there I was a pretty junior player, just finding my way. A bit of a hack, I guess you could say. When I got back to Canada, about ten months later, I could play the guitar. Well. While I was in Alicante I did nothing but eat, sleep and practice the guitar (and read Russian novels). I played about six hours a day. I learned a LOT of music. At the end of one lesson, when I wasn't going to see Tomas for a couple of weeks, he suggested I learn the English Suite by John Duarte, which is in three movements--about ten or twelve minutes of music. When I came to the next lesson I had it all memorized.

The reason I got off on this digression is because of Alicante. It is a medium-sized provincial capital and, apart from the Conservatorio "Oscar Esplá" and José Tomas, there isn't much going on. But in the years after the terrible Spanish Civil War 1936-39, there was a prison camp outside Alicante where enemies of the Franco regime were imprisoned. One of these was the young poet Miguel Hernández, who started out as a goatherd and farmhand. He was on the Republican side--who lost--during the war and afterwards was sentenced to thirty years in prison. He died, age 31, in the prison outside Alicante in the year 1942, of tuberculosis and mistreatment. Much of his poetry was written in prison. Of course, when I was studying in Alicante, I knew nothing of this history.

In 1981, Léo Brouwer chose six lines from Hernández' Poemas de Amor as titles for six brief preludes titled Preludios Epigramaticos. Here are the titles with my translations:

1. "Desde que el alba quiso ser alba, toda eres madre" ["As you are wholly woman, so the dawn wishes to be dawn"]
2. "Tristes hombres si no mueren de amores" ["Sad men, if they don't die of love"]
3. "Alrededor de tu piel, ato y desato la mia" ["Surrounded by your skin, mine is tied and untied"]
4. "Rié, que tod rié: que todo es madre leve" ["Laugh, everything laughs, all is mother of levity"]
5. "Me cogiste el corazón y hoy precipitas su vuelo" ["You caught the flight of my heart and today hurled it down"]
6. "Llegó con trés heridas: la del amor, la de la muerte, la de la vita" ["I endure with three wounds: that of love, that of death, that of life"]

Now for the performances. With the first one, I have included three photos: a young Miguel Hernández, a young Léo Brouwer and myself working with Léo in his masterclass in Toronto in 1978. I think we might have been working on Memorias de El Cimarron by Henze, but maybe not as I don't see a cello bow anywhere!

Here is the second prelude. The photos are a pencil drawing of Miguel Hernández, a photo of Léo Brouwer playing Memorias as we can see from the cello bow, and a photo of myself playing a concert at the University of Victoria, BC.

With the third prelude I have put up a photo of Miguel Hernández giving a speech, Léo Brouwer playing a concert and another photo from the master class.

The fourth prelude is the only really up-tempo one, suitable to the text, so in the photos everyone is looking quite happy.

For the fifth prelude, three photos as before:

And finally, the sixth prelude:

Discovering Musicians, Part 3: Léo Brouwer

The Cuban composer Léo Brouwer is hardly an unfamiliar name, but I don't think he is as well known as he could be. He was born in 1939 in Havana, Cuba but was able to go to the US where he studied at the Julliard School with Vincent Persichetti and Stefan Wolpe. Though the guitar is his first instrument, he plainly was from the beginning, far more than just a guitarist, or even "guitar-composer". He later traveled to Berlin where he studied avant-garde music and the Netherlands where he studied early music interpretation. Apart from being a remarkable guitarist, he is also a conductor.

His early compositions, such as Danza characteristica of 1957, were folkloric in inspiration, though showed even then an inspired gift for an idiomatic use of the guitar. Here is a performance by Brouwer himself:

I wanted to put up a performance of my favorite early Brouwer, the Danza del Altiplano from 1964, but could not find a good version in YouTube. From that same year came his big breakthrough in terms of writing for guitar: the first piece for solo guitar really informed by the development of musical techniques in the 20th century, most specifically the music of Bartok and Stravinsky. Here is Elogio de la Danza, written in 1964:

For a certain kind of young guitarist, this was just what they had been looking for. Tired of the same old Ponce and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, young guitarists from all over fell on this like starving wolves. At least, they did so when it percolated out, which took about ten years! I first encountered this piece in the mid-70s and it won me over. What Brouwer did so well here was use the wide spectrum of sonorities of the guitar to full advantage. Sure, he is using dissonant harmonies, but all through there bubbles an unceasing rhythmic energy very characteristic of Cuban music. He followed this piece with a series of more radical ones of which the most successful is probably La espiral eterna of 1971 in which he succeeds in transferring the effect of tape loops to the guitar. It most closely resembles a piece for harpsichord by Ligeti composed in 1968, though, of course, the techniques are quite different. Here is La espiral eterna:

You might consider this experimental and he certainly uncovered a lot of new sonorities for the guitar, but, apart from a few pieces like Parabola and Tarantos, Brouwer was not going to go much further in in this direction. By the 1980s, he was turning back towards a much more harmonic kind of music. Sometime in the mid 80s I attended a composer's panel with Brouwer, Stephen Dodgson and Gilbert Biberian. I asked the panel why everyone seemed to be going back to writing some kind of tonal music and Léo replied that perhaps they just got tired of atonal music! In any case, 1981 was a very productive year for Brouwer in which he wrote a set of six preludes and a larger work, the three movement El Decamerón Negro. I have recorded both these pieces and will put them up in future posts. But I wanted to introduce Léo Brouwer's music first.

Brouwer does much more than just write for solo guitar. As of this date he has composed a total of eleven concertos for guitar and orchestra. In 1994 the Guitar Foundation of America held their annual conference in Quebec City and I was able to attend. I gave, in English and then in French, an analytical talk about one of Brouwer's concertos, the Concierto Elegiaco of 1986. Here is a performance of the first movement by the dedicatee, Julian Bream: