It took over a year, but I have finally premiered a new piece at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, and finally had a performance of one of my pieces in Oklahoma. I knew, of course, that performances would be harder to come by, and to be honest, I haven’t pushed much to have things played locally, if only because there aren’t that many places to have them played. But that rant is for another time.
Last night, Mariachi OPSU, with the help of my fantastic colleague Matthew Howell, gave the world premiere of “El Piano de Genoveva.” This is a setting of a poem by Ramon Lopez Velarde. I found it interesting because it is a love-song to a piano. The speaker sings the song to the piano because the woman who owned the piano is dead. Wonderful pathos. I think the piece works, and the performance wasn’t perfect by a long shot (we had to put the electric guitar part on ice for this time around). It is the first really tonal piece I have written in a very long time… since about 2001, I think. With some reworking, it will be good to go.
It is an example of a piece that has more meaning in rehearsal, though, than in performance, necessarily. During the process of composition (I finished it just after the middle of August), I had to come to terms with the intersection between my musical language and the somewhat orthodox stylings of mariachi, a highly traditional, extremely stylized medium. Then, over the last seven weeks, the students and I had to learn to be mariachis in a new kind of way–there isn’t really a tradition of concert music for mariachi. This dialogue has been extremely interesting and educational. The Hispanic students in the class helped me with the finer points of my translation (I had high school Spanish, but the idioms are always the problem), and we met on this very interesting common ground between new music and ethnomusicology and and traditional Mexican art forms. We had some good discussions, and everyone got to think a little bit differently about what we do in music. Which is the point of college teaching, after all.
I should thank Jan Radzynski for dropping the suggestion to write a piece for mariachi since we have the ensemble ready to go–if he hadn’t put the seed in my mind, I probably would have been content with the old traditional songs. Thanks, Jan, and Happy New Year!