There is no easy way to confront the legacies of imperial control. These unequal power relationships spawned countless musical responses depicting displacement and loss, but also reflecting hybrid identities that emerged from the collision of cultures. Today’s musical journey has three stopping points—Central America, Europe, and East Asia—in which different forms of empire operated and continue to operate today.
Theodoro Valcárcel’s “Tungu, tungu” dips south to Peru. It is taken from an important 1936 collection of 31 songs in the indigenous languages of Quechua and Aymara from the Peruvian Andes. Though Valcárcel was educated in Europe (specifically Milan and Barcelona), he sought to integrate his mestizo (mixed) background with this training, thus songs like his exquisite “Tungu, tungu” utilize recognizable Western harmonies.
The use of Andean language—such as the shared use of tungu, tungu, meaning “dove” or “beloved”—links Valcárcel to Olivier Messiaen in his 1945 song cycle Harawi. Subtitled “A Song of Love and Death,” Messiaen melded the Cornish myth of Tristan and Iseult with Quechuan languages and Andean folk songs (a harawi is a Peruvian narrative genre). “Doundou Tchil” describes a male dancer performing a courtship dance; the song title onomatopoeically depicts the jingle of the crotal bells at his ankles.
Xavier Montsalvatge—the most significant Catalan musician of the 20th century—drew on the Caribbean style called antillanismo, fusing Cuban dance rhythms with Spanish vocal styles and Afro-Cuban forms. For him, Hispanic culture (though it had itself annihilated the indigenous population) was now being erased by American influence. “Cuba dentro de un piano” and “Punto de habanera” both come from the five Canciones negras, a 1945 commission from Catalan soprano Mercedes Plantada. The former is a habanera-style recollection of a lost Cuba. The latter describes a Creole beauty in a crisp, white crinoline, her gait heard in the rhythm of the guajiras, a type of flamenco.
The prodigious 20th-century Latin American Ernesto Lecuona—the “Cuban Schubert”—wrote at least 600 songs; the hit “Siempre en mi corazón” was nominated for an Academy Award in 1942, but lost to “White Christmas.” The lullaby “La señora luna,” in the form of a Cuban bolero, comes from his 1937 cycle Cinco canciones con versos de Juana de Ibarbourou. The Uruguayan poet Ibarbourou may have written the poem for her son. To this day, Lecuona’s original publication cannot be accessed in communist Cuba.
The perspective shifts to European Jewish voices with Gustav Mahler’s “Von der Schönheit,” from Das Lied von der Erde. Hans Bethge, freely translating poetry by Li Bai, depicts an idyllic scene of girls picking lotus blossom on the shore with boys riding past, but one girl watches in secret grief. The song’s expansive form reveals Mahler’s fascination with song on a symphonic scale.
Arnold Schoenberg’s “Tot” was written in 1933 Berlin. Following Schoenberg’s exile in the US, it was forgotten until 1948. The poem is a study in indifference, reflected in the pitiless angularity of Schoenberg’s music; only at the end do we realize this protagonist is steeped in grief.
While Schoenberg and Weill escaped Nazi Germany, Ilse Weber was murdered in Auschwitz age 41. In Theresienstadt, Weber worked as a nurse in the children’s infirmary and wrote around 60 poems, many of which she accompanied as songs on her guitar. The folk-like “Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt” laments the loss of home; today, it is heard in the artists’ own arrangement.
Written in 1933, Kurt Weill’s sung ballet The Seven Deadly Sins contemplates humanity’s evils. Though the work has two named characters, it is unclear whether they are sisters or aspects of one person. This unusual device was dictated by Weill’s wealthy patron Edward James, who demanded a role for his wife, dancer Tilly Losch, opposite Weill’s wife, singer Lotte Lenya. “Neid” depicts an often-overlooked form of imperialism, namely capitalism, that fosters envy in the characters walking through San Francisco. In “Epilog,” they/she return(s) to Louisiana, seemingly content with a modest lot.
As Messiaen looked west, Maurice Ravel turned eastward for his song cycle Shéhérazade. He was fascinated with the storyteller who nightly saved herself by interrupting her tales on a cliff-hanger. Ravel set freely translated poetry by Tristan Klingsor, a fellow-member in the artists’ group Les Apaches. In “La flûte enchantée,” a servant girl hears her lover playing the flute while her master slumbers. “L’indifférent,” a failed seduction, exemplifies the fetishization of Eastern beauty.
Our next stop is East Asia. Zubaida Azezi and Edo Frenkel’s “Ananurhan” is an arrangement of an Uyghur folk song that, like Weber’s, speaks of leaving home. The tension between central Asian dance rhythms and the mournful text characterizes Uyghur folk music and reflects perseverance of spirit amidst continuing tragedy and persecution.
The “Fishman’s Sonnet” was given to Fleur Barron by composer Huang Ruo. Ruo’s internationally renowned music blends Chinese ancient and folk music with Western classical and popular genres. This song draws on kunqu, one of the oldest forms of Chinese opera.
Recalling both Weber’s and Lecuona’s songs with its sinuous melody, “Northeastern Lullaby” originated in the Liaoning Province in Northeastern China. The lyrics of this traditional ballad were rewritten in 1960 and it has since become enormously popular.
“Fengyang Flower Drum” hails from Fengyang County in Anhui Province. It has a sobering history; the region experienced regular severe floods during the late Ming Dynasty, forcing its residents to sing for money. The song was famously used in The Good Earth, a 1937 film adaptation of the novel by Pearl S. Buck, starring the aforementioned Tilly Losch from Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins.
—Natasha Loges
Maurice Delage studied with Maurice Ravel, who proclaimed him “the supreme French composer of his day.” As a young man, Delage made a long journey to India and Japan, and became fascinated with non-Western musical techniques. His “Ragamalika,” composed in 1914 and subtitled “Chant tamoul” (“Tamil Song”), requires a prepared piano: A piece of cardboard is to be inserted under the piano’s low B-flat to imitate the sound of a drum. “Ragamalika” is sung in Tamil, an ancient language of southern India, and in the score Delage asks that the song—with its changing meters and florid vocal line—be sung with nasal vocalization.
New York–based Kamala Sankaram is a musician of many different talents: She is a composer (particularly of opera), she has experimented with the use of electronics and computers in her works, she is a singer, and she is a sitarist. Sankaram currently teaches at the Mannes School of Music and SUNY Purchase. “The Far Shore” sets a text by the 16th-century Hindu mystic poet Mirabai. Across its four-minute span, the song takes the shape of a long crescendo and then decrescendo, rising at its center to an ecstatic climax for both singer and accompanist.
Los Angeles–based composer Kian Ravaei studied at UCLA, Indiana, and Juilliard. As a composer, he has been acutely conscious of being heir to two quite different musical traditions: Western classical music and Iranian music. “I Will Greet the Sun Again,” which receives its US premiere this evening, was commissioned by Fleur Barron and Kunal Lahiry, with support from Internationale Hugo Wolf Akademie Stuttgart and Pierre Boulez Saal. The composer has provided a brief introduction:
This song was conceived as a companion piece to Ravel’s Shéhérazade, offering a different view of the infamous enslaved storyteller from One Thousand and One Nights. I set the words of another Persian queen: Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), the queen of modernist poetry, whose transgressive feminist language revolutionized Iranian art. Scheherazade’s experience of female captivity is not unlike that which Farrokhzad underwent, and which millions of Iranian women continue to endure.
Born in Southern China in 1953, Chen Yi came to know Western classical music at an early age, but her education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. Western music was banned during the 1960s, and as a girl Chen Yi practiced the piano with a blanket between the strings and hammers as a way of muffling the sounds and keeping her practicing a secret. She re-settled in the United States in the 1980s and has established a successful career as a composer in this country, where she now teaches at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. “Monologue,” from Chen Yi’s Meditation, is a dramatic song, full of vocalizations that suddenly slip into English.
—Eric Bromberger