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Borders Between "Popular" and "Classical" Music and Eddie Palmieri's Compositions Between 1960-1979
About the Author: Noel Allende-Goitía Noel Allende-Goitía received his B.M. in Voice from the Music Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico and his M.A. in History from the University of Puerto Rico. He studied with Puerto Rican composer Amaury Veray, Rafael Aponte-Ledee, and Roberto Sierra and has participated in contemporary music workshops held in the Dominican Republic and Brazil. In 1992, he made a post graduate study in Musicology at the Center of Studies and Development on Cuban Music, in Cuba, where he studied Latin American Musicology and field work techniques with the Cuban ensemble "La Sublime." Since 1994, he has presented his works in the "Semi-Annual Grant Still Composer Concert" and the "New Music Premiere," in Michigan State University's School of Music Composition Department. He premiered a work for string orchestra with the Puerto Rico Symphonic Orchestra on Feb. 23, 1995 and a clarinet assemble in the "Eleventh Annual Evening New Music and Avangarde Clarinet Music" at MSU that April. Allende-Goitía began his quest for a Ph.D. in music composition in the Fall of 1995 as a recipient of the Michigan State University Distinguished Fellowship. He studied with professor Mark Sullivan. His works in Music/Culture Social History have been presented at national and international conferences in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the United States, Mexico, and Africa.
SUGGESTED CITATION Allende-Goitía, Noel. "Together But Not Scrambled: The Conflicting Borders Between 'Popular' and 'Classical' Music and Eddie Palmieri's Compositions Between 1960-1979," JSRI Occasional Paper #35, The Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, 1998.
Table Of Contents
As a composer, I have often found myself struggling with musical ideas, or compositional problems, for a long time and to find the elusive solution listening to a "non-classical" composition. The opposite struck me as I was listening to a couple of Eddie Palmieri's compositions, like Adoración (composed in 1973), and I wondered why the avant garde musical movement in Puerto Rico, during the late 60's and 70's, never acknowledged this fine piece of Salsa and Latin Jazz, or incorporated its innovations. During the time I started researching turn-of-the-century Puerto Rican music social history, these situations emerged in my inquiry as questions. Why, if musical practices coexist in the same social context, do innovations in particular genres seem not to affect one another? In the case of Puerto Rico in particular, and the Caribbean in general, I learned that different genres and musical traditions were performed by the same nucleus of musicians (including composers), though, popular and classical compositions seemed impermeable to each other.2 The impermeability of these two genres is expressed in the convention of regarding both as being "together" or equal as cultural activities and in their social functionality, but thinking that for some intrinsic value they are meant to be segregated, or not scrambled. That impermeability is what I would like to explore in this paper. To some people the terminological divide between popular and classical music seems to be one of functionality. For others, it is a taxonomical division, or a matter of semantics. For large recordings distribution companies, like BMG and Columbia House, the terms seem to be used only as market identification in their catalogues for the consumption of a particular commodity. In the scholarly realm, the division seems more like a difference in the content of two disciplines, as when Jaap Kunst coined the word "ethnomusicology" in the 1950's, to (re)name what was called comparative musicology (or musical ethnology). However, I would argue that in spite of the time that has passed the two terms, popular and classical are today still used in the same way Bela Bartók did in 1931. In the process of defining what popular music was, Bartók created a triangle between what he called culture music, urban popular music, and rural popular music as a way to distinguish what kind of source the first of the three should select as the "original" source, for him the third one. With this he introduced an element central to this paper and what I believe is a notion still alive and well: that the existence of a culture music (one who defines the other) is being assumed in the process of defining what popular music (the other) is.3 The conceptual implication of this is: when we define the existence of something, it can be contested, but when we assume it, it cannot be questioned. The practical implication of this is that we begin to realize why the musical production of Eddie Palmieri, from 1961-1979, in spite of its innovative musical propositions, is positioned out of the culture music borders and out of any sensible considerations, due to its definition as popular production. To link an issue in music terminological debate with the musical praxis of an Puerto Rican-spanish-speaking composer, Palmieri, lead us to consider several things: 1) the division between the so called "popular" and "classical" music is not one of terms, but one of musical practice and social agency, 2) historically, musicians as a production force share together the same social and economic constrains that shape their material life, however, they are not positioned, not scrambled, at the same social and ideological level, and, 3) different musical productions are not spawned from a metaphysical music phenomenology, but from socio-economic groups that relate to each other and belong to the same social-political-economic system.4 Terminologies in themselves (in this case in music) not only classify, index, and categorize the subject under study, but also objectivize world views, social values, and levels of consciousness. I would argue, as Elie Siegmeister did in 1938, that subdividing musical activities in categories might lead one to overlook more discrete social contingencies: that music as a social phenomenon and that human experience happens altogether. Moreover, that it is human experience and the contingencies of social agency which work toward keeping things unscrambled. Siegmeister argued that, in spite of popular music being associated with particular places and social groups, music in general was disassociated from its social grounding. For Siegmeister, the problem was not whether a relationship between music and society existed or not, but who profits from keeping music out of a social analysis.
It is clear in this quote that Siegmeister is writing within the overwhelming experience of the Depression, which is why he is so passionate about employer/employee relations, advocating a socialist interpretation and solution in his book. However, his assessment of the material grounding of so-called "culture music" is impressive. By 1938, Siegmeister suggested a comparison between the board of trustees of the main symphonic orchestras and the Metropolitan Opera with the board of trustees from different banks and industrial corporations in the U.S. His proposition does not go farther than that, but he stresses once again why the "gate keepers" of the "culture music" institutions avoid any social analysis.
The power of this analysis resides in its three levels of critique; first, his bold, iconoclastic approach to music as an activity associated with "Teflon"7 ideology, meaning the continuous disassociation of any human activity considered art from its society. Second, there is no room for any high or low culture dichotomy that, at times, is cloaked in powerful social analysis lost in a high degree of abstraction. Furthermore, he levels music as a social product to the same ground of hardware commodities and goods susceptible to the contingencies of the industrial economy.8 Works from authors such as Theodore Adorno9, Argeliers León10, and Peter Manuel11, have been established that the mass media and capitalist economy have commodified musical production and activities. Hence if music, regardless of its surname (popular, classical, Puerto Rican, R&B, New Age, etc.), is only understood because of its human (thus social) context, then categories and classifications only point to humans values historically developed. Sometimes powerful social analysis deconstructs musical categories reveling their social grounding but at the same time, as I said, those analysis assume notions associated with the aforementioned "teflon ideology." For instance, we all agree with Adorno when he emphatically, and clearly, shows how "tautological tribute is paid to the socially dominant power concentrated in the [culture] industry."12 He also de-mystified the "autonomy" of popular music as an "innocent" and "untouched" musical material when a real and well socially grounded "predator," called the mass media, profits from "its commodity character over any esthetic one."13 Strong points in the Adornian analysis are the articulation of the notion of mediation of social elements and the importance of using critique instead of description when dealing with a musical subject.14 However, because all his sociology is constructed upon a phenomenology (the immanent nature of things as a category of the idea),15 which is predicated from Cartesian-like dualism (based on conventions like high and low and great tradition), we find dichotomies that endanger his social critique. That is the way socially constructed categories camouflage themselves:
No matter how air-tight a relationship between music and society might be established and described, such explanations are built upon the notion of "the Music" as an entity with life outside the human being (as explained in metaphysics), and that it also "shelters" qualities which can be "lost," can be "essential," can lose "dignity," and can be "cosmetic," we continue to assert the assumption that "popular" music (low music) is defined by the intrinsic value of the "classical" (high music). Again, what is defined, in this case low music, is being contested and what is assumed, high music, is not being questioned. However this "category of the idea," as Adorno point out, find its way in more specific and concrete works. We only have to read a handful of titles from conventional historical musicology, on one hand, and from ethnomusicology, on the other, to find in their introductions and first chapters how the latter demonstrates how the immediateness of music and society makes their research pertinent. At the same time, musicology simply assumes the intrinsic value of Mozart or Tomás Luis de Victoria's music for its study. Nevertheless, in tune with its class ideological origins, conventional musicology will not ostracize Mozart's music because of his personal or social behavior, censure Palestrina's music because of the Church's participation in crimes of the New World conquest, or ban Carl Orff's Carmina Burana because of the graphic "R" rating of its text. From this perspective Rap music, for example, has to justify its existence because it points to contradictions in social relations and because its composers reject "Western classical music" conventions in their creations. Consequently, as Tricia Rose and Agnes Heller would argue, it is impossible for individuals and social groups to produce art without value: "People always choose concrete ideas, and concrete goals, concrete alternatives. Their concrete acts of selection are related to their valuation attitude in general, in the same way that their value judgments are related to their world view."17 This immediacy between idea and action can be best illustrated by the work of Eddie Palmieri. In 1976, Down Beat magazine published two interviews that illustrated how a world view, objectively, is a built-in component in our perceptions and consumption of culture. John Storm Roberts interviewed Eddie Palmieri, and Kenneth Terry did the same with George Crumb. The main point of the articles is the difference in contextualization: Roberts interview is framed in Eddie's biography from his life in the Barrio and the Bronx to his Grammy Award for his album The Sun of Latin Music (1974). Terry, on the other hand, did not see any relation between Crumb's life and his preference in musical style.
Both interviewees created a lineage, a "tradition" within which their own musical styles move and grow. Eddie talked about his brother, Charlie, and how he connected him with Tito Puente, Vicentico Valdés, Manny Oquendo, Tito Rodríguez, Mongo Santamaría, and Ray Coen, all members of the "santoral"19 of Afro-Cuban music. Those names represent a more immediate claimed "tradition" than Crumb's, who claimed a "supertradition" resumed from the Middle Ages, traced through Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Bartók, Schoenberg, and Loss Lee Finney. The most contrasting item is how each interviewer relates music style to a particular element to the composer's persona. Roberts wanted to look for the origins of Palmieri's "creativity, its triumphs and a good measure of its tribulations."20 Whether this is a romantic view or not, it follows the convention of relating the "popular" musician to his/her immediate life. Conversely, Crumb's musical creativity is related with breaking "away from the historical line of development."21 Neither his life as a man nor as a faculty member relates to his creativity process, only "ideas rumbling in Crumb's imagination." And it is that imagination, for Crumb, that allows him to look for new forms.
For Palmieri, the Cuban music structure is the framework for any new proposition in his compositions. The Danzón, the Cuban comparsa, and others need to be known in order to create something new. Maybe both composers are expressing the same thing, but both are presenting different internal dynamics invented within and by their "traditions." In the musical "tradition" of Crumb, the convention is to break from the established musical forms and create from outside them. Afrodiasporic music, like Salsa, shares with West African musical practice the principle of innovating from inside the structure of the existing canon.23 The understanding of form is the only way to transform the theme and "[play it] as a bossa nova, as a bolero, and as a danzón." Furthermore, it is the only way to create crossover music "by using rock beat and the Mozambique beat, which is complementary to rock on the back beat, and Brazilian instruments on top of that."24 The theme of musical structure remains central to the Palmieri interview. His awareness of form and rhythmic structure is expanded to cover any attempt to produce music within the Salsa and Jazz style.
George Crumb's interview returns us to the subject of how things are taken as a 'given' in our society, and strayed from it. Palmieri's music assumes a public, and assumes the existence of regional musical genres, inside and outside the United States. Crumb's music assumes a continuum of style in the "classical" western "tradition," and assumes the existence of something called "world culture," which in his opinion, makes us aware of "other" modes of music. Those "other" modes of music in Crumb's terms are not particular music, but are "super generics" music: Japanese, Indian, and Balinese music. In a relationship drawn between classical and popular music, the latter has to justify every aspect of its cultural production, whereas the former only has to explain its cultural production in large generalizations. We will observe that these generalizations are construed as an entity estranged from any social context. Moreover, such estranged generalizations are, more often than not, developed at different levels of consciousness. Michelle Vovel called these levels, ideology and mentality. For her part, Agnes Heller called them "social values, which are socially and historically determined."26 Hence, any socially based hegemonic categorization of musical productions is a conscious decision making process. The aforementioned interviews point to the problem of validating the intrinsic value of music. In the case of the clearly hegemonic and dominant notion that make "cultured music" (in the case of Bartók) or "high music," (in the case of Adorno) the parameter by which all the "others" are measured, it is its conventionally assumed existence and estrangement from society, which create the illusion of intrinsic value. However, I would argue that the intrinsic value of a particular music genre resides in its socio-cultural habitat, which I believe is a shared one. Moreover, the shared social space does not imply uniformity or equality of conditions. Social spaces are contested, negotiated, dominated, shared in symbiotic relations (which never indicate equal degree of reciprocity). The recognition by Robert Walser of "the popular as an important site for social contestation and formation" is for me a recognition, not only of the popular, but of the agency of any socio-cultural expression. "Popular culture is important," not because "it's where most people get their entertainment and information," but because social agency implies dialectic and dialogic relation of its components, which create spaces to "find dominant definitions of themselves."27 Humans beings are the only measure of validity and intrinsic value for any kind of music. Categories become "super-genres" or clumsy abstractions that impose limits and, as I said before, only point to world views and social values.28 As Thomas Turino argues, "culture and music do not come into contact or change, people do."29 Consequently, people's agency is the measure of things, not the other way around.
The conflicting borders in the realm of semantic categories, such as "popular" and "classical," is the fear of those who champion the so-called "classical" music that a century-old class paradigms no longer is perceived and accepted as "universal." Consequently, my perception and understanding of what is called "popular" does not have to be determined by what it is assumed as "classical." The musical borders are not but social borders, limits which are always contested. Musical discourses are produced by social groups engaged in the dynamics of producing their means of subsistence. Hence, the life they live would be construed with the same levels of complexity and contradictions that characterize the social relations that define them. I would argue, that we human beings are together in the construction of a multilevel relationship called society, however "not scrambled" by a web32 of conventions which, I consider, are powerful enough to make us, in one hand, assume and, in the other, define things. A geographic area, a neighborhood, a working place, an entertainment place, a social space, even a religious place, could not avoid being defined by social conventions. Consequently, society is a heteroglotic-adaptive-system in which cultural productions, as music, are the "embodied coexistence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between different epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups of the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so on."33 Those kind of heteroglotic societies are better exemplified by colonial ones due to the explicitness of their conditions. Fernando Ortiz, Alejo Carpentier, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Eric Wolf, Leonardo Acosta, and Coriun Aharonian, to mention a few, are among the authors presenting the colonial processes in the Americas as particular example of how human beings from different geographical places and unevenly developed societies clashed on this continent and produced a determined kind of society, which produced a determined kind of culture.34 During the 30's and 40's, Cuban genres such as Danzón, Conga, Rumba, Mambo, Chachachá, and Son were the identification card of the Latin culture in Night Clubs and Hotels from Havana to New York City. Don Azpiazu and Xavier Cugat popularized these genres at the level of sophisticated night clubs, while George Gershwing and Aaron Copland were feeding on it to revitalize music in the concert hall. Egotism and Tourism in the United States' "mare clausum," - the Caribbean - is the general framework for this appropriation process, as Copland said in his own words:
While "El Manisero" and "Danzón Cubano" represented the social perception of a colonial region, other kinds of tourism were populating New York. Machito and his Afro-Cubans were playing in a nightclub called Palladium at Broadway and 53th Street. The patrons were working-class migrants from Puerto Rico, Cuba and others countries with African descendant population. At the turn of the 50's, Cubans and Puerto Ricans had been playing in Jazz, Bebop, and Big Bands for more than half-a-century. Machito and Chano Pozo were names already associated with Dizzie Gillespie, as before Juan Tizol was with Duke Ellington's band.36 Eddie Palmieri was born in Harlem and lived in the Bronx. He started piano lessons when turned eight years old. In interviews he recalled Miss Margaret, a classical pianist, as his best piano teacher. Beside always wanting to be a drum player in his brother's band, he dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player, like all the kids in the Puerto Rican Barrio in those days. His formative years were dominated by the music of Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez. Orlando Marín and Johnny Segui were his first gigs, and those with his brother, Charlie Palmieri. Before La Perfecta, a 60's orchestra he conducted, he worked with Valdés and Tito Rodriguez. Since his 1961 recording with La Perfecta, he recorded an album every year until now. Palmieri was one of more than a million Puerto Ricans who, between the 1940's and the end of the 1970's, lived through a circular migration37 process at the heart of the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. National identity, cultural authenticity, and political auto-determination have been the framework of the Puerto Rican struggle. However, idealistic categories like these are coveted prey of predators such as the culture industry. As Tom Frank would argue, "there is no tradition, religion, or language to which business owes any allegiance greater than momentary convenience."38 From 1898, the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the imperial Metropoli (United States) has been characteristic of turn of the century imperialism as a global process. Recording Companies, dividing the world in areas of influence, followed the political and colonial nuances of the "world monopoly capitalist" nations, creating - as Peter Manuel says - their own "complexities, ambiguities, and qualifications."39 The complexities and ambiguities are shown in the dialectically interdependent relations between Independent Recording Companies and the Puerto Rican Community: during the 70's Fania Records, acting more like a major record company, was increasingly divesting salsa from the barrio reality and mentality. Innovative composers like Eddie Palmieri, and more social oriented songs, like those of Willie Colón and Rubén Blades, were casualties of this process (Eddie's compositions, during the same decade, were published through minor companies like Tico, Alegre, Coco, and Epic40).41 When Fania's output was enclosed in the traditional-style Cuban son (i.e. Johnny Pacheco and Celia Cruz, with La Sonora Matancera), Eddie's lyrics and the structural form of his music were more akin to the "defaced" reality and agency of the de-industrialization process in New York City, and the deterioration of the Puerto Rican colonial economic model than his "classically" trained counterparts in the Island. When we refer to cultural productions, the colonial relations show themselves in many subtle ways. Following the events of 1492, I would argue with Alejo Carpentier that the musical arts in the Americas were determined by "a constant interplay between two conflicting views, on one hand, what it is consider native, and in the other, what is imported or transplanted."42 The economic and social enterprise in which Europe engaged at the dawn of the 16th Century created one of the basic myths of colonialism: history begins with "the discovery." Eric Wolf argues:
This entity still called "West" created, or I should say beget, the second more persistent myth, which is to assume everything from the West as "classical," and define everything from the Other (in our case the Americas) as "folkloric" or "popular." Moreover, even when that "folkloric" or "popular" material reaches the concert hall or is considered together with other "classical" genres, it is not analyzed or contextualized as an equal.44 This world view present something basic to the colonial ideology, which is: within the Americas' cultural production, the "classical" and "popular" reach an ontological personification. Europe is the first one, and the latter is America. But, as an example of a heteroglotic society, a colonial one presents higher levels of complexity. In Puerto Rico, in 1931, a delegation of outstanding musicians, mostly educated in Europe, went to ask Governor Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt, to sign a law that would make possible the creation of a Conservatory of Music. The only answer was, "Oh yes, I think that support for your unrefined music, that is, the tiple, the güiro, and the cuatro and all those native instruments, is commendable."45 The blatant ignorance of the colonial Governor in distinguishing between Puerto Rican musical genres and musical instruments was only surpassed by the bigotry of his view that the "native" of the land should practice his/her "unrefined music" only. Conversely, the Puerto Rican musicians were promoting an Europe-style Conservatory of Music because that, they considered, would save Puerto Rico from the ongoing popularity of "plebeian music."46 Moreover, the social praxis of the aforementioned musicians was a musical practice in which composer, musician, and agent were activities embodied in the same person, and their need to work made them be present at any kind of social activity (from high society ball to poor neighborhood parties), having to pull out, from the same creativity pool, the music needed. However, as the events of 1931 showed, they were together under the same social and economic constrictions, but "not scrambled" in their world views.47 "Classical" and "Popular" as cultural definitions act on all the levels of colonial relations as a "black holes" capable of labeling anything but ultimately unable to define anything. The colonized people are defined by their (popular) music and criticized if they practice something else considered by the colonial power to be outside their musical tradition. Conversely, it is assumed that the oppressor has a "higher" culture and is capable of promoting any "improvement" of her/his subordinates. In this scheme, whatever or whoever falls in the "popular" category is defined by whatever category assumed from the notion of "classical." Puerto Rican colonial experience is one of many instances in which this proves to be tragic. In any Puerto Rican music history book, the dichotomy between "classical" and "popular" is not used as a classification tool only. While conventional music history of the Island regards the second half of the 50's as the climax of the nationalist ("classical") movement, it is an undisputed fact that the height of Puerto Rican nationalist musical expression occurred during the 30's and 40's with the production of many migrant popular composers, the most conspicuous among them being: Rafael Hernández.48 Twenty years later, Palmieri's compositions "Some Where" and "My Spiritual India,"49 went unnoticed by the Puerto Rican "avant garde" movement for the same reason Rafael Hernández music is not considered "nationalistic" music: the one defined as "popular" does not comprise any particular notion of innovation (in the Adornian sense) and the one assumed as "classical" contains innovation as an aspect of what is considered its intrinsic value. When authors like Hector Campos Parsi and Fernando H. Caso look for signs of innovation in Puerto Rican music, they are talking about conservatory-trained musicians (assuming literacy and written music), "popular" music is referred as a kind of urbanized "folk" (oral) music in which innovation comes in two ways: the arranger, either manipulates the original form, or borrows elements from "classic" music, thereby showing his or her classical training.50 Furthermore, creativity as metaphysic capacity, innovation as aesthetic value, and the construction of a universal musical discourse is denied, ideologically, as being part of "popular music." This is the epicenter of the problem: because "popular" music is construed as a by-product of "classical" music, the phenomenology of the former is subordinate to the existence of the latter. The colonial dimension of this debate is nurtured by the conflicting notions, in conventional musicology, of oral and written tradition. The notion of musicology studying written music, is assumed as an intrinsic value of that discipline (classic music), while ethnomusicology is defined as the branch in charge of orality (popular and folklore music). Ground-breaking studies are bringing to the spotlight the coexistence of orality and literacy as aspects of the unfolding nature of human musical performance.51 No matter how oral or literary a musical tradition might be, it is in its performance by human beings, through their social agency, that music as a cultural product lives. Consequently, music making, as a semiotic domain and cultural practice, is able to convey more concrete and specific meanings as a product of social conventions than "music" because it is what people do, and the dynamics of their relations that cause musical or cultural changes.52 Within the framework of this paper, this means that "culture can be located only in relation to the lives of concrete individuals as articulated through action at specific moments."53 Like Thomas Turino, I would argue that it is within the praxis of a social reality that we have to look for the elements which transform music performance practice, rehearsal, aesthetic and compositional procedures, and, furthermore, how music production - as a cultural expression of that society - "may take on new meaning when adopted by different social groups for their own specific purposes."54 The Music, the Composer, and the Landscape First we hear a short piano motive, a 2-note chord, hovering around a minor second interval, over a doublebass drone. The sound of overtones from the bass creates an atmospheric, hollow, electronic like sound. From that point on a counting of bars seem unnecessary, and the notion of indeterminacy becomes a useful framework to grasp the music. After a few seconds the piano's short motives start a re-exposition, joined this time by the percussion. The first beat, clearly stated, is a double octave chord on the note A, by the piano. An electronic guitar and bass come in with sound effects and glissandos, introducing a minimalist string of notes by the piano that build to a climactic set of full chords restating the double octave on A chord. The musical discourse gradually changes to a long "romantic" theme with added note chords around a clearly established D major tonality, quoting a well-known melody, after which the whole Latin percussion section and the brass join forces, and the singer starts the lyrics: "Adoración, por que tú dudas vida mía/ si tú bien sabes que soy tuyo todavía"55 The previous description clearly does not apply to Rafael Aponte Ledee's composition "Estravagario" (1971), Luis Manuel Alvarez's "La Creación" (1974), to compositions by the "nationalistic" school (Amaury Veray, Héctor Campos Parsi, or Luis Antonio Ramírez), and less yet to new composers (after 1975) such as Luis Daniel Matínez and Roberto Sierra.56 That the description belongs to a composition classified as "innovative mixing of salsa and jazz musical styles"57 presents an example of the ubiquity of human musical expression no matter the genres used. However, this ubiquity of human musical expression is cloaked under the utilization of such term as "popular" and "classical" and their implied categorization of things. I would argue that it is the implied categorization of things which point to social processes that make it possible, for a whole generation of composers, to be oblivious to what was happening in the world of popular music as a source of answers for their own compositional problems. Palmieri, a Puerto Rican pianist born in New York, composed and recorded this work in an album titled "Sentido"58 [Sense]. Works like this, in which he integrated Son Montuno with Jazz, were responsible for Eddie's fame as the l'enfant terrible of Salsa and Afro-Cuban music during the 1970's. By the end of the 1960's, Eddie was known for the introduction of two changes in the conventional Son ensemble and Son Montuno form: one, the introduction of three trombones to the ensemble (without trumpets), and second, the use of the mambo as structural support of the composition. Though these changes were not totally new in the Latin musical community, what was new was the way those instruments were used and the fusion of the Afro-Cuban genre with other Afro-diasporic ones like Jazz and Rock 'n' Roll. However, since his records "Justicia," "Superimposition," and "Vamos Pa'l Monte,"59 he positioned himself at the periphery of the Salsa record industry because his work was not seen as commercial. For as new a genre as Salsa, the decade of the 70's was not only its boom, but also the "herding" of artists from the Barrio Latino to the "star making system." Furthermore, the crystallization of a more New York-based, Latino-centered musical production rooted in and related to, but not dependent on, the dynamics of the founding genres (as Son, Guaguancó, and Son Montuno) in Cuba. Puerto Ricans like Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez, during the 50's popularized the Mambo, the Pachanga, and Chachachá, Cuban-style big bands genres that Arsenio Rodríguez, Machito (Frank Grillo), and Pérez Prado created and disseminated with their bands.60 However, after two decades of massive migration of Puerto Ricans into the U.S., and after the Cuban Revolution (1959), and the subsequent influx of Cuban Refugees to U.S., the predominance of Cuban genres persisted in spite the fact that most of the predominant bandleaders emerging were not Cuban - Ray Barretto, Johny Pacheco, and Palmieri, among others.61 At that moment in time, the commercial radio in Venezuela, and an independent records producer, Jerry Marsucci (Fania records), coined the term "Salsa" to label the music which had been playing until those days. Before the heyday of Salsa, Palmieri functioned as a path-breaking phenomena:62 musically, before the end of the decade, trombone-dominated ensembles were seen throughout the Caribbean. The arrangements were more ambitious and aggressive; socially, the music was not determined by the luxury of the nightclubs, but by the poverty of the Barrio, in South East Harlem, the Bronx, and South Brookling. In the mid-60's Palmieri conducted a band called La Perfecta in which, for the first time, trombones had a central position. This innovation was an adaptation of what Mon Rivera did in Puerto Rico. Mon Rivera was a Plena singer, Puerto Rican musical genre, that established the trombones as a central feature in his band. Palmieri not only used the trombones alone, but also made them sound harsh and aggressive. In that way, Palmieri departed from both the big band sound and the jazz band sound also. "This difference in sound affected the how the fan listened: the music stopped being majestic and become assertive, there was no more 'pomp and circumstance' but violence; things were definitively different."63 The Hispanic mainly Puerto Ricans community of New York City were moving from the festive days of the Palladium to the social unrest of the Young Lords. From the neo-colonial and glittering nights of Don Azpiazu and Xavier Cugat cubanism, to the working class and Barrio activism of Palmieri and Colón. Like his composition Adoración, presented at the beginning of this section, Palmieri's compositions expanded the possibilities of the Son structure. The orchestral sound dominated by the trombones were only the "carrier waves" of more definitive innovations. There is general agreement that the main characteristic of Palmieri musical production positioned him outside mainstream Salsa. His albums Champagne (1969), Justicia (1970), and Superimposition (1971) established him as the "far out" genius, in Rondón terms, for what was happening in Fania Record. With his album Sentido (1973) he clearly set social subjects in the lyrics of his compositions and used continuous experimentation with new sonorities and rhythmic combinations. A musical composition like Justicia (1970) shows Palmieri's approach to conventional Afro-Cuban style. There is an introduction, the exposition of the song, and would-be coro and soneo. So far he is within the "canonic" parameters. However, once the Montuno starts and the development is presented, instead of returning to the coro and soneo, he uses it as a bridge to a second montuno in which different instruments develop long improvisations over the recurring intervention of the coro as ostinatos. The coro repeated is: "¿Cuando llegará la justicia?" (When justice would come?). The same happens in "La Malanga" (Superimposition, 1971) and, in the same album, "Pa' huele." In "Lindo Yambú," (Justicia, 1970) he presents in the second montuno a change from son montuno to guaguancó, and transforms the previous song lyric in its coro. The more clear-cut innovation happens when compositions like "My Spiritual Indian," "Some Where" (both in Justicia, 1970), "Qué lindo eso" (Superimposition, 1971), and "Adoración" (Sentido, 1973) bring together compositional techniques that are commonly dismissed as "jazz influenced." I am not saying this is not the case, but it would be simplistic to accept as a conclusive category. "Adoración" and "My Spiritual Indian" have in common an aleatory introduction of similar components that retard the real introduction, converting it in an unexpected presentation. In both cases the use of the montuno as the structural framework of the pieces create a balance, that in the case of "My Spiritual Indian," is challenged by the use of the coro material as ostinato. The real two challenging pieces are "Some Where" and "Que lindo eso." Both pieces blur the internal structure to a level in which material that starts clearly as a musical phrase is no longer perceived as such, but rather as a sonic event. "Some Where" has two introductions, as "Amor ciego" has (Justicia, 1970). The first introduction works more as a "llame," an introductory drumming in Afro-Cuban ceremonies, after which a piano develops a melody that is played by several instruments while the rhythmic base undergoes a series of mutations and "tectonic" shifting. After that, the original structure of the song no longer holds the composition together and a timbrical polyphony of the mutated material yield a recapitulation of the first introduction. In the case of "Que lindo eso" the musical discourse is presented in a series of juxtaposed events. The original melody, introduced by the piano, is developed over a defaced percussion rhythm and a walking bass. The almost simultaneous presentation of a guagauancó rhythmic pattern in the latin percussion, with soul-style drumming, prevents any of them from prevailing while the piano, a trombone, and a trumpet exchange lines of the melody first presented by the piano. Two elements dominate the second half of the composition: the defaced sonic event and the melodic theme. A recapitulation with strong cadence makes us think that the piece would end in a very traditional way. But the bass, played with bow, holds our attention with high overtones and harmonics, prolonging the end of the piece. If this analysis had been presented during my college years by my music history and theory professors without naming the composer, I would have thought that it was drawn from works by Puerto Rican avant garde composers like Aponte Ledée and Francis Schwartz, or, in a more international view, by Cage or Stockhausen during the 60's or 70's. I would argue that compositional terminologies used during the avant garde movement in the 70's have an uncanny resemblance to performing practices and compositional nuances found in Eddie Palmieri's works. Indeterminacy and "moving away from fixed composition"64 were characteristics of much experimental music at the same time Palmieri was composing his. Overlapping that time was also minimal music, "Music with Changing Parts" (1970) and "Music in Twelve Parts" (1971-1974) were giving layered textures of musical planes in different, but meshing, tempos.65 In the music-political arena, Cornelius Cardew composed "The Great Learning" in 1972, when he expressed his socialist-maoist beliefs and, after that, his "Piano Albums" of 1973 and 1974 in which he decorated transcriptions of Chinese and Irish revolutionary songs. We could continue with examples of quotation and integration, like Maxwell Davies' "A Mirror of Whitering Light" (1977) using a plainsong-derived theme as generative material, or Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia" (1969) and George Rochberg's "Third String Quartet" (1972-1973).66 Furthermore, it is known that Palmieri and other Salsa musicians were regular listeners of those composers. What strikes me most is the strength of social conventions that keep the illusion of separated areas of artistic production intact, in such a way that each one seems to be impermeable to each other, which I do not believe to be true. Furthermore, Palmieri and these composers were physically sharing the same urban space, residing under the same social and economic forces, that shaped their material and artistic lives (New York and San Juan, Puerto Rico). They were together sharing the same cultural habitat, but they did not perceive both "regions" (popular and classical) as "equal." As with Palmieri and the salseros in New York and San Juan, the "classical" trained musicians, like Campos Parsi, Rafael Aponte Ledée, and Francis Schwartz, were all living in the same colonial conditions. Their musical production moved within the same constrictions of urban life and colonial conditions, but they were not "scrambled." Both sides spawned and responded to different socio-economic groups, and at the same time belonged to the same social-political-economic system that read them as musical discourses with different phenomenologies. Social conflicts create conflicting "borders" between different cultural products, regardless of shared technical difficulties or aesthetic propositions. Consequently, I believe there are powerful social conventions that make a composer decide to study Javanese gamelan music or work with Ravi Shankar rather than take the subway and "hang out" with salseros from the barrio. In this case, we can apply to society what Roy Wagner said about anthropologists:
When was the last time you cashed a reality check? The examples of Palmieri's musical production, its social contextualization (the Puerto Rican community in New York, and the development of the Salsa, as a musical style), and its comparison with music composed by the "avant garde" of the 70's, were presented to show the power of social conventions. Musical discourses, as social conventions, show their power by being implicit. However, social classifications of cultural production are social conventions that show their power by being explicit and taken for granted. I would argue that since we, as human beings, are capable of predicating conventions from our everyday life, we are able to assume "universal" and "absolute" conventions created out of particular social relations. As Wagner argues:
The power of social convention, and its capacity to invent society, does not reside only in the creation of social categories as popular and classical, but also in defining those categories in such broad ways that both become megageneralizations or supergenres that engulf everything and define nothing. Moreover, these supergeneralizations represent that static social values are attached to each category. Yet they are not imagined values - they are active in determining social action, practical aesthetic, and artificial division between musical practices. Tricia Rose introduces this problem when she talks about how rap producers oppose their lack of training as the reason for their innovative capacities, and perceive musical training as the very obstacle to understanding rap.69 This contraposition offers the opportunity to illustrate also how social categorizations create artificial dialectic relations. Rose argued that the confusion starts when musical training is defined as western musical training. Moreover, the real problem is that western aesthetic priorities are not concomitant with our social and musical priorities. The heart of that problem is that our colonial education makes us see our own cultural production as something alien. As Latin American composers and sociologists, we have to stop engaging in arguments about whether our cultural production is universal or not, or whether some musical productions are "popular" or "classical." We, as composers, sometimes struggle over problems solved in other areas of musical production. As sociologist, maybe, we are creating conceptual borders to discover that they define only our own assumptions. I believe that any kind of acquired human knowledge is a reflective one. Unquestioned social categorizations could lead us to assume our position within our own society as estranged from it. In this sense, we have not only to make a reality check, but cash it also.
When Eddie Palmieri, during the 70's, was composing "Que lindo eso" (Superimposition, 1971), in the same country and city composers were looking to Japanese or Balinese music as alternative musical modes. Whether his music was addressing the same technical problems they were assessing or not (my opinion is that it was), the musical discourse underlined the Afro-Caribbean aesthetics and social priorities of the Hispanic community that were incompatible with the segregationist social discourse of the United States at that time. Aaron Copland, in 1942, looked at Mexican and Afro-Caribbean music as "a genuine tourist souvenir."71 The U.S. and Puerto Rican composers of the 70's were too far removed, within their own country - from the aesthetic and musical practice of Salsa or Latin Jazz as a musical styles - that even knowing Palmieri was a Conservatory-trained musician would not bring "peace" in the conflicting borders. Yes, I know, it is a reality check hard to cash. Adorno, Theodore W. Introduction to the Sociology of Music.
(1962) Translated from German by E. B. Ashton. New York, The
Seabury Press, 1076. Austin, William W. La Música en el siglo XX. (Vol, I y II) translated from English by José Ma. Martín Triana. Madrid, Taurus Ediciones, 1984. Bartók, Béla. Escritos sobre música popular. (this collection of essays covers the years 1907-1944) traducción de Roberto V. Raschella. México, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1985. Berendt, Joachim E. El Jazz: de Nueva Orleans al Jazz Rock. (1959), traducción de Jaz Reuter y Juan José Utrilla. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986. Berry, Wallace. Structural Functions in Music. New York, Dover Publication, Inc; 1976. Boggs, Vernon, et. al. Salsiology: Afro-Cuban Music and the Evolution of Salsa in New York City. New York, Greenwood Press, 1992. Collier, James Lincoln. The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History. New York, Delta, 1978. Coplan, Aaron and Vivian Perlis. Coplan: 1900 Through 1942. New York, St. Martin's/Marek, 1984. Dorian, Frederick. The History of Music in Performance: The Art of Music Interpretation from the Renaissance to Our Days (1942). New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1966. Ewen, David. Historia de la Música Popular Norteamericana. (1961), traducción de Sonia Tancredi. México, Editorial Novaro, 1965. Gardner, Howard. Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity. New York, Basic Books, a Division of Harper Collins Publisher, 1993. Gerard, Charley, and Marty Sheller. Salsa!: The Rhythm of Latin Music. Crown Point, Ind.; White Cliffs Media Company, 1989. Gómez García, Zoila. Musicología en Latinoamérica. Habana, Cuba; Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1985. Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music: The Avant Garde Since 1945. New York, George Braziller, 1981. Grout, Donald Jay. A History of Western Music. (First edition 1960. Third edition with Claude V. Palisca), New York, W.W. Norton, 1980. Leymarie, Isabelle. "Salsa and Latin Jazz," Hot Sauces: Latin and Caribbean Pop. New York, Quill, a Division of William Morrow and Company, 1985. pp.95-115. Mandel, Howard. "Eddie Palmieri: Fire on the Clave," Down Beat. August 1994, Vol. 61, No. 8, pp. 28-31. Mangual, Rudolph. "Eddie Palmieri," Latin Beat Magazine. Oct. 1992, Vol. 2, No. 8, pp. 22-23 Manuel, Peter. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993. Manuel, Peter. "Latin Music in the United States: Salsa and the Mass Media," Journal of Communication. Winter 1991, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 104-116. Manuel, Peter. Popular Music of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey. New York, Oxford University Press, 1988. Manuel, Peter. "Puerto Rican Music and Cultural Identity: Creative Appropriation of Cuban Sources from Danza to Salsa," Ethnomusicology. Vol. 38, No. 2, Spring/Summer 1994, pp. 249-180. Manuel, Peter. "The Soul of the Barrio: 30 Years of Salsa," NACLA Report on Americas. Sept.-Oct. 1994, Vol. 28, No. 2. pp. 22-26. Monson, Ingrid. "The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse." Journal of the American Musicological Society. Vol. XLVIII, fall 1995, No. 3, pp. 396-422. Nettl, Bruno. Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents. New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1965. Padilla, Felix M. "Salsa: Puerto Rican and Latino Music," Journal of Popular Culture. Summer 1990, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp.87-104. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Roberts, John Storm. "Salsa's Prodigal Sun: Eddie Palmieri," Down Beat. April 22, 1976, pp. 21-22, 42-43. Rodríguez, Olavo Alén. De lo Afrocubano al la Salsa: géneros musicales de Cuba. San Juan, Puerto Rico; Editorial Cubanacán, 1992. Romero, Enrique. "Eddie Palmieri: Salsa Suite," El Manisero. No. 6, 1995, pp.24-28. Rondón, Cesar Miguel. El Libro de la Salsa: crónica de la música del Caribe Urbano. Caracas, Venezuela; Oscar Todmann Editores, 1980. Siegmeister, Elie. Música y sociedad. (1938), traducción de María Teresa Sanz de Falcón. México, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1987. Silbermann, Alphons. Estructura social de la música. Madrid, Taurus Ediciones, 1961. Tamargo, Luis. "Eddie Palmieri: The Sun of Latin Music," Latin Beat Magazine. Nov. 1995, Vol. 5, No. 9, pp. 30-33. Terry, Kenneth. "George Crumb: Makrokosmic Cartographer," Down Beat. Oct. 21, 1976, pp. 18, 50-51. Turino, Thomas. Moving Away from Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1993. Walser, Robert. Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, N.H.; Wesleyan University Press, 1993.
1. This is a literal translation from the Spanish of a well-known
phrase: juntos pero no revueltos. The only phrase in English
close to it is one used during the years of legal racial segregation
in the United States: separated, but equal. However, in Spanish
the phrase is not restricted to racial relations. It is applied
to any instance of segregation and does not have the strong association
as in English. |
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