Retratos de la Vida (“Portraits of Life”)

The word antro has its origin in the Latin “antrum,” meaning “grotto” or “cavern.” In Mexico, until the ’90s, the term referred to bars or entertainment places of dubious reputation. But nowadays, and especially among younger people, this word refers to any bar or nightclub. 

One time, while talking with flutist Alejandro Escuer, we imagined the title of a future work, one that would synthesize the music of Mexico’s legendary dance halls and bars: Antrópolis, a neologism, a precise invented name for a piece that narrates the sound of the city through its dance halls and nightclubs.  

In 2017, conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto commissioned me to write a short work—brilliant and rather light-hulled—to be premiered at the close of a concert celebrating the 80th birthday of American composer Philip Glass, performed by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York.  

Given the parameters of the commission, I retrieved the title we had imagined, and thus Antrópolis came to life. It is a piece in which I wanted to pay a very personal tribute to some of those “antros” or emblematic dance halls of Mexico City that left a special sonorous imprint in my memory. These cabarets or dance halls that represent the nostalgia for rumberas and live dance orchestras, such as “El Bombay,” where it is said that Che Guevara would twirl; or the “Salón Colonia,” which seems to have come out of dreams taken from a film of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Who doesn’t remember the fun ballroom “Los Infiernos,” a perfect place for those who after a long day at work would leave their cubicles to go dancing, drink, and listen to music. Finally, the memory of the bar “Tutti Frutti” leaves an impression, where I first met the punk couple who own the “antro”, and where you could listen to experimental music from the 1980s. 

Antrópolis is the sonorous reflection of a city through its “antros”, including the accumulation of experiences that we bring, and that form an essential part of our history in this very complex but fascinating Mexico City. 

The triumvirate of composers Granados, Albéniz, and Falla, are the most important composers of twentieth-century Spain, without question.   But, many would award the palm of “first among equals” to Falla.  American audiences know him primarily for three relatively early works:  The “Ritual Fire Dance” from his ballet, El amor brujo; the symphonic suite for piano and orchestra, Nights in the Gardens of Spain; and, of course, the music for The Three-cornered Hat.  All of these compositions are tuneful, accessible, and either rooted in Spanish folk elements, or French impressionism.  However, he went on from the 1920s to explore imaginative and challenging elements of modernism in his stimulating and influential works. 

Achieving a modicum of success as a young composer in Madrid from the turn of the century, he turned early on to works for the stage—not only for their practical popularity, but also because he had shown from an very early age a flair for literary and dramatic interests.  After composing a series of successful zarzuela (popular Spanish musico-dramatic entertainments), he hit the big time in 1905 with his first major opera, La vida breve, which incorporated significant elements of traditional Gypsy music.  A promised performance that was part of the prize that it won never materialized, so in disappointment, the young Falla left Madrid for Paris.  It changed his life.  There he met and hobnobbed with the luminaries of French artistic life, including Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Dukas, and the impresario, Diaghilev.   Later, insular Spanish music critics harped on the “impressionisms” in his subsequent compositions, at the expense of Spanish elements, but never mind.  At the onset of World War I he moved back to Spain, and achieved much greater recognition as a composer than in his earlier period. Nights in the Gardens of Spain dates from this period. His association from that time with the theatrical personage, Gregorio Martínez Sierra and his wife, Maria, resulted in his writing in 1916 the ballet, El amor brujo, and the incidental music for a modest pantomime, El corregidor y la molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife).  

The latter work was immensely successful, and a fateful visit to Madrid by Igor Stravinsky and the acclaimed impresario of the Ballets Russes, Segei Diaghilev, led to Diaghilev’s encouragement of Falla to extend and enlarge the music to a complete ballet.  The little farce, El corregidor y la molinera, was based on the novel, El sombrero de tres picos, and the expansion of the concept by Falla took the original title.  The combination of native Spanish musical material by Falla, Léonide Massine’s choreography, and Pablo Picasso’s cubist sets and costumes received rave reactions at the première. 

The risqué story is a bit complicated, but the essence is that a village magistrate (whose uniform includes a traditional tricorn hat) tries foolishly to seduce a miller’s wife, and ends up making a complete clown of himself.  The lecherous magistrate has the miller arrested on trumped up charges, inadvertently falls in the river, jumps into the Miller’s bed.  Clothes are surreptitiously exchanged, resulting in mixed up identities and competing seductions—you get the idea.  But, in the end virtue triumphs and the ridiculous magistrate is suitably humiliated. 

Falla extracted two suites for orchestra from the ballet, one from each act.  The first suite opens with a very short fanfare for the curtain rise, and we see the mill.  Following that is a leisurely depiction of the warm, sleepy afternoon and the magistrate’s pretentious procession near the mill (the droll bassoon depicts the latter).  The miller, taking a dislike of the magistrate, has his wife tantalize him with a swirling, seductive fandango to lure him on.  Upon the conclusion of the dance the bassoon/magistrate returns.  A tender moment in the music depicts the miller’s wife disingenuously teasing him with an offer of some grapes; she then coquettishly runs away.  Pursuing her, he’s led into an ambush, and the angry husband jumps out of the bushes and frightens away the clownish magistrate with a stick—ending act one. 

The success of the ballet came after Falla, Massine, and Diaghilev had taken time and trouble to tour the country and research the native Andalusian materials.  That took a while, but paid off handsomely a few years later, at the London première, in 1919.  Its Spanish tunes, dramatic storytelling, and brilliant orchestration have made it an audience favorite ever since—even if, like Aaron Copland’s populist music of the 1930s—it represents only one facet of the composer’s musical style. 

–Wm. E. Runyan 

Today, Moncayo is revered as one of the leading exponents of Mexican nationalism in musical style, important in the first half of the twentieth century.  While his name is not as familiar to US audiences as perhaps that of Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas, he played an important part in the musical life of Mexico until his premature death in 1958 at the age of 45.  In addition to his activities as a composer, he also played percussion and piano with symphony orchestras, and was a well-respected and active conductor until his death.  He entered the National Conservatory of Mexico in 1929 and received a thorough formal education in music, becoming, along with three of his compatriots, a protégé of Chávez.  Turning to musical composition early on, he premièred some of his compositions by 1931, subsequently joined several symphony orchestras, and finally took the baton as a conductor in 1936 at the age of twenty-four.  He went on to attend the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts on scholarship in 1941.   There he met such luminaries as Aaron Copland, Serge Koussevitzky, and the young Leonard Bernstein. 

About that time his well-known and most performed composition, Huapango, received its first performance.   It is based upon popular themes from the Mexican state of Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico. Chávez had sent Moncayo there to collect music indigenous to the area, and the orchestra fantasy based upon some of those themes was the result.  A huapango is a Mexican folk dance and a musical style, played by a small group of instrumentalists, a violin and two different sizes of guitars.  And, of course, the varying rhythms of the traditional huapango match the complex dance steps of the dancers. 

Moncayo, like all good composers, demonstrates a formidable mastery of making much of little material.  The challenge here is especially large in pulling together a medley of pre-existing tunes, and making a coherent whole of them.  His sparkling and imaginative orchestration keeps the interest up—its light and colorful palette is strongly redolent of much French music, and why not, so much great Hispanic music was written by Frenchmen, it seems.   The lilting, galloping rhythm, with familiar Mexican syncopations, unstintingly carries us through a series of charming solos until a softer and slower middle section, initially carried by the woodwinds, provides some contrast.  After a bit, the tempo kicks up again, and an exciting, breezy drive to conclusion ensues. 

–Wm. E. Runyan