In 1996 the Rotterdam Conservatory released a CD of Cuban Contradanzas and Danzóns which quickly became for me, a longtime Cuban music enthusiast (I, II), part of my daily bread. The album was inspired by a concert by the Orquestra Típica, a folklore/ preservationist initiative, in Santiago de Cuba in 1994 which led the producers to search for sheet music of any 19th Century Contradanzas or Danzóns, of which they only found 28. The music, a precursor to both New Orleans and Afro-Cuban Jazz, introduces a slow, melancholy melody honed for full effect over centuries that becomes uptempo at the close.

The music most certainly comes from the "country dances" of Southwest France, with horns brought to what is now Haiti when Louis IV was persuaded in 1685 by his ardently Catholic mistress Françoise d'Aubigné to lift the Huguenot King Henri IV's 1598 Edict of Nantes, which had ended over 30 years of the Wars of Religion, prompting a Huguenot diaspora to far flung places in the world including what was then the colony of Saint-Domingue. In the 11th Century, the patronage of the troubadours by Provençal nobility came when the region was loosely controlled by House of Barcelona, Catalan being more similar to the Provençal Occitan than French. Ezra Pound notes in Canto VIII how the first troubadour poetry is indebted to Arabic music from Moorish Spain. The Albigensian Crusades of the early 13th Century cut Provence off from Catalonia and caused troubadours to flee from the region in all directions.

Sordello da Goito, who wrote in Occitan despite living in Mantua of Italy's Lombardy region, spent those years in Spain and Portugal along with many other troubadours. Dante had Virgil (also a Mantuan) bow to him (memorialized in stone in Trento, right)*, Browning penned about him the epic of which Pound would begin his Canto II "there is only one..", asking in the first published draft of Canto I "What's left for me to do?" Stuart McDougal wrote: "For H.J. Chaytor (whose works were well known to Pound), Sordello was an important poet largely because he represented a transitional stage between the Provençal and Tuscan views of love. In his poetry love has become 'rather a mystical idea than a direct affectation for a particular lady: the lover is swayed by a spiritual and intellectual ideal, and the motive of physical attraction recedes to the background. The cause of love, however, remains unchanged: love enters through the eyes; sight is delight.'" The theme of unrequited love in this verse of his was common for its time, and may have helped lay the thematic foundations for later genre of the region like Fado. ("If only it pleased her, with her consent,/ to grant me some hope of mercy from her,/ whate'er the pain which I may feel/ she'll hear from me no plaint.// Alas! What good are eyes to me/ if what I want they do not see?"):



Alfonso the Wise of Castile sponsored troubadours in exile, utilizing their techniques for religious music. The surviving manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (1250), from his court, document a range of instruments found later in Huguenot Contradanzas, of which many were of Moorish origin, including early forms of trumpets, clarinets, and string instruments. The Huguenot Protestants arose in the 16th Century out of the influence of Luther and Calvin and disenchantment with French rule, forming strongholds in the Beaune region, East of the Basque region and North of Catalonia, as well as scattered towns like Bergerac, Montauban, Agen, and Figeac. It was around this time that Sardanas were believed to have been first performed in Catalonia, with instruments and melodies similar to the Contradanzas:



Relocated in what is now Haiti, the Huguenots came to lord over the colony's cultural life, and their instruments and compositions became popular amongst the African slaves who, to the delight of the Huguenots, added African-derived aspects to the rhythms, but between the slave insurrections of 1791 and the division of the country in 1807, all French settlers had to leave the island, and many relocated, along with their slaves, to Santiago de Cuba and New Orleans, leading to the popularity of Contradanzas in both places. Around the time of this migration, the first notations and records of Contradanzas are found in Santiago, with the first evidence of this music in New Orleans dating from the mid-19th Century, where in Congo Square Haitian Vodou drumming became a regular feature, its more sacred practice moving underground due to touristic attention until it was banned altogether by Louisiana's Black Codes. Maya Deren wrote how Vodou drumming is not improvised and that Haiti, also, banned the drumming in places due to anxiety about Vodou and possible rioting. Louisiana's ban may have been what severed the United States' historical link to the rhythm-keeping ensemble of Afro-Cuban percussion, paving the way for the solo, individualized styles of percussion that led to Blakey, Roach, Braxton, and Murray. The horn melodies of ragtime, however, that developed in New Orleans in the late 19th Century can be heard in Contradanzas.

Although musical notations in Spain have been found going back to the 8th Century, there was a discernably different approach between those to the North and East who after Monteverde, Vivaldi, and Bach produced notations for posterity and the Iberian belief in music functioning for a performer and audience in the moment, as described by Lorca: "All the Arts are capable of possessing duende, but naturally the field is widest in music, in dance, and in spoken poetry, because they require a living body as interpreter - they are forms that arise and die ceaselessly, and are defined by an exact present. Often the composer's duende passes to the interpreter." Contradanzas and Danzas went through several stages of development, transformation, and stylistic controversy in three countries before any of it began to be written down.

The Rotterdam Conservatory's unsigned liner notes say "The greater part of the (Orquestra Típica de Santiago de Cuba) consisted of septua- and octogenarians, and on hearing them perform, I realized that with the death of these musicians this music would probably disappear." So thought I, but I was wandering around one predictably warm night in the City of Eternal Spring, Cuernavaca in the State of Morelos, Mexico, when walking to the North of the Plaza de Armas I heard a familiar melody. I had for years been listening to the Rotterdam album and also had no idea that the music was performed in Mexico. A brass band was belting out Contradanzas in the Jardín Juárez, which, on quieter evenings, relies on a community of grackles for musical entertainment in the twilight, from a gazebo designed by Gustave Eiffel (above), while about 20 couples, mostly elderly, elegantly dressed and all Mexican, were dancing in the evening air, steps for which they seemed to have a regular familiarity. I read here that Cuban Contradanzas made their way from the port of Veracruz southwards to Mexico CIty, Cuernavaca, and to the Valley of Oaxaca.**

On the "textile route" East of Oaxaca City is the Zapotec town of San Jeronimo Tlacochahuaya, called in the Blue Guide Tlacochahuaya de Morales and known locally as Tlacochahuaya, tho calling it Tlaco would invite confusion with neighboring Tlacochistlahuaca, Tlacolula, and Tlacochero. The town, 8 kilometers east of the tree with the largest trunk in the world (left) and 2 kilometers west of the ruins of Dainzu, boasts the Tlacochahuaya Philharmonic, which plays Contradanzas as part of its regular repertoire:



There are no hotels in Tlacochahuaya, and the performance of Contradanzas in Mexico is a living form, not a folkloric performance for tourists. The 2006 protests in Oaxaca, which gained the most notoriety in the US from the unpunished murder of Indymedia journalist Brad Will by a city councilman and two police officers, were precipitated by the misappropriation of 920 million US$ of the state's public funds and extremely underfunded schools, like May '68 escalating to over a million protestors after a response of police brutality. But as with the drumming in Congo Square, there arose during the protests a tension between culture and folklore: the Guelaguetza, a pre-Columbian Zapotec festival, had been taken over by the state and turned into a tourist spectacle, an irritation enhanced by the fact that the corrupt, repressive Governor Ulises Ruiz was overseeing the festival, leading to an alternate People's Guelaguetza which over 200,000 participated in.

So this is a close approximation of what the precursor to jazz sounded like in the late 19th Century, bringing to mind Lorca's meditation in that same lecture: "The dark and quivering duende that I am talking about is a descendant of the merry daemon of Socrates, all marble and salt, who angrily scratched his master on the day he drank hemlock, a descendent also of Descartes' melancholy daemon, small as a great almond, who, tired of lines and circles, went out along the canals to hear the drunken sailors sing." Witnessing the musical accompaniment for Tlacochahuaya's parade for St. Jeronimo's feast day, the Dance of the Conquest, and other performances I found, it would appear that every able bodied male in this farming town of 2,000 is a member of a brass band. Indeed, on the 17thC facade of the town's church, God himself is holding a trumpet up to St. Jerome's ear. (below)

Another Danzón from Tlacochahuaya:



From a 50's photographic imprint of the Valley of Oaxaca: "..the great Valley of Oaxaca, justly famous for its pure air, its blue sky and its pretty countryside covered with flowers the twelve months of the year, where ash-trees, jacarindas, eucalyptus-trees and laurels of India abound. A great garden, a delightfully placid and harmonious place full of tranquility and well being, of ancient dreams and gay landscapes, and of pure poetry. There, among the meadows, sometimes half hidden in a wood, others around some hill, towns and villages suddenly appear, giving life to the countryside and inviting one to share their rural peace.

"But besides the beauties of nature, the Valley of Oaxaca, so sweet and calm, so appropriate for day-dreaming, contains History. The silence of the beautiful landscape is frequently broken by the echo of a thousand memories of its exciting past. A past situated in an almost mythical world, but amazingly rich in manifestations of the spirit and the actions of man. In this very ancient land the people carry deep inside them the nostalgia for something undefined, but which in their imagination must take the form of fabulous wealth, opulent cities and races in the fullness of their vigor. Nostalgia, indeed, for a mysterious and very remote past, full of beauty, irretrievably lost in spite of the fact that it sometimes seems that the old gods wander around here once more.."

* Sordello even gets the main square of Mantua named after him, containing the cathedral and the ducal palace, while Virgil must content himself with a Napoleonic-era piazza a block North, tho Virgil gets a statue and Sordello doesn't.

** Another link between the cities of Cuernavaca and Oaxaca is extended visits by Malcolm Lowry, who headed South from the setting of his opus to seek in Oaxaca the perfect mezcal, finding hallucinatory friends like fauns being slaughtered in the hotel dining room, vultures in his bathroom and upended turtles bleeding to death, and, in a letter, "no less than five policeman are watching me." The classic Lowry documentary is embeddable:



Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry by Donald Brittain & by John Kramer, National Film Board of Canada

Yehudi Menuhin, violin 

"I am only inclined to send myself best wishes if I can give a satisfactory answer to the question: are other people the only ones obliged to consign me to the rubbish heap, or must I join in?" Arnold Schoenberg, "On My Fiftieth Birthday, September 13, 1924"

What's up

Annette Messeger (Marian Goodman, 24 w 57th, til Aug. 24) gives this account of the origins of the stuffed animal genre of sculpture: "Mike Kelley and I used the stuffed animal at the very same time... He is more interested in a direct social reflection while I will place a photo or a word on the doll, a sentimental value which will give more of a charge. I invest the doll with another content, like African voodoo effigies.." as Picasso viewed art as a weapon after studying African art. "Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley engage in child-games, what we call in French 'pipi-caca.' In my work on the other hand, the colored crayon becomes a weapon, it is pointed. I stab with it; it keeps the formal aspect of the pretty colored pencil but is lethal, deadly." At her one woman show at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris I saw a laughing three year old girl race to a pile of her stuffed animals and jump into them, causing her parents some consternation while the guard shared the laugh.

In her interviews she draws a distinction between the American and French traditions, "when an artist sees an object, he sees an object that is loaded symbolically but he also sees it visually" and says she employs "a mixture of this strong sentimental side and the visual side. In my work there are always these two elements, and I wonder if this is not opposed to minimalist American Art.. In Europe we have the weight of the past on us, which makes us much less direct than Americans who seem to always produce a kind of 'new art' without history." This opposition is historically denied, most famously in Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko's 1943 New York Times letter "There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless," but the subjects in late Rothkos and Gottliebs are to be sought, not "loaded" and apparent, perhaps less important to their imitators.

As in Europe, she finds in Mexican streets (which she visits often) "objects that are loaded symbolically" : "Visually it's just overwhelming; sometimes it's just too much, and you have to stop. The colors, the smells, the markets, everything. The religious iconography. There's this street in Mexico City, near the cathedral, and it's just filled with nothing but plaster religious icons!" the "forest of (Mexican) symbols" found in Alberto Gironella's assemblages (below). Her statement "I do see my work yes, as bric-a-brac, a surrealist hodgepodge.." suggests the visits to the flea market with Marcel Noll related by Andre Breton in Nadja and Gironella's methods.

Breton in that book says "de Chirico could only paint when surprised (surprised first of all) by certain arrangements of objects" and Catherine Grenier writes of this show "The choice for these architectural forms either conical (left) or abstract in their shape makes one think of the metaphysical world of de Chirico (below, left) or the allegorical archaism of Carra.. (below, right)" referring to the period when the two were painting Metaphysical Interiors together in Ferrara. de Chirico had at times similar views of visual experience: "One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, not only the great questions one has always asked himself - why was the world created, why are we born, live and die.. But rather to understand the enigma of things generally considered insignificant.. To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many-colored toys which change their appearance, which, like little children we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realize they are empty."

Baudelaire in 1853:  "The overriding desire of most children is to get at and see the soul of their toys, some at the end of a certain period of use, others straightaway.. The child, like the people besieging the Tuileries, makes a supreme effort, at last he opens it up, he is stronger. But where is the soul? This is the beginning of melancholy and gloom. There are others who immediately break the toy which has hardly been put in their hands, hardly examined;.. I do not understand the mysterious motive that causes their action."

de Chirico would disagree with Messager's view of the artists' "character." Messager: "Art is a secret shared between the individual and the collective. In order to be touched by a work of art, it must first refer to the person who made it, a strong personality, and it must touch the collective, everyone must find something in this order. Artaud is a good model for this. He made his drawings for himself only and we can all find ourselves in these portraits, his auto-portraits or his manifestos. It is precisely this back and forth between the individual, between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, which makes a work of art stand out, because it touches both worlds at the same time."

de Chirico: "Nietzsche very properly remarks: 'With the greatest respect one says of a man 'He is a character.' Yes - if he exhibits a course logic, a logic obvious to the eyes of the least discerning. But as soon as it is a question of a more subtle and profound spirit, which is coherent in its own way, the observer denies the existence of a character.' The same observation can be made on art, and also on painting. A profound picture will be entirely without the gesticulations, the idealism which attracts the attention of the crowd and makes the name of an artists well-known. All momentary posture, all forced movement will be put aside."  (1911-15) Artaud invests his observations in his persona, but manages to evade the defects of the practice set forth by Nietzsche and de Chirico.

de Chirico became more attentive to form than content after his first solo show in Rome in 1919 came under critical attack and he became enamored of the Titians and Reubenses at the Villa Borghese. He soon thereafter designed stage sets with Diaghilev and others, an association which brought forth Picasso's Neo-Classical period (at his first wife's insistence), and so the Neo-Classical Cocteau came to de Chirico's defense when he began to fall out with the Surrealists. It could be that he reached a threshold in discerning content that he wanted the Rome critics and ballet culture to pull him away from.  Neo Rauch appears to be undergoing a simlar process in the past few years, with less extensive development of enigmatic dramatic tableau and more references to art-historical approaches to form (below).