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SEQUENZA21/
340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

Zookeeper:   
Jerry Bowles
(212) 582-3791

Managing Editor:
David Salvage

Contributing Editors:

Galen H. Brown
Evan Johnson
Ian Moss
Lanier Sammons
Deborah Kravetz
(Philadelphia)
Eric C. Reda
(Chicago)
Christian Hertzog
(San Diego)
Jerry Zinser
(Los Angeles)

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Latest Posts

Mein Fuhrer, I Can Walk!
4 X 4 / Fresh Voices VI Festival in San Francisco
New Music To March To
The Death of Classical Music Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Wasting Away in Margaritaville
Interactive Composition
John Corigliano meets The Apprentice
A Candy-Colored Clown They Call the Sandman
The rite of Spring Reverb
Dispatch from the Lyric


 

Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for review. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019


Wednesday, May 31, 2006
A Salieri is commissioned to write a piece for Mozart

San Diego's Mainly Mozart Festival originally limited itself to music of the Classical era, but over the last decade or so, it's expanded to included all music after Mozart (and every now and then a Baroque offering), even a smattering of contemporary music.

This year, perhaps taking the lead from the La Jolla Summerfest (which has been aggressively commissioning composers for their festival since the late '90s--this year features premieres by Bright Sheng, Leon Kirchner, and Magnus Lindberg), Mainly Mozart commissioned a classical composer for a work (in the past, they've commissioned jazz composer Guy Barker, but I believe this is their first classical commission).

I had never encountered the composer they chose, Gabriela Ortiz Torres. Here's some of what I had to say about her string quartet:


It's tempting to compare the commissioned composer, Gabriela Ortiz Torres, to a modern-day Antonio Salieri, but that would be badmouthing Salieri, who in his time was well known throughout Europe. While Ortiz Torres may be a prominent figure in Mexico (she's a composition professor at the Mexican University of Mexico City), her music is invisible on the international scene. However, like Salieri, her work, Aroma Foliado: Gesto de Mozart, was competent, exhibiting its own charm and drama, but ultimately forgettable.

....had you played a recording of Ortiz Torres's quartet for me and asked me to identify the nationality and era of the composer, I would have guessed it was written by someone from the United States in the late 1940s/early 1950s. That's because it sounded, on the surface, so much like Bartók, and there were many Bartók imitators in this country around that time. It's easy enough to evoke him, as these long forgotten Americans and Ortiz Torres did. The sections of the quartet with glassy sustained chords above or under which a tenuous, winding melody emerges are the bastard descendants of Bartók's "night music" style. The harmonies revealed a tonal skeleton underneath dissonant elaborations. The crunchy, vigorous dances in asymmetrical meters are Bartókian as well. One section evoked Stravinsky more than Bartók, with its motor rhythms and kaleidoscopically repeating fragments (again, something you might find a young American composer in the late 1940s doing).

There were two features of Ortiz Torres's piece that reflected a departure from that idiom. One was the single-movement form of the work, divided into highly contrasting sections. (Bartók, of course, was obsessed with large-scale, goal-driven form.) The other was the incorporation of quotations from Mozart's String Quartet no. 21 in D, K. 575. Despite these postmodern aspects, the entire work had the flavor of a woman ignoring her own culture and time to write music that sounded like United States males imitating a European (but at least Bartok was from the earlier imitators's own time).

In Mexico, there are elite families of fair-skinned Mexicans who claim pure descent from Spaniards, their aristocratic blood lines never mingled with Indians. There's something perverse, at least to an American mongrel like myself, about someone in our time and on our continent mindlessly insisting on maintaining their pure Spanish identity. Aroma Foliado, reminded me of those Mexican elite: it's proudly European and anachronistic....

Read the entire review here.

 



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