REFLEXIONES 45

November 6, 2017

Classical Music

WHO CAME UP WITH THE NAME OF CLASSICAL MUSIC? Doesn’t Classical refer to a certain period in an era, for instance the Classical Maya Period? But what else could this music be called? Serious Music? Boring Music? Music from the Past? What is Classical Music, anyway? Is it the monotonous Gregorian Chants that we listened to in my home when Michel would put on the 78rpm records with their hissing sounds and light up some resin in a couple of small bronze incense burners and made me sit, together with Mamita, on Sunday, to substitute for the agnostic atheism that prevailed in his mind? Or was it the joyous tune of Schuman’s that was the first one I performed during my second Concert given by the Seño Lolita students at the Sala Chopin in old Mexico City.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BECOME A PIANO TEACHER? Since my kids are all grown up I have lost touch with piano teachers, but I do remember a couple of them with great clarity. Seño Lolita, as she was known to all her students (and the mothers of her students) lived in a large house on Calle Patricio Sanz, named in honor of the rich landowner of Porfirio Diaz’s time whose wife, Ana Llera de Sanz, sole heir to Sanz’s fortune, created at the beginning of the 20th century one of the first foundations in Mexico to benefit orphans and older people. At any rate Seño Lolita was a nice frumpy lady, much like Mrs. Doubtfire, who taught little kids, including me, the basics of classical piano. I learned to read music under her supervision, practiced the scales an infinite number of times and fought with Schuman since his idea of fingering the notes was different from mine. (He was right!) Thanks to her husband Don Bulmaro, I discovered that pumpkins grew in the ground next to the stalks of corn which were planted outside her studio.

What must that life have been like? Day in and day out, patiently sitting through the lessons, and constantly correcting tempo and melody and fingers that would not bend correctly. And then, at the end of the year, the Recital would come with a parade of little kids and young pre-teens showing off in front of an audience made of parents and grandparents and aunties who relished when their little one appeared on the stage. That was my turn to play the piano version of Beethoven’s forever incised in Mamita’s memory.

PABLO CASTELLANOS WAS MY THIRD TEACHER. I don’t remember the name of the second one. I only saw him a few times. He was my uncle Mane’s friend and, along with the metronome, he introduced me to Carlos Fuentes and his novel La Región Más Transparente (Where the Air is Clear) which probably made me one of the first young readers in Fuentes’ life, as this was his first book and my introduction to Latin American literature. I remember enjoying the book much more than the metronome, which became the bane of my piano existence as it was a relentless keeper of time and became my nightmare of musical performance. Why, o why, do I have to follow the exact beats of the metronome instead of the whim of my imagination? Why did the composers have such a different measure of tempo than my own? Sometimes I wanted to go faster (clearly because I dominated the passage) and sometimes I wanted to go slower (probably because I had not studied my lesson correctly.) But I already knew then that if I wanted o succeed in piano I had to get a great teacher. Enter Pablo Castellanos.

EDUARDO PALLARES HAD BEEN MICHEL’S LAW Professor, then Friend and finally client as well. and there will be more to tell about him in another Reflexiones. He makes an appearance now because it was Maestro Pallares who recommended to Michel that, if I wanted to seriously study piano, Pablo Castellanos was the go-to guy. He lived in a large Colonial Style house, which were becoming very popular in Mexico at the time, with very large spaces, high roofs, beams, solid furniture. His house had all this and great views on Mexico City and the volcanoes, since it stood on the Camino del Desierto de los Leones, at the time, the outskirts of Mexico City.

Another great thing it had was, actually, two grand pianos, Steinways, fabulously black and perfectly tuned. Castellanos was Mamita’s age (50), so I had great empathy with him. It was the first time that I finally got what Classical Music was all about. I had done the usual sight reading, first reading, notes, scales, both major and minor, tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant and subtonic as well as chords. I had gotten also been introduced to the metronome, as I mentioned earlier. But I really had no idea what it meant to play a piece of music. Pablo Castellanos had studied with the great Cortot in Paris and with another great pianist, Fischer, in Berlin. He was a concert pianist, a teacher at the National Conservatory and at the National University and he was truly devoted to music in all its aspects. He started me of with Chopin’s Prelude Opus 28 No 20 in C Minor better known as that I had heard, of course, before. But he explained what the rhythm and the tempo meant. Why there were minor chords and how the movement itself was one of gravity and profound sadness. He described a funeral procession in Chopin’s time, with the hearse drawn by horses and people dressed in black, probably in the winter rain, following the hearse. Suddenly, it was not music anymore, it was a story that could be told though musical notes. And it all became clear to me, in one sudden flash. You could actually tell a story with notes, or paint a picture with notes. Music made absolute sense.

THAT WAS ENOUGH TO GET ME COMMITTED TO MUSIC, although I really needed to be committed to the insane asylum because I began to feverishly practice my piano lesson for hours on end, forsaking all of the other responsibilities that I had at the time, mainly studying my classes at the Lycée and with my math and physics tutor Monsieur Lambert, who was respectful of my music aspirations but who still demanded absolute fealty when it came to delivering my reams and reams of problems that I had to solve between my weekly tutoring lessons. But music was my passion at that time in my life. I remember as it were yesterday the first time that I went to attend a concert live at Bellas Artes, the great Music and Opera Theater of Mexico, completely Belle Époque with a fabulous Tiffany glass curtain with a superb depiction of the Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl mountains, mistakenly named “The Volcanoes” in Mexico because only one of them (The Smoking Mountain) is one. I was invited by Maestro Pallares, who was the Chairman of the “Asociación Musical Daniel” that brought all the musical performances to Bellas Artes. He had a loge, of course, and I got to sit there. The orchestra was Mexico’s premier one and the pianist was Rubinstein. They played Beethoven’s in C Minor Op 37 which literally blew my mind. I had listened to the recording several times because Michel had recommended that I do, in order to enjoy the live concert more thoroughly, which proved to be a superb suggestion. This concerto went on to become probably my favorite one of all times. Maestro Pallares turned out to be a most wonderful musical mentor for me since I was invited to many other concerts and even to his home, after a performance by Friedrich Gulda, who delighted us with some Jazz music and signed Maestro Pallares Steinway golden metal frame that had already been signed by some of the greatest pianist of the 20th century. It was the first time that I saw a pianist perform at close range and I was overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotions with which Gulda played. Years later I went to see him after a concert in Vienna and he pretended to remember that soirée chez Pallares that so much pushed me further into wanting to be a concert pianist.

BUT ALL THESE DREAMS WERE NOT TO BE, since I was really torn between aspiring to be a concert pianist, and understanding that life down that road would be pretty much a chimera or following my other passion at the time which was Science and particularly the Exact Sciences, Physics and Math. The decision was black and white, when it could have been gray, keeping a bit of piano and proceeding with the Sciences, but I did not have the stamina, nor the discipline to do that, so the piano went by the wayside. But not so my love for Classical Music, which continued to grow as I became older. Great joys of my life have been attending concerts in many different cities around the world, from Moscow to Munich, with different orchestras, conductors, soloists. I fondly remember listening to “XELA Buena Música en México” with Michel in the car radio of his old Dodge, where I first heard the “René Ansermet et l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande”; going to the Teatro Metropolitan for early Sunday concerts with Michel; spending a whole night in Geneva, while at University, listening to Debussy’s Cathédrale Engloutie, over and over; sitting in the Conductor’s Section, facing the conductor in Philadelphia, where my seats were smack center in the first row; paying for Stehplätze as a 16 year old in Munich (I could not afford a proper seat); being engulfed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; watching Stravinsky conduct The Rite of Spring at the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico; rushing in the cold to the Konzerhaus am Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin; arriving at the Sainte Chapelle or at Saint Sulpice in Paris, to listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Albinoni’s Adagio; or being present at the opening of LA’s Disney Hall and of Kansas City’s Kauffman Center; and just listening to classical music live or with 78 rpms, 45 rpm, LPs, eight tracks, tape, cassettes, dvds or plain digital.

CLASSICAL MUSIC BRINGS AN EXCEPTIONAL INTIMACY on a cold Sunday afternoon, when it is snowing outside and you know there is no other place you’d rather be than home, listening to Eric Satie and letting your imagination and your emotion run wild; or a memory of Vivaldi and the Summer outside the Hadrian gardens in Rome; or Chopin’s Mazurkas; or Liszt’s Années de Pélérinage; or on, and on and on. No matter what the composer and the interpreter create, the absolute truth is that your soul is complete and your mind is active at all times. Listening to Classical Music and reading are conflictive activities because both are jealous lovers that demand absolute and total attention. The emotional connection that classical music offers not just to the past, but to all humanity across time and space, transcends boundaries. At its core, classical music is an inclusive art form. It strives for perfection and it influences all forms of contemporary music. It may not be the favorite music of younger generations but it still has its echoes in the scoring for epic or adventurous films, for romantic ballads, for children’s songs and for all forms of musical expression that continues to explore ways of expressing emotions and ideas. For me, it will always be a connection to my past and an aspiration to my future.