Tonight I will be attending the fourth concert of the Casals Festival. This will be the opportunity for the Puerto Rico Orchestra to display its true abilities: Beethoven's overture, " The Creatures of Prometheus" , Bruch's second symphony. The intermission is to be followed by a set of baroque arias sung by the soprano Elly Ameling.
My room sits directly above the headquarters of Francis Schwartz, An intellectual musician, a dynamic internationalist better known in Paris and New York than in his adopted Puerto Rico, whose inhabitants have unthinkingly accepted the view promoted by the world's musical celebrities that they have no music of their own. His energy is enormous, his ego excessive . Schwartz, like his counterpart , Hector Campos-Parsi, does not question the axiom that links art with politics on the island. Both men are distinguished composers. For reasons combining national character, history and, possibly, mere caprice, classical music squats atop the apex of Puerto Rico's cultural ziggurat.
Waiting to get ready for the concert I stroll about the spacious Student Union, sitting down in alcoves to compose my thinking to organize my notes, bathed in the soothing environment produced by excellent music coming from the loudspeakers in the cafeterias. It ranges from Chopin to Jolivet: the presence of Francis Schwartz is clear. He has been helpful to me in many ways, arranging a poetry reading in the English department, introducing me to the experimentalist, Rafael Aponte-LeDee, negotiating for my room with the manager of the Casa de Huespedes. I will be interviewing him several times. He will treat me to lunch, point me in the direction of excellent but neglected musicians, give me a list of names of publishers in New York.
Champion of avant-garde and experimental music, Schwartz incorporates synesthesia, happenings, multi-media theater and high technology into his compositions. He frequently brings over figures such as John Cage and Julio Cortazar for seminars and performances. Everyone recalled to me the 'cosmic event' he directed at the university a few years back, during which the entire campus, including the telephone switchboard operators and the jack-hammer crews, were incorporated into the orchestra.
A comparable attentiveness and cordiality will flow from Hector Campos-Parsi from the moment I enter upon his domain, complete with homologous manifestations of aristocratic largesse. His headquarters are in the offices of AFAC on the 11th floor of the Minillas Towers, a complex of government buildings some 7 miles away from the University and adjacent to the Centro de Bellas Artes. Much of my time this spring will be spent shuffling relentlessly between the fiefs of these two cultural warlords.
It is a source of some amazement that two persons so similar in social role, holding essential the same job, should have such radically different artistic philosophies .Hector Campos-Parsi is a neo-classicist, heir to Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Carlos Chavez, Nadia Boulanger. A musician of refined taste and painstaking craft, he is also a connoisseur of poetry and art, an urbane and cultivated conservative, altogether a charming man who, one must never forget, has power and knows how to use it.
One is not surprised to learn that they are not exactly the best of friends. The tenor of Francis Schwartz's polemic when speaking against the musical establishment is well conveyed through this excerpt from his article ,The Bureaucracy of Music in Puerto Rico , published in the Caribbean Review of July , 1981:
"Puerto Rico is a cultural battlefield. This is not a new phenomenon, since the struggle between local forces and those of the metropolitan centers have characterized island life for centuries. The latest bombshell to explode within the confines of this three million -plus Caribbean land, is the passing of a new law which creates the Administration for the Development of Art and Culture ( AFAC)... pianist Jesus Maria Sanroma and composer Hector Campos-Parsi... have actively campaigned for the new law. Their support of this cultural legislation has earned them the opprobrium of most Puerto Rican artists and they have been publicly condemned...."
When I told Francis Schwartz that I'd arranged an interview with Hector Campos-Parsi , he permitted himself a few words of guarded approval, before warning me that : " Campos-Parsi is more right-wing than Reagan. "
Direct experience convinced me that this was not the case. Campos-Parsi is a confirmed believer in statehood for Puerto Rico; yet when I told him that Jeane Kirkpatrick, then ambassador to the UN, was due in arrive in San Juan that afternoon, commenting that she usually spoke like an ass, he corrected me:
" She doesn't just speak like an ass- she is an ass!"
The artistic and political differences of these two gifted composers reflects a climate of hostility reigning throughout the whole of Puerto Rico's artistic life. As , with a trace of astonishment in his voice Angel Nater, contentious in his own right, told me : " These composers, they all fight each other, too! "
Allegiances divide along clearly discernible lines: Francis Schwartz sneers at the abilities of a group of young composers at the UPR who have formed themselves into a group called the National Association of Composers ( ANCO) . The bad blood is completely reciprocated and they indulge in letter wars. Composers in Puerto Rico fight about music theory in the daily newspapers! Here a letter from Schwartz to El Mundo , June 15th, 1982:
" En una carta del Senor Carlos A. Vasquez, publicada en el
periodico El Mundo del 14 Junio de 1982, se ofrece una informacion
falsa sobre mi persona. Quiseira afirmar que este servidor no es
miembro de la Fundacion Latinoamericana de Musica
Contemporanea comon incorrectamente senalo Carlos Vasquez en
su carta.
Extiendo una cordial invitacion al joven colege Vasquez, en
nombre de la honestidad intelectual, de ser mas responsable en sus
manifestaciones publicas.
Atentamenta,
Francis Schwartz"
( Translation: An incorrect statement appeared in a letter by Mr. Carlos A. Vasquez, published in the newspaper El Mundo on June 14th, 1982 . I wish to take the opportunity to affirm that your humble servant is not a member of the Latin American Foundation of Contemporary Music, as was incorrectly asserted by Carlos Vasquez in his letter.
I wish to extend a cordial invitation to my youthful ( juvenile? )
colleague Vasquez, in the name of intellectual honesty , to be more
responsible in his public utterances. ..... )
This paternalistic snipe in the papers gives but a partial idea of the venom with which Schwartz will speak of ANCO in private. In the interview he gave me on June 11th in the Siglo XX restaurant in the Old City, he unburdened himself on the subject of ANCO in the following fashion:
" The older members of ANCO ( Ernesto Cordero, Carlos Vasquez, Carlos Cabrer, Luis Alvarez and others teaching at the University ) , are out of touch with what is going on in contemporary music. They don't keep up to date with new music on the international scene, of which Puerto Rico is only one small part.
Nationalism is no excuse for lack of knowledge. They have lots of ego and write reactionary music. Some people seem to feel that it is more important that someone call you a composer than it is to do any composition. I advise them to get off their ego-trips about being composers and spend more time composing ! "
The comments made by ANCO members about Schwartz follow a similar pattern:
" ...He's only worried about his own reputation... He wants to be seen with the right people.... All positions at the University are political. Francis Schwartz could not have gotten to be where he is without playing the kind of politics we hold in contempt... He's not even Puerto Rican.... And his music is bad.. During the Second Biennial of Contemporary Music ( at the UPR in 1980 ) , he spent all of his time entertaining celebrities while we had to carry the chairs and the music stands...etc., etc....."
One of Francis Schwartz's friends is Rafael Apontee-LeDee. As avant-garde experimentalists they have much in common and worked together as hosts for John Cage's visit to the UPR in March.
Hector Campos-Parsi does not associate with Rafael Apontee- LeDee. "I do not associate with Rafael Aponte LeDee" , he told me , within the first ten minutes of our meeting in his office at AFAC.
For his part, Rafael Apontee LeDee appears to have picked fights with just about every other composer on the island , making him something of an enigma. According to ANCO, everyone was, once upon a time , united under the leadership of Rafael Apontee LeDee. Their organization called itself FLUXUS, deliberate borrowing from the name of the well-known arts movement in New York City in the 60's and 70 's. It was in the bicentennial year of 1976, important in Puerto Rican musical history for being the first, and the next to the last, year in which Puerto Rico's composers were able to get their works performed at the Casals Festival. Soon after the formation of FLUXUS, Aponte LeDee, without warning or apparent provocation, wrote letters to all the newspapers saying terrible things about every other FLUXUS member .
I was not told who gave the funeral oration .
The composer Amaury Veray is another uncompromising isolationist. He, like Francis Schwartz and Hector Campos-Parsi, has an international reputation. Veray, Delano and Campos-Parsi opened Puerto Rico up to the movements in modern music in the 1940's. We kept getting our wires crossed and I never did get a chance to interview him. From what I was able to learn he also has his shopping list of grievances.
The one important local composer who avoids being drawn into the unending internecine warfare , who remains 'above the flood' , is Jack Delano. Everybody I encountered spoke warmly of him. Photographer and composer, he and his wife have collaborated for 40 years with the government's cultural agencies , including those, such as the film division of the Department of Community Education, created by them. He has found time to produce a rich catalogue of compositions, such as the lovely Ballet Suite for La Bruja de Loiza ( 1955), the Viola Sonata in A minor ( 1953) , several symphonic works, and many scores for films, ballet, and the radio .
The quarrels between ANCO and their antagonists are a minor sub-plot within the larger melodrama of Puerto Rican classical music: the bitter struggle that unites everyone, ( including Hector Campos-Parsi) against the Casals Legacy : the Conservatory, the Puerto Rico Orchestra, the Casals Festival, and AFAC. The Children's String Program doesn't bother them .
Maestro Pablo Casals, legendary for his simple ways, his fondness for nature, animals and children, his charming fables, his encouragement of the arts of his adopted homeland, a highly controversial man who at the same time is constantly vilified in the press, in island politics, and in private conversations among local musicians, sits under the shade of the flamboyan outside El Pessebre, huddled over his cello. He brushes away a fly or grasshopper, observes the cow obsessively munching grass at the boundary of the woods, and wonders...wonders for the life of him, just what the damn fuss is all about!
"....What would my good friend, Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, say about this madness? 'Stick to the cello', probably... It's all a lot of nonsense....Like all those people who never lost a night's sleep over the Spanish Civil War or Franco , but hooted at me for accepting an invitation from John F. Kennedy to play at the White House !..... Albert Schweitzer advised me to do it......Those mockers should have been there with me in Prades when the Gestapo tried to force me to go to Berlin and play for Hitler!.....
. ....And then there's that Senor Hector Campos-Parsi, one of their so-called national composers, who must really think he's good enough to compete with Mozart, Schubert and Bach , because he wants me to play his works in MY San Juan Music Festival! He also seems to bear some grudge towards me about the Conservatory I've set up here! Why, I put myself to considerable trouble to bring it into existence! Provincial ignorance, that's all it is...Humph, humph..!"
( Campos-Parsi's version of the story is this : " For two years I traveled back and forth across the United States, visiting all of its major conservatories . I summarized my research in a series of detailed reports proposing the formation of a conservatory in San Juan incorporating the best features of each of them . My reports were flatly ignored by the government committees - thrown in the wastebasket! For them, Casals was a God: A God surrounded by " , and he made an expressive gesture with both hands, " Ignorance! Casals was in his 80's. His mind was old and medieval. He thought in terms of 19th century European conservatories and his ideas were imposed by fiat. " )
From the interior of El Pessebre one hears the voice of young Martita . She is entertaining their friends, Luis and Rosa Cueto; they come often to El Pessebre to assist the aged virtuoso.
"I invite you to taste these mangoes!" she says, "They're ripe and delicious! Our chauffeur, Isaac Delgado, gave them to us ; you must have seen him waiting for us at the bottom of the hill. They're fresh from his brother's garden!"
Don Pablo stops playing the cello long enough to listen to the sounds of nature, to examine the glittering of the raindrops on the grass blades, to savor the warm breezes coming from the Bay beyond the hills. " The songs of the birds!" , he rhapsodizes, " The songs of the birds! What can be more beautiful than the songs of the birds? What, indeed, other than my lovely Martita!" And he scoops out his arpeggios with renewed vigor. The cow, (whose jawbone I am destined to inherit in another decade) , moos in rapturous accord.
Don Pablo lays down his bow. A wry smile forms over his lips as he shakes his head . Ah! He muses: the pretensions of those Puerto Rican musicians who insist on their right to play in his Festival!
" They can't even play the Brahms Violin Concerto!" he snorts. Then, becoming suddenly serious : "My Conservatory will change all that."
Martita and the Cuetos are emerging from the cottage. The cello, restored to its case, is taken inside. Martita takes Casals by the arm. As they stroll down the hill she informs him that while he was practicing she took a call from the governor, Luis Ferre . Ferre wanted to know when Casals intends to come back to San Juan so that they can get together for some chamber music. He will need advanced notice so that he can organize the television crews.
The quartet arrives at the bottom of the hill. Isaac Delgado is chatting away with his brother-in-law, an unpredictable madcap who is always happy and never stops laughing. They drink from cans of Budweiser. The brother-in-law is an alcoholic; in fact both of them drink too much. One surmises that the problem is endemic to the countryside.
When they drink beer, they drink: Budweiser
When they smoke, they smoke: Winston's
Vague tendencies in the financing of the arts in the United States become concrete realities in Puerto Rico. We shall also be witness to the sad spectacle of accomplished artists fighting one another as much, if not more, than they do their common enemies.
Contemporary classical music in Puerto Rico, ( it's popular music or salsa is , as we known , equally interesting though not the subject of this article) , as everywhere else, can be divided into 3 categories: academic, conservative and radical. The academics are to be found, it comes as no surprise, in and around the University of PR. Even Francis Schwartz, avant-garde therefore 'radical', works within an academic context that leaves its impress on his works, certainly his writings. His criticisms of ANCO, are framed about the standard academic put-down : " they lack credibility".
Conservatives, among whom we may include Hector Campos- Parsi and Jack Delano, are tied into institutions such as AFAC, the national radio and television channels, the Department of Education and so on.
Most of the radicals, surprisingly, are to be found teaching in the reactionary old Conservatory of the Maestro. Among these, the most prominent names are those of Rafael Aponte-LeDee and Amaury Veray. Apart from Francis Schwartz, a late arrival of the 60's, these composers were all active in Puerto Rico before Casals established his hegemony over music in 1957. As Campos-Parsi puts it :
"Casals ignored the very existence of their existence."
They were in good company apparently, as Casals was famous for ignoring the very existence of the existence of every other modern composer, starting with Debussy. According to Jack Delano, he may even have held reservations towards the innovations of Tchaikowsky! It may be true that Pablo Casals placed Puerto Rico on the musical map : the Puerto Ricans remain the unknown people. Even the internationalism of the Casals Festival has had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing the impression that the Puerto Ricans have never been capable of producing more than dance music and salsa .
Jack Delano, the lone admirer of Casals in this storm of cultural-political polemic ( Quote : " He was a wonderful man. " ) was at the same time very concerned that this mistaken image in the public mind be corrected.
"Serious music has existed in Puerto Rico from the 19th century. All the important soloists, opera companies and singers came to the island. In the 20th century the organization Pro Arte Musical was formed for the purpose of bringing prominent musicians here, as they continue to do. In 1952 Ramos Antonini, the second most powerful figure in the Popular Democratic Party , established the system of Free Schools of Music, which continues to be very active."
Campos-Parsi may be permitted to pick up the narrative from this point: " The 40's and early 50's were our golden age. It was a critical and exciting time. The Ballet de San Juan needed a repertoire of dance scores. It was a period of renaissance for the theater as well. Commissions were being given out by the government agency that Jack Delano and his wife had set up in the Department of Community Education to write music for films . Delano himself wrote a famous score for the film 'Modesta', a kind of modern-day Lysistrata.
" With every year from 1951 to 1956 came the development of new resources, not only in music but in all the other arts. And then ", he sighs , " In 1957, Pablo Casals came to live with us. Religion is always based on the unknown. Casals was a God", he said, repeating himself, " A God surrounded by ignorance! Suddenly", he spreads his arms wide, " an enormous cloak of mediocrity covered the nation - in the name of "excellence" ! It was no longer our job to produce anymore, only to interpret scripture. Historically there tends to be distrust among Puerto Ricans. It is traditional among us to bring in foreigners to settle our disputes. This explains the phenomenon of Pablo Casals."
Donald Thompson turns livid whenever the conversation verges on the subject of the Casals Festival. His version of the events of 1957 over-reaches Machiavelli:
" The real culprit in this whole business is Alfredo Matilla, the director for Department of Cultural Affairs during the Munoz Marin administration of the late 50's. Matilla was the worst kind of 'artist lover' , the sort of pretentious snob the Puerto Ricans call the 'Spaniard from Madrid' . It all began when Matilla discovered that Pablo Casals' mother had been born in Mayaguez. He then proceeded systematically to set Casals up. He was the one who sent Martita over to France with instructions to seduce him and lure him back to the island. Casals and his brother came here for a trial visit in 1956. Of course they were taken right away to Mayaguez. The reception given them was utterly incredible. I don't know if you've had a chance yet to witness the sentimentality of the national character. Everyone cried the whole time. Casals' brother, it's said, cried for an entire week! Matilla had the whole campaign mapped out in advance, down to the smallest details: Martita; the Festival; the Conservatory; the Puerto Rico Orchestra. It all hinged on Pablo Casals' decision to emigrate to Puerto Rico...."
In judging the worth of Thompson's conspiracy theory, it may be the better part of wisdom to be guided by his own advice: " Roy, paranoia is the national sport; we've all got to be on our guard against it! "