![](../pix/juan2.jpeg)
Juan Blanco
courtesy of Gabriele Proy, March 2000
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Last modified: Sat Jan 20 16:09:37 AST 2001
ICMC 2001
Juan Blanco:
Cuba's Pioneer of Electroacoustic Music
By Neil Leonard III
Author's draft of the article
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Published
in
Computer Music
Journal
21:2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 10-20.
Copyright 1997 by
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Used by permission.
Neil Leonard III
Berklee College of Music
1140 Boylston St.
Boston, MA, USA
nleonard@it.berklee.edu
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Introduction
The first time an audience heard electroacoustic music by a Cuban
composer was when Juan Blanco (b. 1919) premiered his Música
para Danza, at the Union Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de
Cuba, in Havana, in 1964. Blanco had been yearning to
create electroacoustic music for years. In 1942, he designed an
instrument (never built) that predated the similar Mellotron by
twenty years. In recent years, he has learned computer programming
to create a number of computer music compositions, yet he is prolific
in other genres as well. For over half a century, Blanco has
pioneered Cuban contemporary music, exploring ways to update the
island's rich musical heritage. In all, he has composed over 160
works, which have been premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra,
composer/guitarist Leo Brower, jazz saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera, and
Afro-Cuban masters Merceditas Valdés, Tata Güines, and
Guillermo Barreto.
I first visited Cuba in 1986 with a group of U.S. musicologists
hosted by the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (ICAP). I
traveled across the island listening to and sitting in with musicians
along the way and met Blanco at ICAP, the site of Blanco's studio in
Havana. Over the next ten years I returned to Cuba eight times, once
for the period of a year, to research both modern and traditional
music. Early on it became clear that no Cuban composer epitomized
musical innovation better than Blanco, who melded new music,
electronic instruments, improvisation, and the island's unique
musical heritage. Yet, despite Blanco's contributions little is
known about him in North America and very little has been written
about him in English. (See Leonard 1994 for an earlier survey).
This article provides an overview of his life's work, focusing on the
significance of several major electroacoustic works.
Early Life and
Works
Juan Blanco was born on 29 June 1919 in the town of Mariel, a coastal
town in the province of Havana. His family acquired a player piano
from the pianist at the local cinema as payment for a debt to Juan's
father. Juan was fascinated with the instrument and its ability to
perform automatically; by age four he had taught himself to play it.
Classical studies came several years later. Juan also loved popular
music, and at age ten he formed a sextet that played Cuban songs
around the neighborhood.
Later the same year, the family moved to Pinar del Río, a
rural province of sugar and tobacco plantations. Juan made a habit
of following his father to work at the sugar warehouse so that he
could be surrounded by the Afro-Cuban stevedores who celebrated
payday by playing the cajón, a large wooden box that
substituted for a drum. As Blanco put it, "In this way I was
put in contact with one of the purest musical manifestations in all
of the Pinar del Río." (Garcia 1989).
Moving to the city of Havana when he was in his mid-teens, Blanco
began composing and studying composition in the provincial
conservatory. He is proud to have studied with José Ardévol,
one of the island's most influential composers and a highly demanding
teacher. Realizing that his chances of living on music alone were
slim, he also enrolled in the law school of the University of Havana.
While in school, Blanco found time to win the national diving
championship.
While in his early twenties, Blanco was still fascinated by the
possibilities for creating music with new technologies like the
player piano. In 1942, he drew up the blueprint for a device that
attached a separate wire recording deck to each key on a one-octave
keyboard. But fabrication costs proved prohibitive, and the
instrument was never built. A similar instrument, the Mellotron, was
built no less than twenty years later and was popularized by rock
groups like the Beatles, Genesis, King Crimson, the Moody Blues, and
Yes. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) collected Blanco's original schematic for their
electronic music archives in Paris.
Like Alejandro Garcia Caturla (1906-1940), a brilliant composer of
the previous generation who studied with Nadia Boulanger, Blanco
wanted to create a new classical music rooted in the island's
folkloric and popular music. Blanco was also greatly influenced by
Amadeo Roldán (1901-1939), composer, violinist, and director
of Orquesta Filarmónica de la Habana. Roldán emerged
in the mid-1920s, a few years before Caturla, and took nationalism in
Cuban music a step further by integrating Afro-Cuban instruments-the
marimbula, clave, hand drums, and quijada (mule's jaw)-with the
symphonic instruments. Roldán's Rítmicas V and
Rítmicas VI (1931) were among the first classical
compositions written exclusively for percussion. Today, scholars of
Caribbean classical music debate whether these pieces predated Edgar
Varèse's Ionisation, for a percussion ensemble
including Cuban bongos, guiro, clave, and maracas. Roldán
maintained a correspondence with both Varèse and Henry Cowell
(Brower 1989). Ardévol asserts in his "Introducción
a Cuba: La Música" that Varèse was "in debt
to Roldán for important aspects of his use of drums, and in
the newest conceptions related to the function of percussion"
(Ardévol 1969). The contribution of these early Cuban
composers was to create an identifiably Cuban avant-garde that was,
as Ardévol states, "practically without precedent"
(Ardévol 1969). With Blanco as a catalyst, this genre later
blossomed into a national movement.
In the mid-1940s Blanco was composing works for classical instruments
that combined complex counterpoint with the poly-rhythms and lyricism
of Cuban music. But he found the academies uninterested in Cuban
roots, virtually ignoring Roldán and Caturla. So he formed
the Sociedad Amadeo Roldán in the late 1940s to promote the
study and presentation of contemporary works drawing on all of Cuba's
musical traditions (Garcia 1989) (Ortega 1989). The excitement of a
distinctly Cuban avant-garde captured the interest of artists of all
disciplines. Responding to requests for a broader mandate, Blanco
expanded Sociedad Amadeo Roldán to include artists and writers
and changed its name to Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo (Cultural
Society of Our Time). Much like the group of artists who gathered at
Black Mountain College in the U.S. at the same time (John Cage,
Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham), Nuestro Tiempo attracted
the participation and attention of the finest artists in the country.
Nuestro Tiempo was not sponsored by any college or institution;
Blanco often paid for concerts out of his own salary as a lawyer.
With his help, the group became the most important collective voice
of the mid-century Cuban renaissance.
In 1952, Colonel Fulgencio Batista overthrew the government. Batista
shared U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy's intolerance of intellectuals and
suspected communists. As the new head of state, Batista resorted to
police brutality to enforce his will, and Nuestro Tiempo was forced
underground. Despite being jailed several times for leading the
group, Blanco managed to hold concerts, organize clandestine
meetings, and maintain the society through years of repression and
Mafia-style rule. During this time of political repression, Blanco
composed works such as Elegia (Homanaje a los caídos en la
lucha revolucionaria), (Elegy (Homage to the Casualties of the
Revolutionary Struggle)) (1953) and his landmark work, Divertimento
para Orquesta de Cuerdas (1958). Blanco's influence as a composer
began to be felt during this period. Jesús Ortega points out
that hearing the premiere of Blanco's Quinteto No. 1 (1954)
for flute, violin, clarinet, oboe and bassoon, inspired young guitar
virtuosos Ortega and Leo Brower to purse composition as well as
performance (Leonard 1991) (Ortega 1989).
Blanco's standing in the business community helped him survive the
Batista years. He had become a successful attorney, specializing in
tax law and representing large U.S. corporations like Coca-Cola. By
the late 1950s he was working for the secondmost successful law firm
on the island.
When the rebel army entered Havana to overthrow Batista on January 1,
1959, Batista and many of Blanco's clients fled the country. Blanco
soon realized that this could be an opportunity to make music his
career, and sought a commitment from the new government to give him a
full-time job as a musician. When they agreed, he donned a military
uniform, went to the law firm (where no one knew of his musical
interests) and resigned.
Shortly thereafter, revolutionary leader Che Guevara asked to meet
the avant-garde composers of Nuestro Tiempo to congratulate them for
their role in the resistance. As a reward for their loyalty he
appointed them directors of the military bands around the island and
named Blanco Director de la Banda del Estado Mayor, the Havana
military orchestra. When the Czechoslovakia became the first
socialist state to send an ambassador to Cuba shortly after the
revolution, Blanco's military band was the centerpiece of a
grandiose reception ceremony at the Palacio de la Revolucion. The
ambassador showed strong signs of emotion when Blanco's band struck
up what they thought was the Czech national anthem. His Excellency
must be moved, Blanco thought, by hearing his anthem in the Americas
for the first time. Unfortunately, Blanco's archivist had confused
the Czechoslovakian anthem with that of Yugoslavia, with whom Czech
relations at the time were tense.
The next day Guevara ordered the entire band to Cayo Largo, a remote
island south of the mainland, to gather rocks for a construction crew
building a tourist resort. As the army was rather undisciplined, a
fellow intellectual convinced Blanco that Guevara would not notice if
he skipped the construction detail. Blanco's friend proved correct
until Guevara caught sight of Blanco on television hosting a music
appreciation program. The next day, Blanco and the archivist turned
up bright and early at the construction site to lift rocks (Leonard
1993).
Despite these setbacks, Blanco remembers the early years of the
revolution as a time of unprecedented freedom and experimentation in
the arts. The major venues were available to the most cutting edge
composers, and Blanco's music was presented in the best symphonic
halls. As the newly appointed Director of Music for the National
Culture Council, he formed the Orquesta Cubana de Música
Moderna (a forerunner of the seminal Afro-Cuban jazz orchestra,
Irakere) and convinced the state to pay composers a regular salary,
as opposed to paying for individual pieces.
Early Tape
Music
Blanco's work underwent a major transformation during the early
1960s. His interests expanded to include the sweeping innovations in
the international avant-garde. Premiere Cuban novelist, music
historian, and composer Alejo Carpentier, who had traveled to Europe,
brought Blanco a copy of Pierre Schaeffer's book À la
Recherche d'une Musique Concrète (Schaeffer 1952). The
book inspired Blanco to focus on creating electroacoustic music
full-time. Unable to leave Cuba to visit the studios where the more
advanced electronic instruments were being developed, he bought three
consumer-grade Silvertone tape decks from the local Sears department
store and began making electronic pieces. Limited to one oscillator
and an inexpensive microphone, Blanco manipulated sounds using tape
feedback, sound-on-sound techniques, tape reversal, and splicing.
Lacking the sophisticated vari-speed decks used by his foreign peers,
Blanco resorted to manipulating the speed of the tape reels directly
with his fingers.
In 1961, Blanco finished his first electronic work, the
five-and-a-half-minuteMúsica para Danza, which debuted
in 1964. The primary motif is a one-bar ostinato played by a single
sine-wave generator, dubbed to tape four times. Each dub utilized a
lower speed than the previous one, and occupied a distinct pitch
range and tempo. The highest ostinato sounds like a field of
synthesized crickets, the lowest functions as a bass line. The four
parts enter in sequence, each gradually spun down to its unique fixed
speed before the next entrance. The fixed playback speeds are held
for the next minute, revealing a rich rhythmic counterpoint.
After an abrupt cutoff, a long sustained chord enters. Gradually,
microtonal pitch contours emerge from the chord, which evolve into
melodic fragments. The first figure reappears in short bursts. For
the next two minutes Blanco plays with the juxtaposition of the
ostinati and the sustained notes. The final minute of the piece
features variations of the first motif. The piece ends after each of
the ostinati gradually bends up in pitch. The ostinati are stopped
one by one, leaving highest ostinato, which also begins the piece,
alone at the end.
Blanco's rhythmic counterpoint is similar to a mambo played by Beny
Moré's Banda Gigante, in which trumpets, trombones,
saxophones, and bass juxtapose distinct ostinati. Moré was
the leading singer of son, Cuba's most popular form of secular
dance music, during Blanco's youth. He transformed Cuban music in
the 1940s and 1950s by melding secular Cuban dance music with jazz
big-band instrumentation. Blanco's purely electronic adaptation of
Cuban rhythms and ostinati introduced a new sound on the island, and
anticipated the work of groups like Los Van Van, who incorporated
electronic instruments into all aspects of son when they
defined the next wave of dance music in the decades that followed.
Musicians of popular groups like Irakere and Los Van Van still recall
premiering Blanco's works during the 1960s and 1970s (Leonard 1996).
Blanco's second electroacoustic piece, Interludio con Máquinas
(1961), is based on recordings of acoustic sounds, and goes farther
still in exploring sound manipulations afforded by tape recorders.
The mechanical rhythms of printers comprise much of the source
material for this seven-minute piece. Slowed-down recordings of
printers evoke quasi-industrial environments, trains, and Cuban
percussion. Glissandi, abrupt transitions and mechanically produced
iterations are used frequently. The piece climaxes in a train-like
sound accelerated into a frenzy, which is abruptly cut off, then
followed by a one-second fragment of the printer heard at low speed.
Later the same year, Blanco composed Ensamble V, utilizing
prepared-piano recordings that he manipulated by over-dubbing,
changing the playback speed, and reversing the tape. In this work,
which lasts just over 15 minutes, Blanco juxtaposes figures played at
the keyboard with sounds produced by scratching the strings directly.
There are far fewer abrupt transitions, and he often uses the
natural reverberation of the open piano strings to create a smooth
transition between sonic events. In contrast to the earlier pieces,
abrupt transitions and real-time speed manipulation are rarely used.
Tape delay and sound-on-sound techniques are saved for the climax,
two-thirds of the way into the piece. Ensamble V is an
ingenious arrangement of unique sonic events, in which virtuosic
editing techniques were required but not subject to grand display.
Aside from being "firsts," Blanco's early tape pieces stand
up to multiple listenings even today, and show how some of Blanco's
favored compositional devices developed. Already, Blanco had found
meaningful ways to link his electronic compositions to Cuba's rich
folkloric heritage. He later stated that he used sounds of ambient
and urban environments as models for electroacoustic works, and he
appears to have been working along these lines from the beginning.
New Music in
Cuba
For Blanco, electronic music was partially a way to look beyond the
mid-century nationalism inspired by Roldán and Caturla. After
the initial effort to surpass their works, Blanco and his peers found
that even their most ingenious compositions of the 1950s could not
surpass those of Roldán and Caturla. Blanco came to view the
continued pursuit of nationalism as a closed aesthetic. For him, the
new goal was to create a more international music, using influences
from many sources, including electronics and new compositional
techniques from abroad, as well as Cuban music. This new direction
did not in any way devalue the lessons that Blanco had learned from
Roldán and Caturla. Ortega insists that Blanco applied many
of the lessons in Música para Danza (Leonard 1991).
The new direction, or "la música nueva," as Blanco
refers to it, was initiated in the early 1960s by Blanco and
composer/guitarist Leo Brower, often working closely together. At
this time Brower was exploring aleatoric composition, partly inspired
by a trip to the Warsaw Autumn new music festival in 1961, where he
heard the premiere of Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of
Hiroshima and performances by flutist Gazzeloni, among others.
Two weeks before the premiere of Música para Danza
Blanco assisted in the premiere of Brower 's Sonograma I for
prepared piano, the first Cuban composition to use aleatoric
techniques. Together Blanco and Brower began exploring what they
called "open forms" for composition, which were often
presented by Manuel Duchesne Cuzán, director of the Orquesta
Symphónica National, who premiered Blanco's Texturas
(1964) for orchestra and magnetic tape in 1964.
Blanco and Brower refused to limit themselves to the academic
tradition; they began writing for jazz musicians and listened to
rock. Blanco and Ortega wrote a tape collage based on recordings of
sonero Beny Moré. When an Indian diplomat left several
dozen records of Indian classical music with the Casa de las
Americas, Blanco and Brower locked themselves in the building and
listened to the entire collection on the first available weekend. As
the movement grew, Blanco and Brower were soon joined by composers
Héctor Angulo, Carlos Fariñas, Roberto Valera and young
composers Sergio Fernández Barroso, Carlos Malcom, Calixto
Álvarez, among others.
Blanco composed the first graphic scores on the island. Included in
his early use of graphic devices is a mid-1960s series of seven works
called Estimulus para Sonar. In Pirophonia, members
of a string quartet derived structural motives from watching a fire.
In Filmophonia, the group Irakere, featuring saxophonist
Paquito D'Rivera and trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, played to a
six-minute film that was projected above them onstage. The group
played with their back to the audience, and each member improvised to
the movement of a separate animated figure on a film that Blanco had
prepared at Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos
(ICAIC). The performance was broadcast on national television.
Blanco thrived during the early years of the revolution, when the
avant-garde was not censured and musical establishments were open to
young experimental artists. Contrapunto Espacial III (1969)
was premiered in the Garcia Lorca Opera House. The piece featured
his student Paquito D'Rivera along with 20 actors and 24 instrumental
groups distributed throughout the hall. The actors act out various
stages of human development, beginning in fetal positions, gradually
rising to produce vocal noises of primitive man, progressing to
monosyllabic words, followed by crying and laughter. At each stage
of development they are admonished by a loud voice saying "No!"
which comes from a large black loudspeaker located on the theater's
stage. Finally, the actors pair off in couples on the floor, making
love and sighing. At this point D'Rivera strolled between them
playing alto saxophone in a manner reminiscent of John Coltrane's
shrieks of the same era. When the loudspeaker shouts "No!,"
they revolt and break it into pieces. "After the premiere in
1969 they fired the 'responsable' in the National Council of Culture
for letting me present this work," Blanco recalls (Leonard
1993). He points out that soon the administration grew more
concerned about works that expressed independent political views, and
it made attempts to control artists who were critical of the system.
While Cuban composers were enjoying tremendous aesthetic freedom and
stipends for composing, administrators still expected them to prove
their value to the population at large. Blanco resorted to creating
electroacoustic music for massive public events and large public
spaces, including: Fifth Exhibition of Gymnastic Sports (1965); the
Cuban pavilions for Expo 67 (Montreal) and Expo 70 (Osaka); and
Cuba's largest hospital, Hospital Hermanos Ameijeiras in Havana. In
1970, he processed the voice of Lenin addressing the Red Army, in a
piece that was used for the celebration in downtown Havana of the
centennial anniversary of Lenin's birth. Blanco, along with Brower,
Valera and Fariñas began composing for films by Cuba's finest
directors, which were produced by ICAIC. Although Brower and Fariñas
went on to compose many film scores for ICAIC, Blanco's fascination
with ambient sound and more-experimental techniques for manipulating
sound led him to favor large-scale sound installations over scoring
for film.
The ICAP
Studio
During the late 1970s, Blanco began looking for a place to teach
electronic music. The obvious choice, the Instituto Superior de Arte
(ISA), was not interested. Each year Blanco volunteered to teach a
course on electronic music at ISA and was turned down. In 1979,
Blanco was appointed director of a small studio at ICAP. At ICAP,
Blanco offered free instruction and studio time to composers and
young pop musicians interested in electronic music. Blanco initiated
a monthly concert series of live and taped music presenting works by
composers as experimental as Luigi Nono and as accessible as Pink
Floyd, and he facilitated the presentation of works by hundreds of
composers from around the world.
Blanco's support greatly benefited several generations of young
composers. Among the first musicians to benefit from the studio were
Edesio Alejandro, Jesús Ortega, Juan Piñera, Julio
Roloff, and Blanco's son Juan Marcos Blanco. Works by some of these
composers were included on the LP "Música
Electroacústica" (EGREM LD-4222), with liner notes by
Harold Gramatges, one of Cuba's leading composers and teachers.
Piñera and Alejandro's collaborative tape piece Tres de Dos
won first prize in the Twelfth International Electroacoustic Music
Competition, in Bourges, France. Roloff's Halley 86; and Juan
Marcos Blanco's Ritual were selected in 1984 by the First
International Tribunal of Electroacoustic Music, in Paris.
(Apparently, the state-owned record label EGREM was not overly
creative with album names, as the first four recordings in this genre
were simply titled "Música Electroacústica"
or else included these words in the title. The three LPs discussed
below are also named "Música Electroacústica,"
but contain unique material.)
Shortly after, Roloff, who also worked for Cuba's sole record label
EGREM, produced "Música Electroacústica (TIME)"
(EGREM LD-4411), an LP of composers under the age of thirty from the
ICAP studio. The recording included tape pieces by Fernando
Rodriguez, José Manuel Garcia Suárez, Miguel Bonachea,
and Mirtha de la Torre. Later, Ileana Perez Velazquez, both a fine
composer of acoustic music and a fine pianist, as well as Pedro
Pablo, who played violin with the National Symphony, emerged from the
ICAP studio. Many of the composers from the ICAP studio were very
active composing for dance, theater and multimedia events. Alejandro
and Pablo fronted their own rock bands that made extensive use of
electroacoustic influences.
Blanco's
Compositions of the Mid-1980s
In the mid-1980s Blanco also completed his first LP, "Música
Electroacústica" (EGREM LD-4211). The record featured
Tañidos (1983), for tape alone; Espaciso II
(1984), for tape and guitar; and Cirkus-Toccata (1985)
(sometimes spelled Circus-Toccata), a live performance piece
in which Afro-Cuban percussionists improvised to a tape prepared by
Blanco. The percussionists, Guillermo Barreto (timbales) and Tata
Güines (congas), were two of the most celebrated masters of
their instruments, virtuosos in many Afro-Cuban genres who had
accompanied the jazz group Weather Report on their mid-1970s Havana
concert.
Cirkus-Toccata is one of Blanco's major works and is discussed
extensively in this section. Working with the digitally controlled
note sequencer on a Roland Jupiter 8 synthesizer, Blanco composed a
number of melodic patterns, which he manipulated in real-time by
detuning and by changing the tempo and timbre. To complement the
complexity of the tape, he wrote parts to guide the percussionists
through changes in style, meter, and tempo. However, after extensive
rehearsing he found the percussionists inhibited by his score and
decided to let them improvise freely. The following year the piece
was performed by an entire folklore group in Santiago de Cuba, as well
as Guillermo Barreto, queen of Afro-Cuban song
Merceditas Valdés, and classical virtuosos Jesús Ortega
(guitar) and Miguel Villafruela (saxophone).
The recorded version begins with a brief introduction by the
percussionists, after which Blanco fades the tape up to join them.
Blanco used the arpeggiator to create a rich succession of melodic
patterns using a steady sixteenth note pulse. Initially the patterns
are based on major triads and played on a harp-like patch. Before
long, Blanco fades the harp-like line down, then fades in similar
material on a kalimba-like patch followed by a guitar-like patch.
Eventually, multiple arpeggiated lines are heard simultaneously, at
slightly different tempi, and the harmonic content gets increasingly
complex, though there is always one line that is heard above the
others.
Throughout the piece Güines and Barreto base their improvisation
on fragments of Cuban rumba and son, but without staying in
any one tempo for long. Barreto, the premiere timbale player of his
generation, draws a wide variety of sound from the heads of the
drums, their shells, and cowbells mounted on the timbale stand.
Güines is so persuasive with his phrasing and timbral nuance
that a recording of his part alone would seem to be enough.
Before long, the simple arpeggiation gives way to more intricate
melodic patterns, whose pitch contours form momentary rhythmic cycles
and tonal centers. Blanco manipulated the timbres of the patches in
real time as he over-dubbed the individual tracks. He favors plucked
string emulations and percussive envelopes that blend well with the
percussion, particularly the cowbells. Towards the end of the piece
Blanco creates microtonal effects by detuning the oscillators, before
returning to the equal-tempered major-triad arpeggios of the
beginning. On Blanco's cue, the percussionists play a one-bar figure
in unison and Blanco stops the tape on their final note.
Cirkus-Toccata addressed Cuban music's rich melding of
disparate sources: the electronics drew on European and North
American influences, the congas alluded to African roots, and the
timbale invoked the rich legacy of dance music unique to the island.
Going beyond Roldán's use of Afro-Cuban instruments in
classical works, Cirkus-Toccata was a collaboration with the
masters those instruments. The coexistence of avant-garde,
Afro-Cuban, and jazz sources had never been explored to this extent
in Cuba.
In 1987 Blanco produced a second LP, "Música
Electroacústica," EGREM 4424, featuring two pieces. The
first piece, Suite Erótica, is a 25-minute tape
composition, consisting of three pieces that Blanco created in 1979,
1982, and 1986. The first and last acts are based on the biblical
text "Song of Solomon," spoken by male and female voices.
In the first section, the text phrases are edited and processed to
such a degree that only occasional phrases are recognizable. As
Blanco explains in the liner notes, "the voices symbolize love
within a couple with both spiritual and sexual aspects." The
voices are accompanied by soft notes resembling a pipe organ with
steady vibrato. The second movement, comprised entirely of sustained
synthetic sounds, closely resembles his Tañidos and
Espacios II from the same period. The final movement
juxtaposes the couple's voices with sounds Blanco equates with the
"violence of nature," "the violence between everyday
people," "violence of political oppression," and
"violence of war." To represent political oppression,
Blanco processed archival speeches of Adolph Hitler, whom he cites as
"the model and inspiration for contemporary oppressors."
The second piece, Suite de Los Niños, was composed in
the studios of the Experimental Electroacoustic Music Group of
Bourges in 1984, and used more playful themes. The movements are
called Relojes Locos (Crazy Clocks), Plegaria de los
Osciladores (Oscillators' Prayer), and Canción de Cuna
de la Industria Pesada (para dormir a una turbinista) , which
translates as "Heavy Industry's Lullaby (to put a small turbine
to sleep)." The three pieces were realized at the studio of the
Experimental Music Group, Bourges, France.
Introducing
Computer Music in Cuba
In 1986 Blanco established the biannual Festival for Electroacoustic
Music: Spring in Veradero, an event that brought the Cuban composers
together with their counterparts from the international community.
Over the years the festival presented works by Cuban composers
including Calixto Álvarez, Leo Brower, Carlos Fariñas,
Argeliers León, Roberto Valera and the ICAP group. Foreign
presenters included Jon Appleton, Peter Byles, Ricardo Dal Farra,
Barbara Held, Leo Küper, Ahmed Malek, Max Mathews, Peter
Mechtler, Vivian Adelberg Rudow, Andrew Schloss, Elrich Süße,
Carlos Vazquez, and Fritz Weiland, among others.
Many of the foreigners presented computer-generated tape pieces and
brought computers for live performances and demonstrations. Blanco
had already presented tape concerts that included computer music, but
this event gave many young Cuban composers their first contact with
foreign composers of computer music. The foreign composers gave
public presentations in Havana which widened the awareness of this
music even further. With the help of many of these individuals
Blanco set up the first computer music studios on the island shortly
after the 1986 festival. Soon after, he was providing the first
instruction on MIDI software and synthesizers.
In contrast to the tape pieces the ICAP composers presented abroad,
foreign visitors at Blanco's festival in Veradero often found the
group presenting more flamboyant works, frequently incorporating
elements of the Cuban cabarets that surrounded them in Veradero, the
island's premier tourist resort. In 1989 Blanco staged a dance
performance on the beach, where dozens of dancers emerged from the
water in an elaborate piece choreographed to his tape music. The
1991 festival opened with a tape piece by Pablo that included an
entire company of cabaret dancers, decked out in their kitsch
costumes and dancing on floats, in an hour-long procession down the
main road in Veradero. Later in the same festival, Blanco staged a
dance concert in the town's fanciest outdoor theater. The troupe
moved to Blanco's music in a highly erotic and elaborately
choreographed dance. At the climax of the piece, a curtain opened
and a mobile stage brought the Municipal Band of Cardenas, from a
neighboring province of farmers, to stage center playing full force.
The festival ended with a midnight procession, based on a banned
religious parade, headed by musicians carrying a figure of Cuba's
patron saint, the Virgin of Cobre, again moving to Blanco's
electroacoustic music.
Present
Works
In the early 1990s Blanco acquired a NeXT computer. His sixth son,
Mauricio, who served as technical assistant to the jazz group Cuarto
Espacio and later to Cuban pop star Pablo Milanes, helped his father
learn the C programming required to develop his own software using
the NeXT's tools for direct digital synthesis. Blanco picked up the
programming rapidly and began a new phase of his career, producing
many pieces for this system. By 1993 he had composed over eight
pieces programming the NeXT, nearly an hour and a half of music. The
titles of some of these pieces, such as Para Enterrar la Esperanza
(1993) (To Bury the Hope) and Five Epitaphs (1993), reflect
increasing difficulties that Cubans faced. Contrastes II 20-8-92
(1992) is named for day that a decaying home collapsed on a family,
who had warned the authorities of the impending danger, and killed
them all. Other computer-generated pieces include Contrastes I
30-6-92, Loops, 1991, Treno (Lamentation) (1992), Paisaje (1992).
In the course of his career Blanco was elected Vice President of the
Cuban Committee of the International Music Council of UNESCO and
became a member of its Executive Committee of the International
Confederation for Electroacoustic Music. He also organized the first
music concourse of the Musical Division of Union Nacional de
Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC). He was selected by the
Electroacoustic Music Group of Bourges to participate in the
composition of the International Suite, commemorating the
Bicentennial of the French Revolution for which he composed his
1789-1989 (1989). Blanco traveled throughout Europe and Latin
America, and was among the first group of artists that Cuba's
revolutionary government sent to China. Travel to the United States
was harder, mainly due to U. S. travel restrictions.
In 1993, I worked with The Space in Boston and The Boston Creative
Music Alliance to bring Blanco to the United States to direct the
first live performances of his works in this country, and
commissioned Espacios V, for saxophones and tape. He spoke at
the Berklee College of Music, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Dartmouth College, and Wesleyan University. He presented works at
Wesleyan University's New Music Festival and the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston, where he presented his works on programs
with Ron Kuivila, Richard Lerman and George Lewis. Abraham Adzenyah
of Ghana and Sa Davis from the United States were called in to play
Cirkus-Toccata in place of the original Cuban percussionists.
While Blanco had to create a niche for his teachings outside of the
island's musical institutions, by the late 1980s it became clear that
his teachings were vital to pop musicians, who became increasingly
dependent on electronic instruments, whether for home production or
just for fashionable sounds. In the early 1990s, the Ministry of
Culture recognized this need and assumed responsibility for the ICAP
studio, renaming it the Laboratorio Nacional de Música
Electroacústica. Around the same time, the Soviet Union
withdrew aid from Cuba, and arts organizations faced increasing
pressure to produce income for the country; Blanco's funds were cut
considerably. In 1993, Blanco was unable to secure Veradero as a
site for his festival, as it was a prime location for tourism, one of
the island's main sources of hard currency. He tried to move the
festival to the more remote city of Holguin, but found it difficult
to obtain financial backing and had to cancel the festival at the
last minute. Undaunted by the present difficulties, he continues to
compose and travel, but difficulties as basic as the lack of
electricity or transportation make it harder for him to continue to
foster the community for electroacoustic music that he created in
Cuba.
Conclusion
For over fifty years Blanco's work as a composer, teacher, and
promoter electronic music have contributed to Cuba's reputation as
one of the most important musical centers in the Americas.
Throughout his career he has been one of the island's least
compromising composers and one of the most progressive. Through his
compositions he introduced Cubans to musique concrète
techniques, synthesizers, MIDI systems, real-time music software
and direct digital synthesis techniques. He has passed these
techniques down to several generations of composers through his
studio and private teachings. From his early acoustic works to the
pieces he created with the NeXT computer, Blanco's works have caught
the attention of Cuban and international audiences.
He is a musician who deeply understands the rich culture of his
homeland. As Ortega pointed out when asked about Blanco's
relationship to Cuba's musical legacy: "The fact is that the
music of Blanco is Cuban music. He cannot get away from Cuban music.
Regardless of his selection of instruments or themes . . . he could
base a piece on an Asian theme, and it would still be Cuban music.
He is Cuban-deeply Cuban, in the purest sense of the philosophy
represented by idiosyncrasy of a Cuban people." (Leonard 1991).
To date, Blanco has incorporated this aesthetic in a catalog of
approximately 100 electroacoustic works. No other composer living in
Cuba has applied this rich perspective to such a wide range of
electronic or computer-based means for making music. His
contributions as a composer and as a specialist in the field of
electronic and computer music constitute a landmark in the history of
Cuban music.
References
Ardévol, J. 1969. Introducción a Cuba, La
Música.
La Habana, Cuba: Instituto del Libro.
Brower, L. 1989. La Música, Lo Cubano y La Innovación,
La Habana, Cuba: Editorial Letras Cubanas.
Garcia, J. 1989. "Monólogo de cumpleaños."
Clave 13: 3-5.
Leonard, N. 1994. "Juan Blanco, New Music Pioneer." Rhythm
Music Magazine 3(4): 36-52.
Leonard, N. 1991. Unpublished interview with Ortega, Veradero.
Leonard, N. 1993. Unpublished interview with Blanco, Boston.
Leonard, N. 1996. Unpublished interviews with Paquito D'Rivera
(Massachusetts) and members of Los Van Van (New York).
Ortega, J. 1989. "Juan Blanco 70 Aniversario, Siempre Joven."
Clave 13: 3-5.
Schaeffer, P. 1952. À la Recherche d'une Musique
Concrète.
Paris: Editions du Seuil.