Rumor de Páramo

Acknowledgements
Charola del disco
Ana’s Commentary
Brennan essay
Vital essay
Composer notes
Track listing with links to audio samples

Acknowledgements …

For you who from the very beginning offered to this beautiful and harebrained project your unconditional support both moral and practical, as well as your imagination and creativity … I hope this music expresses what my words cannot:

Jorge Labarthe, Mini Caire, Bertha Cea, Ramiro Osorio, Marj Coffin, Julia Olmo, Lourdes Báez, Eugenia Tenorio, Víctor Jiménez, Adriana Camarena, Cynthia Wolloch, Maggie Hug, Susan Chapman, Ignacio Durán, Lirio Garduño, José Luis Rivera, Alberto Vital, Pilar Piñón, Gilberto Palmerín, Lorena Flores

… and for your individual donations:

Sandra Ward & Ron Mann, Jennifer Feil, Fay & Robert Jones, Marc Smith & Steve Lightner, Harold & Sue Davey, Gordon Denny & María Demello, Marie Isabelle Chevrier & Paul Jarkowsky, Dr. Carol Lang, Dianne Romain & Sterling Bennett, Luis Miguel Yamín Martínez, Rochelle Cashdan, AJ Buckingham, Patricia Velásquez, Araceli Velásquez & Jesús Ortega, Kate Delos, J.J. Wilson, Nichole Johnson, Rainer Schulte, Jean Schwarzbauer & Don Winkelmann, Constance Herrstrom & David Herrstrom, Clair Ransom & Roger Thorpe, Esther Boles, Claudia Herrmann, Jean-Pierre Buono

I am grateful to Mrs. Clara Aparicio de Rulfo for her authorization to use texts of Juan Rulfo as well as his name.

CHAROLA DEL DISCO

All the music of this recording was commissioned by Ana Cervantes, with the support of the institutions and individuals recognized in this booklet.

Ana’s Commentary

Magical, for me as interpreter, the idea that the extraordinary work of Juan Rulfo –in all its beauty and its desolation, all its profound humanity— might draw from each of these thirteen composers, from four countries and three generations, their utterly singular and personal response. Magical, the result: a torrent of imaginative and sonic richness. Magical, afterwards, to enter into this music, and invite it to enter into me, so as to share it here with you. Magical, in the end, that the circle both vital and virtual which connects composer-interpreter-listener becomes even more alive and vibrant, through the communion between interpreter and composer which results when one commissions music from the other.

Rumor de Páramo

One of the most daunting challenges, among the many that Mexican artists have confronted in the past and continue to struggle with today, is that of transposing to other media the astonishing, evocative, mysterious, and elusive universe of Juan Rulfo. Plastic artists, filmmakers, and dramatists have all repeatedly come up against a basic obstacle: how to translate to other languages what in Rulfo’s world is an inseparable symbiosis between words (spoken or not) the images they produce, and the fantasies they evoke? Mexican composers have eagerly embraced the impulse to give Rulfo’s words an equivalent expression in musical sounds, and their attempts have grappled with the same dilemma that has confounded other creators.

These twelve Rulfian pieces (which can be so called, in fact, due to their intention and destination) for piano represent a fascinating collective effort to capture his intangible universe of desolate plains, fires, and moors. The participating composers have achieved their goal with diverse tools and techniques, emphasizing in their general approach in their works Rulfo’s penchant for mystery and rumor, murmur, and allusion, without omitting the occasional discrete, almost dreamlike reference to the band music which, in another time, might have inhabited the dusty, gray, and barren space (physical, symbolic, phantasmal) of Comala. In the collected works we can confirm that the states of mind that the different composers evoke have a great deal in common (their varied origins and esthetic predilections notwithstanding), and we can also attest to their shared intention to speak without speaking, as Rulfo does, and to systematically avail themselves of the most potent communicative element of the acclaimed Jalisco born writer and photographer: silence.

In fact, silence constitutes the principal element in Rulfo’s music, as we find in this dialog taken from his marvelous short story Luvina:

“What is that?” she said

“What is what?” I asked

“That… that sound.”

“It’s silence...”

In effect, the recordings in this collection, from brief aphorisms to more ambitious pieces, are as ascetic, austere, and eloquent as that same sound.

Juan Arturo Brennan (English Translation: Padraic Smithies)

RULFO AND MUSIC

Any literary scholar is familiar with the following formula: the sense of a valuable text is always superior to its content as such; sense and content are not, under any circumstance, synonymous. Juan Rulfo had an ear for music and an eye for photography, and with this ear and this eye he multiplied the force of each word, each phrase, each paragraph of each text: there is music, and the music in the text is the sense of the text. There is music in his work, there is rhythm, there is tone, there are secret phrases, subterranean phrases, implicit phrases; the texts, finally, are scores, and we the readers have been enjoying and analyzing them for fifty years. Moreover, if Rulfo regarded the magnificent nouvelle El gallo de oro with some disdain, it was only because not all of the phrases were constructed with the musicality that was so important to him; as though a composer were reticent to return to the manuscript of a work from which he remembers certain small dissonances, or simply a few schemes not fully developed.

We are just beginning to discover the vast musical culture of Juan Rulfo, that began very early, around 1926, in the house of San Gabriel, from whose windows flowed the notes of a gramophone, an object which at the time only certain families could afford. Nor was the music ordinary.

Suffice it now to say that by example Rulfo’s passion for Germany can almost translate to “Rulfo’s passion for Deutsche Gramophone”. As if to say, he jumped from the steps of the airplane to the medieval music stands and did away with almost everything in between.

This recording, arduously promoted by the admirable Ana Cervantes, would have awakened his curiosity, humility, pride and gratitude.

[NOTA EN CONTRAPORTADA DEL DISCO: TEXTO EN ESP-FR-ENG-DE]

RUMOR DE PÁRAMO NOTAS DE PROGRAMA (ENGLISH)

GEORGINA DERBEZ R. (México, 1968): Del viento, la esperanza (From the wind, hope)

The piece seeks to evoke the atmosphere of enormous solitude and silence –the parched plain, useless and without life—through which four people walk in search of hope. This distant hope is only glimpsed, conveyed by the wind. The piece’s gestures, perceived from very far away (time seems to stretch out in the course of the journey) slowly tend toward a dialogue, and the things which represent that distant dream –the presence of a town, of human life, of greenness—become increasingly present.

CHARLES B. GRIFFIN (USA, 1968): Murmuring in Comala

Rulfo’s striking sonic palette --groaning wheels, rattling windows, falling rain and murmuring ghosts-- echoes the complex narrative unfolding, where we rarely begin by knowing whose voice we are hearing. A sound implies a someone making the sound, and so we recognize the voices peripherally, like registering a ghost image. We discover whose voice it was rather than whose voice it is. Equally striking is the novel’s non-linear conception of time. It flowers slowly in multiple directions. This is a lovely analogy to music, which is surprisingly multidirectional: we listen ahead and backward simultaneously, constantly reinterpreting each new musical gesture by placing it in its previous context and anticipating its direction.

JACK FORTNER (USA, 1938): Vine a Comala (I came to Comala)

Vine a Comala (“I came to Comala”) are the first words in Juan Rulfo's novel Pedro Páramo. The piece is constructed in a traditional A-B-A design (fast slow, fast), but is really a transliteration of some of the striking imagery from the novel: the mirage and mountains approaching Comala; the ringing of the church bell and the ghostly sounds of the village; and, finally, the death of the narrator, Juan Preciado.

TOMÁS MARCO (Spain, 1942): Siluetas en el camino de Comala (Silhouettes on the road to Comala)

This work for solo piano was written in 2005-2006 at the request of pianist Ana Cervantes, to whom it is dedicated, for her project Murmurs from the Wasteland. The work alludes to the ambience of suggestions, hints, half-tints and mysteries which Rulfo’s novel evokes, and is based on the constant but varied use of a descending figure which acts as a continuous presence as well as a formal connection, around which appear a series of sudden fleeting silhouettes, which emerge, take on presence and vanish. There is no descriptive and certainly no narrative intention – rather, a desire to evoke an ambience, to ground these mysterious but very real silhouettes which arise in the road to the mythical Comala.

HORACIO URIBE DUARTE (México, 1970): Cinco visiones sobre Comala (Five Visions of Comala):

Chorale for the anguished soul of Miguel Páramo
Murmurs in the village
Sounds of the graveyard
Father Rentería
Fiesta in Comala (after the death of Susana San Juan)

I imagine Rulfo’s world, Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas, as desolate places deformed by heat emanating from the earth. Fantastical places, so common yet mysterious. Through this work I have tried to evoke images, not by anecdote, but simply the first images that came to me from the book the first time that I read it at the age of 10 or 12. I cannot avoid the association of a Mexico painted through the music of Silvestre Revueltas, and so I dedicate this piece to his memory.

EUGENIO TOUSSAINT (México, 1954): Palabras sin sonido (Words without Sound)

Palabras sin sonido is sustained by an ostinato of diatonic cluster chords that form a non-conductive spiral around which a series of melodic lines are woven that are similar to soundless words. The piece is inspired by a fragment from Pedro Páramo in which the narrator speaks of hearing words that “had no sound at all, did not resonate; were felt; but without sound…”

VICENTE BARRIENTOS Y. (México,, 1974): Llanuras Verdes (el color de la tierra) (Verdant Plains (the color of the earth))

The work and its development are inspired by a passage in Pedro Páramo in which the author speaks of green plains and of “seeing the horizon rise and fall with the wind which moves the stems of wheat, the ruffle of the evening with a rain of triple ruffling. The color of the earth, the scent of alfalfa and of bread. A town which smells of spilled honey…”

ANNE LeBARON (USA, 1953): Los Murmullos (The Murmurs)

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz once said that Juan Rulfo is "the only Mexican novelist to have provided us an image - rather than a mere description - of our physical surroundings." Referencing spectral murmurs filtering through the streets of Comala, whisperings of dreams, and groanings in the ghost town cemetery of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, this work for piano pays homage to the sonic images of the secret nonvoices populating Rulfo’s novel. I'm grateful to the marvelous pianist Ana Cervantes, for whom the composition is written and to whom it's dedicated, for the invitation to write for her and to be included in her ambitious and worthy project.

FEDERICO IBARRA GROTH (México, 1946): Páramo pétreo (Páramo unyielding)

The connection I found to Rulfo in this piece came through his obsessions; in fact, the author’s repetition of various themes or atmospheres in his stories such as the presence of dust, the wind; the journey, which can be flight, walking, obligation, persecution; of ghosts, confront my own obsessions. The construction of the piece is simple: A theme of three incessantly repeated notes gains variation through new counterpoint, giving it the character of a passacaglia or a chaconne though its structure is far from similar. The name of the piece evokes the author’s play with consonants in the titles of his books: the double L in el Llano en llamas, the P in Pedro Páramo, this last title having served my transformation.

CARLOS CRUZ DE CASTRO (Spain, 1941): Vértigo en Comala (Vertigo in Comala)

The simultaneity of contrary elements is a logical consequence in surrealism. The simultaneity of contrary elements is part of the essence of the novel Pedro Páramo, and the simultaneity of contrary and rapid elements provokes a dizzying whirlwind. The idea of vertigo in Pedro Páramo comes from the incessant contradiction between that which exists and does not exist, between that which never existed and is nevertheless assumed to have existed. Staticness, tedium, lassitude and existence without knowing why or what for in Comala, form part of a whole which in the novel produces an explosive vertigo as a reaction to the staticness, tedium, lassitude and existence without knowing why or what for in Comala. In this duality of dizziness, between the slow disturbance of the sense of reality and the whirlwind resulting from the awareness of conflicting elements, is the vertiginous idea which has given rise to this one and a half- minute sketch. This work, composed in Madrid in 2006, is dedicated to Ana Cervantes, who commissioned it for her project Rumor de Páramo / Murmurs from the Wasteland.

MARIO LAVISTA (México,, 1944): Páramos de Rulfo (Wastelands of Rulfo)

Páramos de Rulfo is intended as an evocation of the literary and photographic world of Juan Rulfo, a world of spaces which are open, slow, filled with emptiness, with murmurs, with things half-said, with silence and resonance; with time that does not move.

STEPHEN McNEFF (United Kingdom, 1953): Pavane (in the old way) for doña Susanita

Music of all kinds permeates the themes of Pedro Páramo even when it is mostly unheard. As a composer I could pick and choose from an abundance of ideas, but kept being drawn to the character of Susana San Juan, almost mad and unobtainable. I had a striking sound image of her which reminded me of Ravel’s Pavane in its formality and restraint. I was inspired partly by my English predecessors who composed pavanes, embracing the mystery and elegance of the Iberian forms with their magnificent darkness as well as blinding light. There is a beguiling complexity of history and relationships here – a subtext of love and hate. We are persuaded by hints and gestures of things that were or could have been; like Pedro Páramo himself we hear the unobtainable. Towards the end the music becomes unrestrained, then quietens and, like the characters, crumbles to silence.

RUMOR DE PÁRAMO

Ana Cervantes, titular e intérprete

ORDEN FINAL DE PROGRAMA, DISCO COMPACTO:

TRAC TITULO DURACIÓN

1 GEORGINA DERBEZ R. (MÉXICO, 1968): Del viento, la esperanza 5:09

2 CHARLES B. GRIFFIN (EUA, 1968): Murmuring in Comala 3:46

3 JACK FORTNER (EUA, 1938): Vine a Comala 6:40

4 TOMÁS MARCO (ESPAÑA, 1942): Siluetas en el camino a Comala 7:07

HORACIO URIBE DUARTE (México, 1970): Cinco visiones sobre Comala:

5 I.Coral por el alma en pena de Miguel Páramo 1:11

6 II.Murmullos en el pueblo .22

7 III.Ruidos del camposanto 1:31