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W ORLD I V I AGAZINE
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Isang Yun
Toru Takemitsu no. b-l
Jose Maceda
Hans-Joachim Koellreuter
Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen
Fernand Vandenbogaerde
Denmark, England, Puerto Rico
Musical Snobism
ISCM World Music Days
ISCM Reports and Minutes

Nu mb e r 6 Se p t e mb e r 1996 DM12
D-50464 Ko l n P.O.Bo x 102461
6 Neves, opus citatum, 122.
® Neves, opus citatum, 120.

This paper was presented at ENCOMPOR IV, September 1995, Pfirto Alegre, in celebration
of Koellreutter's eightieth birthday.
Translation from the Brazilian-Portuguese original by Graciela Paraskevaldis

A Panoramic View of Puerto Rican New Music

Latin American Crossroads

by William Ortiz

Puerto Rico is a musical warehouse of traditional forms, dance and song. Music
is an intimate part of the daily lives of Puerto Ricans and has a long history as a
primary vehicle of expression within Puerto Rican culture. Puerto Rico also has a
lively world of new music, which, as everywhere else, wages a constant struggle
against all-embracing traditionalism and commercialism. Puerto Rican new
music is a mosaic made up of different trends and currents that has its roots in
the so-called "classical” tradition that can be traced to the early church music of
the Spanish colonizers. There is not a mainstream contemporary music in Puerto
Rico and it probably does not follow a logical historic evolution. Yet it parallels
somewhat musical development in the United States and Europe. After 1970,
strong countercurrents have arisen. Today there is a search for a national way of
expression, though the techniques may be universal. To fully understand this
manifestation and cultural phenomena in Puerto Rican society, it should be taken
into account the sociopolitical conditions from which this music emerged, socio-
political conditions that have been shaped primarily by the colonialism imposed
on Puerto Rico first by Spain and then by the United States. One segment of the
new music world is engaged in the simmering independence movement, and
speaks out against all non-Puerto Rican influences. But the most active forces in
Puerto Rican new music have fought to bring to the island the latest musical cur-
rents from around the world, and many of the composers have arrived at unique
and enticing fusions of old and new.
Puerto Rican reality is complex and contradictory. The island was one of the
poorest and ignored territories of the New World since its discovery and coloni-
zation by Spain in 1493. In 1898, the island was handed over to the United States
as a consequence of the Spanish-United States of American war. All of a sudden,
during the fifties, after approximately for hundred and fifty years of isolation and

World New Music Magazine 6 73

 margination, Puerto Rico is transformed, by the industrialization program called
“Operation Bootstrap”, into one of the most developed areas of the hemisphere
and economically the most powerful Caribbean island. The dream of indepen-
dence was practically buried when Commonwealth status was granted to the is-
land by the USA in 1952, with all its commodities, contradictions and paradoxes.
The fifties were years of optimism, strengthened by a real improvement in the liv-
ing conditions.
It is within this social-time frame that occurs the most important transformation,
up to this date, of Puerto Rican concert music: the so-called Puerto Rican Na-
tionalist School of Composers, the senior generation of Puerto Rican new music.
They were Hbctor Campos Parsi (1922), who studied at the New England
Conservatory of Music, with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood and with Nadia
Boulanger in Paris; Amaury Veray (1922-1995) who also studied at the New
England Conservatory and at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome; Jack
Delano (1914) who was born in Ukrainia and moved to Puerto Rico in 1946, after
music and art studies in the United States, to found and direct the cinematogra-
phy section of the Division for the Education of the Community; and later on Luis
Antonio Ramirez (1923-1994), who studied at the Madrid Conservatory of Music
with Cristbbal Halffter. The movement focused on and amplified the essence of
Puerto Rican traditional folk music within the frame of European classical forms.
The emergence of this aesthetics responded to a nationalist sentiment - some-
what belated - of the Puerto Rican artist to the intents of cultural nihilism by the
North American military governments at the turn of the century. The leadership
and pedagogy of these seminal figures opened a new world of possibilities for fu-
ture generations of composers to explore, enrich and transform.
But this musical occurrence was not an isolated event nor an accident. As in
all art, the advent of a new aesthetic idea is usually not an instantaneous eruption.
Musical modernism and national sentiment began to be manifest in the works of
earlier twentieth century island composers such as Braulio Duefio Coibn
(1854-1934), Jos6 Ignacio Quintbn (1881-1925), Monserrate (Monsita) Ferrer
(1885-1966) and Jos6 Enrique Pedreira (1904-1959). It also involved the advent
of government sponsored institutions of musical performance, music training and
cultural agencies. It is relevant to point out that this movement got its impetus
when the then recently created Division of Community Education (1946) began
commissioning film scores from these composers. An equally important ramifica-
tion of this was Jack Delano's 1948 score for the film “Desde las nubes” which
was among the world’s first to use “musique concrete”. It is also pertinent that the
first major music compositions of Hbctor Campos Parsi and Jack Delano, the
“Divertimento del Sur” for string orchestra and the "Sonata en la menor" for viola
and piano, respectively, were written for a composition contest sponsored by the

74 World New Music Magazine 6

government-owned radio station WIPR in 1953. In 1955, the Institute of Puerto
Rican Culture was created and the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra was estab-
lished in 1958. These government branches engaged performers and commis-
sioned new works either directly or through grants to such groups as ballet and
theatre companies. An example being Campos Parsi’s “Urayoan”, Veray’s
“Cuando las mujeres” and Delano’s “La bruja de Loiza”, which were all commis-
sioned for the Ballets de San Juan. The enthusiasm felt within this cultural rebirth
also establishes in 1957 the tradition of the Casals Festival. In the words of its
founder, the world renowned Catalan cellist Pablo Casals: “Puerto Ricans will be
exposed to the best music performed by the best musicians". The festival was
originally conceived as a cultural complement to Puerto Rico’s industrialization
program. It is the most prestigous classical music event on the island and in
keeping with its founder’s philosophy also the most conservative. After twenty
years of existence and the death of Casals, the limited classical repertoire was
challenged by Puerto Rican musicians, the press and the now defunct
“Asociacibn Nacional de Compositores", which in 1976 was able to achieve the
programming of works by some local composers. Today the music director of the
Casals Festival is the internationally known Polish composer Krzysztof Pen-
derecki, who has put together some interesting programs with a varied assort-
ment of epochs and ensemble formats, although the festival is still basically main-
stream.
Music education in Puerto Rico is centered in four major institutions: the Puerto
Rico Conservatory of Music established in 1960, the music departments of the
Interamerican University at San German and the University of Puerto Rico at Rio
Piedras, and the Free Schools of Music, which are junior conservatories for high
school students. The Conservatory of Music represents the more European, con-
servative side of our music culture, whereas the University of Puerto Rico enter-
tains the more progressive trends. The music department at Rio Piedras boasts
the only electronic and computer music studio at an educational institution and is
in the process of approving Master Degrees in Musicology and/or Ethnomusicol-
ogy, Composition and Music Education, all geared towards our Caribbean real-
ity.
By the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies the government’s in-
dustrialization program, which gave such economic optimism to the island, be-
gins to break down. The “Shining Star of the Caribbean” or the “Isle of
Enchantment", as Puerto Rico is known for its model of economic growth, starts
to reveal its limitations and weaknesses. The “escape value” of Puerto Rican im-
migrants to the USA turns sour due to racism and oppression. The economic in-
equality, at first hidden by the initial improvement in living conditions now be-
comes clear. By the mid-sixties the nationalist music movement begins to extin-

World New Music Magazine 6 75

 guish itself. Veray and Campos Parsi begin to respond to the new contemporary
music techniques and relegate nationalistic elements. Campos Parsi abandons
nationalism but seeks inspiration in the native Taino culture. His “Petroglifos”
(1966) for violin, piano and violoncello employs aleatoric sections with twelve-
tone material and "Arawak” (1970) is scored for violoncello and electronic tape.
Amauray Veray undertakes the route of political protest in his “Fantasia para or-
questa, a la memoria de Gilberto Concepcibn de Gracia” (1965) and “De
Profundis” (1970) for orchestra and spoken chorus. Serial techniques are used
by Veray in both of these works to express his deep patriotic anguish.
In 1968, the “Fluxus" group, under the leadership of Rafel Aponte-Ledbe
(1938) and Francis Schwartz (1940) was organized to ferment avant-garde music
and break with the nationalist position. These two composers embraced the full
range of international modernist ideas, from serialism to mixed-media expres-
sions and made a strong impact on the music aesthetics of the decade. Aponte-
Ledbe has been a major figure in the promotion of new music in Puerto Rico. As
founder of the discontinued Biennials of New Music (1978) and director of the
Latin American Foundation for Contemporary Music since 1981, he has orga-
nized many concerts of every type including concerts of popular music. He was
educated at the Madrid Conservatory and later continued at the Di Telia Institute
in Buenos Aires studying with Alberto Ginastera and Gerardo Gandini. As a com-
poser, Aponte has been interested in controlled improvisation and extensions of
the playing techniques used on traditional instruments. His “Seis diferencias para
piano" (1963) represent the composer’s early stylistic dodecaphonic language,
while his orchestral works “Elejia” (1967) and “Impulses, in memoriam Julia de
Burgos” (1967) are based on the movement of order to disorder, alternating alea-
toric and measured sections. His latest work “Cuentos de Daniel Santos” for or-
chestra (1995) is a homage to the late popular music singer and displays a kind
of consolidation of his previous work with thematic quotes from popular tunes.
Francis Schwartz has been a pioneer in the field of music theater in Puerto
Rico. His polyartistic creations, as he calls them, incorporate aromas, gestures,
humor, chance operations and public participation. Philadelphia-born and
Texas-bred Schwartz received his doctorate in Paris after studies at Julliard in
New York. His compositions include fully composed instrumental and vocal com-
positions, but he has devoted particular energy to works involving improvisation
and audience participation. These include: “Auschwitz” (1968), a multi-sensorial
music-theater piece; "Cosmos” (1976), an “intercontinental polyartistic event”
performed at the University of Puerto Rico, which included musical contributions
telephoned live from around the world and broadcasted to the audience; and
"We’ve Got (Poly) Rhythm” (1984) for guitar and audience participation, which re-
fers to the song by George Gershwin, in whose memory the piece was com-

76 World New Music Magazine 6

posed. At present, Schwartz is Dean of the Humanities Faculty at the University
of Puerto Rico at R(o Piedras.
Hdctor Campos Parsi wrote in his formidable “La musica en Puerto Rico": “In
1975, Puerto Rican new music is channeled into two principal routes: one conser-
vative, that is still associated with aspects of tonality and conventional instrumen-
tation represented by Delano and Ramirez, and the other in which figure the
avant-garde composers Aponte-Ledde, Schwartz and their pupils and in which
also participate, in their own personal way, Veray and Campos Parsi”. The aes-
thetics of Aponte-Ledde and Schwartz are evident in the early work of Luis
Manuel Alvarez (1939), who studied with Roque Cordero and Iannis Xenakis at
Indiana University and where he also studied ethnomusicology. Serial technique
was used to create various melodic designs and two-voice fugues in his “Seis
piezas breves para flauta y clarinete” (1977). Among his other works, we find “La
Creacidn" (1974) for orchestra, narrator and electronic tape, the art song
“Suehos de colores" (1975) for soprano and traditional Puerto Rican folk instru-
ments, using an aleatoric format, and his collection of “Alvaradas" for piano and
“Alvaradas" for guitar. As an ethnomusicologist Alvarez has done important in-
vestigations on Puerto Rican folk music. The conservative line of composition that
Campos Parsi wrote about, is followed by composer/guitarist Ernesto Cordero
(1946). He studied at the Madrid Conservatory, at the Accademia di Santa
Cecilia in Rome and at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. His output is particular-
ly for guitar or voice and guitar, for he is a leading exponent of the Puerto Rican
art song. His highly lyrical, neo-classic style is evident in the “Concierto
Evocative" (1977) for guitar and orchestra and the “Concierto Criollo" (1986) for
Puerto Rican cuatro and orchestra. Cordero is founder and co-director of the
International Guitar Festival of Puerto Rico.
Funding cut-backs and indifferent arts adminstrators continue to plague the
new music community of today. The lack of music publishing and new music re-
cording and its dissemination contribute to the apathy. For the newer generation
of Island composers, Puerto Rico is an ever-surprising fusion of cultures and a
continuous political battlefield where we keep trying to devine ourselves; a coun-
try of asphalt and cement where television is probably the most important mem-
ber of the family; an emotional island where sensuality and garbage live in har-
mony; a generous people who cannot live without federal welfare and food
stamps; a spiritually fertile land where traditional values and violent crime exist
side by side; drug points, shopping malls, urbanizations, the San Juan-New York
air shuttle, traffic jams and cellular phones; a strange hybrid of the US-American
dream and the problems of the Third World. Out of this reality there emerges a
group of composers who have embraced various alternatives to express this pe-
riod of chaos with artistic confidence. This generation of composers has in effect

World New Music Magazine 6 77

 synthesized the two musical tendencies which Campos Parsi wrote about in
1975. What we see is the leaking and crumbling of the barriers that separate
these two currents, leading to a post-modernist range of hybridization, and a re-
definition of nationalist and neo-romantic tendencies with minimalism, if any, only
hinted at.
Carlos Cabrer’s (1950) beautifully wrought neo-impressionistic works stand
somewhat at the more conservative end of the spectrum. A student of Aponte-
Ledbe at the University of Puerto Rico, he is currently pursuing doctoral studies
in England. Modernism is evident in his relatively brief output with the use of seri-
al technique in works like “La rota voz del agua” (1982) for soprano, flute, guitar
and cello. Obvious folk references are not evident in his music and the orchestral
works “C^nticos” (1977), “Ceremoniales" (1984) and “Lago de los suenos" utilize
an atonal language of consonant intervals without recurring to tonality. Jos6
Montalvo (1951) has been active in computer music composition. He studied at
Indiana University and New York University and at this writing he is a “Visiting
Scholar” at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford
University. He presents concerts of real-time computer music and his works in-
clude: “Ruisehor” (1993) for electronic keyboards; the orchestral “Mito caribe”
(1993) and “Horizonte fractal” (1994) for computer-generated tape. Carlos
Vazquez (1952) is also a leading exponent of electronic and computer music on
the Island. An ex-student of Aponte-Led6e at the University of Puerto Rico, he
completed his doctorate at the University of Paris at Sorbonne. Vazquez is the di-
rector of the Electronic Music Studio at the University of Puerto Rico and has
been involved in organizational activities of new music, which include being a
founding member of the “Foro de Compositores del Caribe", first president of the
ex-“Asociaci6n Nacional de Compositores” and the music director of the “Mues-
tra Internacional de Musica Electroacustica”. His piano concerto “Ecua-Jey”
(1986), the symphonic suite “Brisas del Caribe” (1986) and “Las sinfonias de la
nacionalidad” (1993) embrace and amplify the nationalist tradition incorporating
dance movements of other Caribbean islands such as the Dominican merengue
and the Jamaican reggae. Roberto Sierra (1953) studied with Luis Antonio
Ramirez at the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music and with Gybrgy Ligeti in
Germany, after studies at the Royal College of Music in London. An instrumental
purist. Sierra’s music combines a formidable contrapuntal technique with Puerto
Rican folk and popular music and he forms musical structures from his ongoing
analysis of the earlier masters of this century. Representative works include:
“Polarizaciones” (1979) for orchestra, “Glosas” (1987) for piano and orchestra
and “Salsa para vientos" (1983). Sierra has also held important administrative po-
sitions in Puerto Rico.
Jazz and the “classical” tradition are integrated in the music of Alfonso

7ft World New Music Magazine 6

Fuentes (1954) and Raymond Torres Santos (1958). Fuentes studied at the New
England Conservatory and is concerned with the meditative and spiritual powers
of music. He is particularly known for his carefully structured piano “Improvisa-
ciones” which evoke the solos or “descargas" found in salsa or Latin jazz. Other
works include a "String Quartet” (1983) written “to break the academic barriers";
his major work to date is the orchestral “Planeaciones ancestrales" (1990) where
magical mysticism is realized through his evocative orchestration. Like Fuentes,
Torres Santos is active in both concert and popular music. His new music is high-
ly influenced by his activities in media entertainment, which includes scoring and
performing for films and television. This has also led to his interest and expertise
in electronic and computer music technology. A student of Amaury Veray at the
Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music, where he is the current Chancellor, Torres
Santos completed doctoral studies at the University of California in Los Angeles.
His piece “La guaracha del Macho Camacho" (1983) for acoustic piano and
electronic piano, synthesizes his “crossover" philsophy: the acoustic instrument
representing the "classical" sound, while the electronic instrument evokes the
contemporary sonority. Concluding with Javier de la Torre (1962), we come to a
full cycle. An eclectic composer, his music is fundamentally rooted in the "classi-
cal" techniques and aesthetics of this century. An ex-student of Carlos V^squez
at the University of Puerto Rico, he continued studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and
at Cornell University. “Aulos" (1992) for woodwind quintet, displays virtuosic in-
strumental writing, while his "Cinco piezas breves" (1986) for piano, utilize ex-
tended piano techniques with a four-note set as the motivic cell from which mel-
ody and harmony are construed. The piece is a personal tribute to the legacy of
Anton Webern.
As seen, the metamorphosis and redefinition of the barriers between sophisti-
cated concert music and popular music has been in process for many decades
in Puerto Rico. We listen in different contexts and express diverse emotions
which generate the distinctive colors of our music. This in turn responds to the
history of our class society and its powerful ideological and cultural configura-
tions. The ideas and searchings which began to take root in the nineteenth cen-
tury with the very first Puerto Rican “classical” composers such as Felipe
Gutibrrez y Espinosa (1825-1899), Manuel Gregorio Tavarez (1843-1883) and
Juan Morel ampos (1857-1896) have now blossomed and flowered, so that by
near twentieth-century's end, Puerto Rico's new music manifestation has pro-
duced works which can be appreciated and enjoyed the world over.

William Ortiz, born 1947, is a prolific composer whose broad catalog includes orchestral
and chamber works, songs, chamber opera and electronic and computer music. Ortiz
studied composition with Hdctor Campos Parsi and form and analysis with H6ctor Tosar at

World New Music Magazine 6 79

 the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music. He was later granted the Doctor of Philosophy in
composition from S.U.N.Y. Buffalo, where he studied with Lejaren Hiller and Morton
Feldman. Instrumental color and experimental forms are interesting aspects of his music,
which is communicative, vital and anti-dogmatic. In works such as “124 E. 107th St.” (1979)
for percussion, electronic tape and narrator; “Street music” (1980) for flute, trombone and
percussion; "Graffiti Nuyorican" for piano and percussion; “Resonancia esf^rica” (1982) for
orchestra; “Urbanizacidn" (1985) for solo percussion; “Ghetto” (1987) for singer/narrator,
flute, electric guitar and percussion; "Caribe urbano" (1990) for woodwinds and piano;
“Unknown Poets from the Full-Time Jungle" (1992) for soprano and piano; “Suspensibn de
Soledad en 3 tiempos" (1990) for orchestra, and others, we find two fundamental ideas: 1)
the need to convert the language of the street into a legitimate instrument and 2) the need
to express musically his experience as a Puerto Rican raised in New York.

Jorge Peixinho t

Jorge Manuel Rosada Marques Peixinho was born on January 20, 1940 in Monti-
jo, Portuga. He studied piano and composition with Santos and Crones de Vas-
concelos at Lisbon Conservatory up to 1958. Further composition studies were
with Goffredo Petrassi and Boris Porena in Rome, Luigi Nono in Venice, and with
Pierre Boulez in Basel. He participated in the Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik Darm-
stadt between 1960 and 1970, where he was inspired by Stockhausen, Boulez
and Gottfried Michael Koenig. Peixinho was professor at Oporto Conservatory of
Music in 1965 and 1966, visiting professor in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Brazil, and
from 1985 he was professor for composition at the National Conservatory of Mu-
sic in Lisbon.
In 1970 Jorge Peixinho and his collegues founded the Grupo de Musica Con-
tempor^nea de Lisboa, which he has continued to direct, in 1975 he was rebuild-
ing the Portuguese Section of the International Society of Contemporary Music,
which had existed from 1946-1953, and was elected to the Presidential Council
of the ISCM from 1977—1981. Peixinho received the Gulbenkian Prize in 1974 and
some other prizes from the Author’s Society, the Music Council and the Radio.
Jorge Peixinho composed a great number of pieces for orchestra, different
chamber ensembles, piano, vocal soloists and choirs, theatre, film, ballet music,
and electroacoustic tape music. Starting with strongly serial music he changed to
freer serialist methods, to concepts of harmonic and melodic integration and to
instrumental theater scores. Most of them are still unpublished, some have yet to
be performed.
Jorge Peixinho died at the age of fifty-five in 1995 in Lisbon. The ISCM com-
munity lost in him an intelligent, very active and enthusiastic, warm- hearted col-
league and friend.

80 World New Music Magazine 6