This week’s theme is…More Syndication! Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂
More Syndication, Day 2 – Malambo from Estancia by Alberto Ginastera
Have you ever seen this movie?
I must confess that I have not, and have few strong intentions for remedying that condition in the near future. Although the trailer was funnier than I thought. Maybe I’ll watch it with the kids someday if the right opportunity presents itself, but given the critical response it has garnered it’s not exactly on my short list these days. But, it would probably be fun to watch and consider the mix of history and psychology upon which it is based, which has made such an impact on the history of the New World over the last few centuries.
El Dorado refers to a mythical tribe/city/empire in what is now Latin America that was inordinately rich in gold, to the point that it could be rather wastefully incorporated into religious and tribal ceremonies. As European explorers began to mix with the indigenous peoples of the New World they started to hear about this and other related legends. And, well, many of the Europeans who caught wind of this just knew they could make better use of the precious stuff than the indigenous folks were, and so legends like El Dorado (which roughly translates to something like “The City of Gold”; it literally means “The Golden”) inspired something akin to a gold rush for Spanish and Portuguese explorers who threw in their chips and mounted exorbitantly expensive expeditions across the ocean and through the vast and varied terrain of what is today South America. Of course, the influences and causes of expeditions like that are manifold and nuanced, with numerous political, imperial, industrial, commercial, and religious aims depending on whom you would have asked, but I’m sure the lust for gold was on many of their minds.
A similar legend involves the “Mountain of Silver”, or Sierra de la Platta, which supposedly enriched an indigenous tribe and their ruler, the White King, named for his entirely silver throne, near the present-day Andes Mountains. This fantastic story fueled no fewer than four ambitious expeditions in search of the Mountain of Silver carried out by different explorers from Spain and Venice over the course of the sixteenth century. While many of the conquistadors did indeed discover precious metals in varying quantities, the Sierra de la Platta itself was never found. The legend was strong enough, however, to attach to one of the regions in present-day South America a related name: “Argentina” comes from the Latin word argentum, meaning “silver”.
Like so many of the Central and South American nations, Argentina’s history is a disjunct story which includes episodes of tribal Indian cultures, Iberian colonization, and then a long series of governments, variously democratic or dictatorial, which has only recently stabilized, in spite of the best intentions and efforts of many along the way. The story of Evita is one such episode, covering the life of president Juan Peron.
One consequence of this kind of history is that a stable environment well-suited to the cultivation of art becomes elusive, and a flourishing scene which combines rigorous training and native colors in equal measure must fight to develop, sometimes never really blossoming. You can read about another such nation here. And so there are not many prominent Argentinian classical musicians. The only ones I know to have come from Argentina are Daniel Barenboim, Martha Argerich, tango master Astor Piazzolla, and one of Latin America’s greatest composers, Alberto Ginastera.
A young hotshot, Ginastera scored one of his first major commissions fresh out of his conservatory training in Buenos Aires, the ballet Estancia, written at the order of Lincoln Kirstein, a New York City-based ballet impresario who was traveling through South America around the time of Ginastera’s graduation. For his first ballet, Panambi, Ginastera had focused on various aspects of the indigenous Indian peoples of South America, a subject that all South American composers seemed to gravitate toward at some point. For Estancia, his second ballet, Ginastera chose a thoroughly Argentinian character to portray, the gauchos.
If you were to make a Western movie set in Argentina (for more about Western movies, see this post), the gauchos would be central characters and it may very well be set entirely, or at least in part, on an Estancia. The flatlands of Argentina and Paraguay are called pampas, after an Andean word meaning “plains”. After the Spanish and Portuguese began to colonize the New World, wealthy landowners set up ranches on the pampas, which they called estancias, in order to raise the cattle they had imported from Europe. The rugged farmhands who worked the estancias were, and are still, called gauchos. The spirit of the gauchos runs deep, and once you are a gaucho, well, I gather nothing else quite satisfies:
In his Estancia Ginastera celebrated the gauchos, their culture, and their work. The ballet is rich with movements illustrating various aspects of life and work on the estancias, including different kinds of workers, livestock, crops, and leisure. The story is about a city slicker who falls in love with the daughter of an estancia master. The daughter is only interested in gaucho suitors, and so the boy from the city must convince her that he too is worthy of her affections.
Ginastera’s Estancia, coming as it does from early in his career, is full of Argentine folk influences. He would use less and less of them as his music became more abstract and formalistic over the ensuing years, but Estancia pulses with the raw and irresistible dance rhythms of Argentinian folk music. Unfortunately the ballet company with which Kerstein intended to introduce Estancia broke up before it could be premiered and Ginastera had to wait many years to witness the first production. But in the meantime he, as so many composers of ballet have done, extracted a suite of four movements, which are often presented on orchestral concerts. You can hear the four movement suite here:
But, if you only get to know one movement, make it the finale, the malambo. A malambo is a traditional Argentine “step dance”, which is to say a dance that focuses on fancy footwork over all else. It’s a little like Riverdance I would think. The malambo was intense, and often the source of good-natured competition on the estancia as the gauchos competed to out-dance one another. The malambo is the finale of Estancia, and it is here that the young city boy makes his final plea to defeat his gaucho competition for the hand of the estancia heiress. Listen to this astounding and energetic performance led by the up-and-coming Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel as the Simon Bolivar Youth Symphony shows its South American pride. Can you hear the episodes which represent the different dancers having their say, one at a time? Listen to Ginastera’s remarkable orchestral colors and rhythms. If this doesn’t get you dancing, I don’t know what will.
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