LAMúsiCa
Volume 2, Number 4 (May, 1999)
Carmen Téllez, Editor in Chief
Gerardo Dirié, Editor
Erick Carballo, Managing Editor
A Conversation with Roque Cordero
by Thomas Carl Townsend
Composer, conductor and educator, Roque Cordero was born in Panama City, Republic of Panama, August 16, 1917. He studied composition with Ernst Krenek and conducting with Dimitri Mitropoulos in Minneapolis, Stanley Chapple at Tanglewood and Leon Barzin in New York. He was director of the Institute of Music and Artistic Director and conductor of the National Symphony of his native country. Later he was assistant director of the Latin American Music Center and professor of composition at Indiana University. Presently he is distinguished professor emeritus at Illinois State University, where he has taught since 1972.
Cordero has received commissions from Dimitri Mitropoulos, Minneapolis Civic Orchestra, Elizabeth Coolidge Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, Third Caracas Festival, Second Festival of Rio de Janeiro, Alabama University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kennedy Center, National Institute of Culture of Panama, Illinois Arts Council, Illinois State University, Cincinnati Symphony and Peoria Symphony Orchestra. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for musical creation in 1949, an Honorary Doctor's Degree from Hamline University in 1966, and the Grand Cross of Vasco Núñez de Balboa from Panama in 1982.
His works have been widely performed in Latin America, the United States and Europe, receiving international awards for his First Symphony (Honorable Mention, Detroit, 1947), Rapsodia Campesina (First Prize, Panama, 1953), Second Symphony (Caro de Boesi Award, Caracas, Venezuela, 1957), Violin Concerto (1974 Koussevitzky International Recording Award), and Third String Quartet (Chamber Music Award, San José, Costa Rica, 1977). Several of his compositions have been recorded by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra, the Chicago Sinfonietta and various chamber music groups. He has appeared as guest conductor in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and in the United States. His biography appears in Americas, June, 1958; Rieman's Musik Lexicon, 1972; Vinton's Dictionary of Contemporary Music, 1974; The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1980; Panameños Ilustres, 1988; and Contemporary Composers, St. James Press, 1993.
July 18, 1997
Does the composer have an obligation, and if so, to whom, and how might such an obligation be fulfilled?
Personally I feel that my obligation is first to me, to express my ideas in sound. I could not express them in words because I am not a writer or a poet. Early in my life I started saying what I wanted to say with my music. It was not specifically to glorify anything, although behind all this really I am trying to bring my country into the history of the world and specifically into the music of Latin America. Although I don't pretend to be the only composer in Panama, for there are many others trying to write music, my intention was to bring the name of my country through my music to the attention of the world. However in order to do that my first responsibility no doubt is to my own expression to the best of my ability. It was not simply to write music only for the sake of writing, to say that Panama had a composer. No, the main thing was to become a good composer.
And of course, some composers feel responsibility for themselves as a social voice, a political voice, but I don't believe that that is really the duty of a composer. We participate in the cultural expression of the country, but do not necessarily have a political undertaking. And you find many composers that write in praise of this or that man because they have political power or they are political figures. And that is why many of them jumped at the first moment to write something for the memory of somebody famous, not because they really care about that but it's good to go into this moment of excitement so "my name will be with theirs over there."
I have written to the memory of some great persons, but long after they are dead, and not to become recognized because of the name of the person to whom I have dedicated the music. For example I have a piece in which I am speaking of peace, not as opposed to war, but as an inner peace which allows you to be at peace with your neighbors, and that is in my most ambitious work Cantata For Peace which was commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. I already had been thinking about writing a piece to honor four men who spoke of peace and were victims of violence: Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., but also dedicated to the memory of all men women and children who died in the name of peace. But again, when I wrote the piece it was not simply that I wanted to associate my name to theirs in order to be recognized. I had a musical message of peace in which I found similarities between their ideas of peace and my own. All of them were speaking against violence-that was what linked the four of them together. But mostly it was just a personal expression, it didn't have anything to do with the Civil Rights movement or the Civil War, nothing like that, it was simply the idea of peace, and in this case, as I have said, it was not that I felt that I was obliged to participate in any movement, because this work came many years after Martin Luther King was killed. I was in this country already when that happened but I was not writing anything just because he was killed at that moment.
In the case of someone more personal, like Mitropoulos, I didn't write a piece to his memory until one year after he had passed away, but in this case it was simply to pay tribute to a man who meant so much to me, so I did write the piece to his memory.
Going back to that, I personally feel that obligation is to myself, to express myself in music, with integrity and with the best technical control I can have.
You had mentioned before your role as a Latin American composer. How do you feel the musical influences of Panama have related to the musical influences of Europe in your music? Obviously you have studied a great deal of European music and there is Latin American influence in your music as well.
No doubt we could not be writing music today ignoring all the contributions of Europe from the past and from the present. After all we are not really inventing a new vocabulary, we are not writing with a new system. We use the same system as the great masters of Europe but what we do is that we try not to imitate. No sense to be writing music that will sound like Debussy or Sibelius or Strauss, that is completely out of the question. You can use exactly the same chord that they are using but you have to be your own: imitation in any art is useless.
Yes, I had to integrate technical elements from Europe which I learned from Ernst Krenek, and before I studied Beethoven and Brahms and the others on my own but that technique has to be true for myself to express something that has to be completely personal. I am not necessarily quoting from the Panamanian folk song because I have very seldom quoted directly from Panamanian folk song, but I do use rhythmic elements and some melodic design that can be found there without being any one in particular. However I have quoted sometimes for a specific reason. I quoted especially in the first orchestral piece. But you can find that still in my latest compositions there is some element of Panamanian quotation that is based rhythmically on some Panamanian dances. The specific melody in this doesn't have anything to do with Panamanian folk song. And the point is: I will insist always to be recognized as a Panamanian composer. I am not an American composer, I am not Afro-American, I am not Afro-Panamanian, no, I am not Afro-anything. I do not have anything to do with Africa, I have to do with Panama. If I am going to look back I will look back into my ancestors which are really from Colombia from the Guajiro tribe in Colombia which doesn't have anything to do with Africa. They were natives of that region of the continent, but I am not a Colombian-Panamanian, I am a Panamanian-period.
You wrote the article in the New Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians about Panamanian folk music, did you not?
Yes, I had studied the music because I wanted to discover the elements that I could exploit later on. I had studied it long before I came to this country, trying to find the essence in that music so that I could present that in my own voice.
How did you go about studying?
By listening to the music of the people in the country, later on some recordings also. I have a friend who has many recordings, and through some publications which have been done, some of which have not been very well written. There are a few mistakes in interpreting the actual rhythmic elements because sometimes they try to apply the strict rhythmic element of Europe to our music. Including the first book that I found, which was the one which started my interest in studying the music; it was written by a Panamanian who was a pupil of Vincent D'Indy. He was a very good musician and a composer of music which sounded like French music but he did publish a book on Panamanian folk music, but his transcriptions were not exactly right because he couldn't understand the subtle rhythmic elements of our music. His version was quite strict-partly the way he had learned from Vincent D'Indy. So that started my interest and then long before I came [to the United States] to study many times I had been in the country especially because I played in a band, and we would travel for festivities and we would have the chance to hear the authentic music and that helped me to get some better knowledge. I also spent some time later on; after I went back to Panama I studied the music of the Cuna Indians so that I could learn something else, but you don't find so much influence of that in my music-I just studied that for some particular pieces I wrote in which I had to use some element of the Cunas.
We've already touched on this a little bit, but do you have any more thoughts on what it means for a composer or an artist to be innovative?
Well, there is a danger in that thing about innovative. That is why you find so many young composers that want to be experimenting: everything has to be "new" because everything that has been said before won't be used now. No, innovation is something that you apply when you need to say something new at that moment without throwing away everything because it might sound too old. If I need to use the C major chord because that is what I need at that moment in my piece, I use it. Although I don't use major and minor harmony in my music, if at that moment I need that, I will use it without concerning myself that I went back to the music of the past in the moment of expressing myself. Yes, when you try to write everything experimental, how far can you be experimenting? What is the sense of "experimenting" if you don't use that "experiment" any more? Or because you use the experiment for the experiment's sake, forsaking tradition-you see, you have to be always experimenting with something new because what you did before doesn't work and you don't want to use it anymore. There are many innovations in my music, especially in regards to form, but without just trying to say: "This is for nobody to understand because it is so complex that there is no way to be understood by anybody." There is no sense to that. Don't forget that music is an art of communication. You need clarity in your expression, otherwise nobody can understand you. If what you are trying to create is because you don't want anybody to understand you, then what is the sense of giving that to the public?
I remember hearing that Beethoven was a great composer primarily because he was "innovative" for his time, and it struck me that we still like his music today, and it can't be considered innovative at this point in history.
He was bringing a new element, but it was not exactly the innovation of trying to destroy the past. He was making a contribution to the past towards the future without trying to break all that which had happened. Today many young composers say "I don't have to do anything with the past, I have to create something completely new; for that reason, forget the music staff." They put barlines here and there and expect somebody to interpret that. I don't know how to read that, but in my personal position I don't use it.
Do you have any thoughts on what it means to be a "professional" composer; you had mentioned this at the recital a while back.
"Professional" is a very hard concept. They will say: "He spends his time writing music, that is professional," but if I were living out of my compositions I could be called a professional. If I could receive a commission every other month so I could pay my bills and spend my time just writing music I will be a professional composer. But I have to spend my time teaching so I can find some free time to write my music. You could not say I am really a professional composer. If it is a profession, you get your living out of that. There are a few composers who have made a name and they are professional composers-don't ask me who, because I do not really know any one of them. We teach because we need to get checks so we can go to the store to buy something. But our music is not going to buy anything. Of course they say, "You are a professional composer if you are writing music and professionals earn a living playing our music-that is professional." A conductor is a professional man who earn his living conducting. Like Mitropoulos said, it's the easiest living because you are being paid to conduct the music that somebody else wrote and somebody else is playing. It is nothing but standing in front of them, moving the arms. That is what Mitropoulos said and I agree with him, and perhaps that is why everybody wants to be a professional conductor today: they get more money than the performers and more than the composer.
-and there's nothing to learn how to do.
Exactly, just moving your arms. If they play it right, good, if they don't play it, right...
Well, they still get paid one way or the other.
Yes. So I do write music, but I could not say that I am a professional composer because of the fact that I don't earn my living just writing music. I do get commissions once in a while but if you are going to live on commissions that you get every five or ten years, you really want to starve to death!
And yet it was your composition which won you your teaching positions.
Yes, in part that is why I'm in this country, but when I was teaching in Panama it was not really because my music was so well-known, it was simply that I was preparing myself to teach. And the goal of teaching was to see if I could discover somebody with enough talent to become the most important composer in Panama. Unfortunately, I did not stay there long enough and I didn't find anybody with that capacity to absorb the knowledge. Yes, when they invited me to come to this country it was thanks to my compositions; and then I was recognized as a composer because of my Second Symphony and later on my Violin Concerto. But yes, I have to earn my living teaching, but I suppose somebody could say, "You are a composer, so what?"
I've heard you mention before that you write your pieces for a "professional" ensemble of players and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on your role or the role of the composer in pushing the general level of playing technique to higher limits.
I did mention that I write for professionals: people who are dedicated to playing their instruments. And I demand from them the best so that when I am writing I am not considering "Now, let's make it easy because they could not play this." If I need the very complex rhythmic element right there I will write it and hope that somebody can play it. I never write anything that I can play because I don't play anything; that was not an issue. Although I did play violin and viola, if I was going to write a violin concerto, if I was to consider that I was going to play it then I would not have writen anything. But in the Violin Concerto I was writing for a concert artist who is somebody higher than the first violinist of the orchestra. I don't expect the first or second violin to go and stand up and play the concerto because I am demanding so much from the performers, and yet in the orchestra I try to demand more. Even when I write for a specific orchestra I might consider the level of the orchestra and yet I try to push a little forward to create a challenge for them.
When I wrote the piece commissioned by the University for the Illinois State University Orchestra it was really demanding; it was a challenge for them. They tried to get to that level, and I mentioned to them that I am not writing for students, but for future professionals, therefore I am demanding that they work hard on that. So when I am writing without a specific commission I am thinking about professional players.
When I write for orchestra, the truth is that I see two conductors for my music: that one there [referring to photograph on office wall of conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos] and myself. Although I am not writing for either one but I feel how I would conduct the score. Many conductors will come and do something else-especially those dance conductors. They like to dance in front of the orchestra and I doubt that they can be playing my music dancing-and that is why my music is not played by many orchestras.
You recently wrote a piece for the Peoria [Illinois] Symphony orchestra.
Yes, I just finished a piece, Centennial Symphonic Tribute. It was commissioned by the Peoria Symphony for the centennial season. It is going to be played this November.
Is that a civic ensemble, or more professional?
Well, more professional, they have full seasons. Of course, I didn't write a piece that will demand less from them than when they have played one of my pieces before. They know the complexity of my rhythmic elements, and they know the piece will have those things too because it is part of me. I finished it; next week I am giving all the material to the conductor. It is already programmed for November 4th (1997).
I'd like to ask you about your specific works which are your favorites, or those which you are most satisfied with.
Well, no doubt it is three pieces. The first is the one which gave me international recognition, the Second Symphony because, as you know, in that symphony I tried to accomplish something that had not been found before, the transformation of the sonata structure to create one sonata inside the other. And that was recognized by the jury and they gave me the award. That is the one that brought me to this country.
Also the Violin Concerto, which was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation long before I came to this country, but after my Second Symphony. And later on it won the Koussevitzky International Recording Award. Those two pieces are very important to me but the one I mentioned before, the Cantata for Peace, which is a more ambitious work, has a special place in my creativity. Unfortunately, it has not been played yet, it was finished almost twenty years ago. It is a very demanding piece, not only for the soloist, a bass/baritone, but also for the choir and the orchestra-it is a very large choir and a very large orchestra. They need a conductor who could understand the music and bring it to life. We will see if there is someday somebody who might be curious enough to look it over and decide to premiere it .
I have never been so much concerned with having a piece played; I am just writing the piece. I am not ready to have it there to be played until I am satisfied that I put everything that I wanted to put at that moment. So this cantata is sitting there-the score is sitting in the American Music Center in New York. I don't know if anybody ever saw the score or not, but so far it has not been played.
So those are the three pieces. I like all my works because although there are the three very important works, I like all the others which have been played and recorded because if I didn't like the piece, how could I expect anybody else to like it? And they are the children of my brain; some are big, some are small, some have been played more than the others, especially the Eight Miniatures for Orchestra. It has been played by many orchestras and many conductors, because it is the easiest one, I suppose. But there are many other pieces that can be played if the conductor has intelligence and is going to look at the music and decide to play it. The Cinncinnati Symphony decided to play the Elegy for String Orchestra, which was premiered by the old Bloomington-Normal Symphony before it became the Illinois Orchestra. The Illinois Orchestra hasn't played anything of mine. I've been living in this town for twenty-five years, but the conductor doesn't feel that I deserve to be heard in this town. Good. Maybe someday he will realize that out of courtesy something ought to be done After all the Peoria Symphony played something. But in Peoria, the conductor called me one day because he realized that I had been here for so long and he has never played anything of mine, so instead of playing only a piece, he commissioned me to write something for the orchestra. But time will tell, I don't know.
Kevin Medows and I were discussing which pieces you might pick as your favorites, and he suggested the Dodecaconcerto, I suggested the Variations and Theme for Five.
Well, yes, like I said, I like those pieces but I am looking at the pieces that, if somebody is going to see my work those three pieces ought to be considered. I have studied to see exactly how I handle the sonata structure in the symphony and how I handle the concerto aspect in the Violin Concerto and how I use the human voice in the Cantata for Peace. Of course, the Variations and Theme for Five have a special structure; the fact that it is called Variations and Theme already indicates that. The Dodecaconcerto yes, because I was limited just to twelve instruments, but there are many other pieces. The Fourth String Quartet is very important.
Your Piano Sonata (1985) was a commission.
Yes, but like I said, I have to like the piece I have written because otherwise I wouldn't give that to anyone to be performed. There are many pieces I have started but never finished, because I was unsatisfied with them-there are some sketches. The only piece that I ever thought about rewriting is the Symphony #3. It is a symphony with one subject and five variations and the reason why I am not too happy with that piece is that I wrote it during very hard times in Panama. I had just taken over the National Orchestra and was asked to submit a work for the festival in Caracas. So under that condition I did finish the piece and it was played, and it sounded okay to me despite all the mistakes that were committed because there are many things that were not copied right. It has been played by other orchestras too, but if I had the time that I always make for my music I would do something better. And I did start redoing the piece but then I was informed that if I wrote a piece for a tour thorugh Germany of the North-South Consonant Ensemble from New York, they would play it, so I decided to go and do that. They never went to the tour but the piece was the Dodecaconcerto, which incidentally was played about two weeks ago in New York. Not the same group, it was a different group; they played at the New York Museum of Modern Art. The only point is that they played in the garden, and the garden is by the street and they could not record it because of that. They played my Rhapsody for Violin Solo there once, and they could not send the recording because when you walk you can see the garden from the street, so with all the noise of the street it was not possible to record it; I don't know why they had to do the concert there. They have some other places to do it but I didn't have anything to say about that.
For readers who might like to learn more about Latin American composers, do you have any names you'd like to mention?
Well, there are many young composers right now. Of course the big names are well-known; Carlos Chávez, Alberto Ginastera, and all of them which already passed away, but there are many young composers from different countries that are doing quite good progress in their writing. Like Germán Cáceres in El Salvador, Jorge Sarmientos in Guatemala; there is Ernesto Cordero in Puerto Rico, a very good composer. One composer that was really outstanding in Mexico was Manuel Enríquez who passed away a few years ago. There is a group of young composers in Venezuela, from which they had many good composers in the past, and they have some composers like Alfredo Rugeles; he's doing some experimental music. Sometimes it's not as effective as it ought to be because it is experimental only, but he has very good ideas.
There are a few other young composers in Venezuela but they still need more, how should I say, more discrimination in their creation, not for the fact that "I am just writing, writing," without trying to be clear in what they are creating, to leave something that will stay. It is because, like many of the composers in the Americas, and there are many right now, they are trying to produce as much as they can, and for me the important thing is not quantity but quality. There is no sense to write two hundred works in one year when not one of them will be heard one year later because they are not good pieces. That is the important thing; as you remember, as you are one of my students, I do not intend for you to write a new piece every month. I was trying to teach you the process to create and especially to be self-critical because whenever you give something to the public to be played, it ought to be finished. Not that it's going to be played to see how it will sound-OK now we change it. The composer must hear the music in his or her head, without trying to go and have a fragment to be played by the group to see how it sounds. Today they go immediately to the computer to hear the sound but the sound of the computer is not like the acoustic instruments so you don't get the same sound. You have to hear that sound clearly in your head before you put it down on the paper. And then you have to be very strict with yourself. And that is something that is lacking in many of the young Latin American composers.
I have attended many Latin American concerts in the past few years; I participated in the Forum of Composers from the Caribbean and I heard many things that are done by students, yes, but with some misconception which indicates that the teaching is not serious enough to give the student the right tools. I have been at some of them with students who say, "The musicians were playing wrong," and I look at the score and they were playing exactly right. The fellow's score was wrong, but the teacher had never told him that.
So that is one of the big problems, but I suppose there are a few names that will replace those who have gone before. There is a composer who I forgot to mention who is outstanding; for me perhaps the most important right now in Latin America is Marlos Nobre in Brazil; he really has a great talent. I was amused to see that the colleagues that I mentioned to you have a new CD in which they speak about the "pioneers" (one of them is me) to the young generation. I never considered myself a pioneer in music; there are many others up there before me. But I suppose it was right to say that I belong to the old generation of Ginastera and Chávez. Yes, I have a few CDs lately, but I was amused to read that, and that was from the Forum of Composers CD.
Did you have any comments regarding the question of inspiration versus perspiration?
Well, it takes me quite a long while to start a piece. I start thinking about the piece and what I would like to bring to it and I work so much in my head before I write anything down and then it takes quite a while. Yes the Second Symphony was written quickly but I started thinking about that as soon as I heard about the contest, and when I sat down to write I knew the structure I wanted to use, the transformation, working in my head to solve the problem before I sat down to write. I wrote that in 55 nights, but the Violin Concerto took me more than two years to write because I was not completely satisfied with the way it was going. Yes, inspiration is just the fact that makes you decide "I am going to write this and I have to bring this." Now what you consider perspiration especially if you don't have any air conditioning then you are really going to perspire. Luckily enough we have air conditioning today. Last week we did not have any so I could not stay sitting here. But I did work without air conditioning in Panama, so I did perspire.
At least they had windows in the buildings probably
No, because I could not open the window because the street was there. I am used to be working in my office always, and the busses went by there. I ignored that sound, but if I opened the window then I would hear it.
It's the planning that takes a long time. The writing? yes-you have seen my manuscripts; I cross out many things, because even after I work for a month on this little fragment, if I am not happy then I won't use it. So there is the ounce or a few seconds of inspiration and a year of perspiration to put the things together, yes, it's true. I never tried to rush a piece and that is why I don't accept commissions for next month-it takes a while. The piece for the Peoria Symphony was commissioned to me in September 1995 to be ready to be played in 1997. If they had said write it to be played at the beginning of 1996, I would not accept it because I have too many other things to do; my teaching, and my own study and all that. There is a possibility that I might get a commission for a piano concerto, but I won't be having that finished until early 1999, so I have the whole year and a half to write it if I get the commission, which might bring something that I have been thinking for many years-to write a piano concerto, but no sense to write a concerto if it is going to be sitting there with nobody playing it. When I wrote the Violin Concerto I knew that it would have been played at the Festival in Washington. Although it was not commissioned for the festival but I knew that if I sent it to the festival I would have it played, and it was 1965 and actually it was recorded. It hasn't been played by anybody else but the same soloist. It hasn't been played for ten years now, the last time was here, for my festival. No sense to write a piano concerto if it will be sitting there because nobody is going to play it, and you need a concert artist to play the concerto. And I want to write it so that it will be very different from the first piano concerto, which was a student piece. Now, when I was approached about the piano concerto I was told "we would like something as powerful as the Violin Concerto, "which is exactly what I am thinking-I would like to do that, and I would like to have it heard. They have thought about the soloist, they will have to talk to him, but first, they have to get the money for the commission, so I am waiting to see. The commission was being requested from the National Endowment for the Arts, which as you know they are trying to destroy it right now. I might not get the commission, so maybe because they want to cut the commission's funding they are going to cut it completely, so let's see. We'll have to wait and see. But yes, if I write a piano concerto I would like to do something as interesting as the Violin Concerto.
N.B: As of the writing of this interview, Cordero has received a commission for the piano concerto, not from the NEA, but from the Chicago Sinfonietta. The Sinfonietta, under the direction of Paul Freeman, has previously performed several of Cordero's works in its programs, and has released a recording of the Eight Miniatures for Small Orchestra. Along with the commission for the piano concerto, on March 15 of the present year, the group performed Cordero's Violin Concerto (1962) featuring Rachel Barton as soloist.
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Thomas Carl Townsend studied composition with Dr. Cordero between 1990
and 1995, earning a Bachelor's degree in composition and music theory from
Illinois State University. He recieved a Master's degree in music theory
from Indiana University in 1997.
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