Juan Carlos Garvayo, new president of the music section of the Ateneo de Madrid, organises a performance of Terry Riley’s “In C”, as a presentation of his proposal.
Since October 30, Juan Carlos Garvayo, one of the founders of the Trio Arbós (created in 1996 by violinist Ferdinando Trematore, cellist José Miguel Gómez, and Garvayo himself, on piano), is also the president of the music section of the Ateneo de Madrid. And this Sunday, 17 December, a noon (free entrance), will be the unofficial presentation of his proposal, which has a highly symbolic character, as it will be a performance of In C, the work by Terry Riley (Colfax, California, 1935) composed and premiered in 1964, considered a cornerstone of musical minimalism, by a large group of leading instrumentalists from the main Spanish orchestral ensembles.
In C consists of 53 short, numbered musical phrases, lasting between half a beat and 32 beats; each phrase can be repeated an arbitrary number of times at the discretion of each musician in the ensemble. Thus, each musician has control over the phrase he or she plays, and musicians are encouraged to play phrases starting at different times, even if they are playing the same phrase. Thus, although the melodic content of each part is predetermined, In C has elements of aleatoric music. The performance instructions indicate that the ensemble should try to play within two or three phrases of each other. The phrases should be played in order, although some may be played in a different order than others. The phrases must be played in order, although some may be skipped. As detailed in some editions of the score, it is common for a musician to play the note C in repeated eighth notes, usually on a piano or a pitched percussion instrument (e.g. marimba). This functions as a metronome and is known as “the pulse”. It was Steve Reich – one of the musicians who participated in the premiere of the work at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, along with Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Morton Subotnick, among others – who suggested to Terry Riley the idea of the rhythmic pulse, thus radically altering Riley’s original composition, which had no predetermined rhythm.
Why did you choose this piece to publicise your work as president of the music section of the Ateneo de Madrid?
I chose this piece because miracles happen with it, both for the player and the listener. If it’s done well, it’s an incredible experience. I have contacted lots of friends to come and play the piece (and I take this opportunity to invite anyone who wants to join in the performance to do so).
It’s a very simple piece: 53 phrases with very simple rules, but I’ve experienced almost musical orgasms playing it. I even ask myself: “How is this happening?”, because there are huge avalanches of sound and, suddenly, tremendous voids. It’s a work with a score that fits on a sheet of paper, but it’s still a masterpiece, whichever way you look at it. There is written music, but at the same time you have an enormous freedom, which allows you to improvise. That’s why every time it’s performed it can be different and everyone is fascinated by it. In C has, for me, an added value of celebration, of enjoyment of music and of existence. It is pure joy, the most luminous tonality there is. And that’s why I wanted this piece to be the presentation party, because music has historically had an incredible presence at the Ateneo. In the 19th century, the Ateneo was the most prestigious place in the field of recital and chamber music. Manuel de Falla, Albéniz, Granados and Turina made their Madrid debuts there.
How did you discover In C?
I studied from a very young age in the United States. I went there when I was 17, in 1986, and there I got to know all the American minimal music of Riley, Reich, or Glass, and it was a discovery for me, just as Piazzola was a discovery, which was also a shock for me. I must have heard In C at the end of the eighties and I have always followed the new versions that came out, even with African orchestras or rock groups, but I am incapable of listening to it on record! The only way I enjoy it is live, listening to it and playing it.
What is essential is to be rhythmically precise, because all the phrases have to be synchronised with the pulse of the initial C, as if it were a metronome. Because the phrases are very well written, with their quaver rests and crotchet rests, but everything has to last exactly as long as Riley says for it to work.
Who will accompany you in the performance?
At the moment we are 21 musicians. Riley says in his instructions that 35 is desirable. We are going to play it with two pianos, but with four hands, and while one is playing the C that functions as a metronome, the other can play the 53 phrases that make up the piece. Among the 21 there is a bit of everything: we are the three members of the Trío Arbós, and there are illustrious colleagues such as Toni García Araque, double bass player of the Orquesta Nacional de España; the clarinettists Joan Enric Lluna and Eduardo Raimundo; the violist Paul Cortese; the saxophonist Pedro Pablo Cámara, and so on. There are also students from the Conservatorio Superior, where I am a professor. I have tried to ensure that there is a varied range of instruments with wide tessituras, so that it is not timbrally monotonous.
The Trío Arbós is a reference in Spain in the field of contemporary classical music. You have recorded or premiered many works by composers such as Luis de Pablo… How do you manage the balance between the more apparently “serious” music you develop playing De Pablo, Gabriel Erkoreka or Nikolai Kapustin, and proposals such as Terry Riley’s In C, which the more serious composers have scorned? Which way do you balance?
I am musically omnivorous: I “eat” everything. I’ve just come from playing a concert in Brazil with a flamenco singer, interpreting seguiriyas, granaínas, bulerías, tangos, etc. I’ve also done Alegro-soleá, a piece that Enrique Morente and a certain Antonio Robledo, who wasn’t really called that: his name was Armin Janssen, a German from Hannover, but he changed his name when he wrote flamenco.
With the Trío Arbós we have also done everything there is for trios and we have commissioned hundreds of premieres. We recently recorded an album of boleros with Sandra Carrasco, with arrangements by Ricard Miralles, Serrat’s lifelong pianist. Contemporary music is purely out of musical curiosity, because I need to know what the music of my time is like, to get to know the composers and work with them.
As for In C, it is a piece that I have performed several times. We played a lot with Stefano Scodanibbio, a legendary double bass player of the avant-garde – Luciano Berio wrote Sequenza XIVb for double bass and Xenakis Roscobeck for him – who worked a lot with Riley: they played duets, Riley with his keyboards and and Scodanibbio on double bass, and one of the times he came to play with us – because we had a residency at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for five years, and we programmed five or six concerts a year with the now defunct CDMC, with the possibility of commissioning works for each concert (we gave the Spanish premiere of Kontakte, by Stockhausen) – and Scodanibbio suggested we do In C. So we called on musicians we knew, with different instruments, and we brought them together at the MNCARS with Stefano.
The work has an indeterminate duration. How long is yours going to last?
Scodanibbio told us that the piece should ideally last around an hour or an hour and ten minutes, but that it can’t last less than 45 minutes. I’ve even played it for an hour and a half, but for it to last an hour and a half it has to be with musicians who have already played it and who are able to be patient, because what you usually want to do is to move on to the next phrase…
Can you explain to me why it was so difficult for the generation of serialists, from Boulez to Luis de Pablo, to accept minimal music? I don’t believe it was because it was too simple for them…
No. In fact, the complexity that can occur in the work, because of the casual rhythmic gaps that occur between the phrases, generates such a complex polyrhythm that it would be impossible to write it. I think that the same thing happened to that generation that happens to all composers, regardless of their style, that in order to advance their aesthetic ideas they sometimes have to denigrate the opposing ones in order to strengthen their theories, their concept and their poetics. They have to say that the others are worthless. It’s like with religions: “the only true religion is the Catholic religion!” Well, that’s fundamentalism.
I have always been very involved in the musical avant-garde and in the most complex music. I’ve been in contact with composers who write things that they define as “the poetics of impossibility”, who write things that can’t be played, but for them, the effort of wanting to do it is what counts. You see Bryan Ferneyhough’s scores and you faint, because they are terrifying… But when you worked with him, what he told you is that he wants it to sound “like birds chirping”… (laughs) or that there is a very big crescendo and a diminuendo…
The truth of music is neither in its simplicity nor in its complexity, but in the authenticity of its message, in its formal solidity and in its capacity to move or to make you think and reflect, that is to say: to move intellectually as well, not only emotionally. And you can do that with one note or with 500. And there are moving works by Riley, like In C, as there are by Stockhausen.
What do you want to do from now on as head of the Ateneo’s music section?
The first thing we want to do is to publicise the institution’s legacy. In the entire gallery of portraits of illustrious Ateneo members there is not a single one of musicians, and among the presidents of the music section were Tomás Bretón, Emilio Arrieta and Amadeo Vives. Secondly, we want to do what they did, who called Turina and Falla to premiere works, because they were the young composers who were doing important things in Paris… and they had the vision to bring them here so that Falla, for example, could premiere the Siete canciones populares españolas [Seven Spanish Folksongs] in 1915. My wish is to encourage and promote a varied and quality season from the Music Section, which will cater for different musical styles, but which will take into account the important musical legacy of the Ateneo.