The Music of the Netherlands Antilles. Jan Brokken

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and his four fellow refugees were free to plan the liberation of South America, beginning with a series of battles in 1813 and ending in 1824 when the Spaniards departed. Bolivar’s two sisters stayed on Curaçao much longer, living on Curaçao until 1819 in an eight-sided house known as the Octagon.

      A procession of exiles followed El Libertador’s example. In 1821, two thousand monarchist Spaniards settled on Curaçao. They transformed the Otrobanda district into one huge casino, moving on two years later, tired and broke from rolling the dice, to Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Spain. The founders of the Dominican Republic, Juan Pablo Duarte, Juan Isidro Pérez, and Pedro Alejandrino Pina, lived on Curaçao before starting the revolution in 1844. Yet another civil war broke out in Venezuela, this time in 1845, and seven liberal politicians sought refuge on Curaçao. In 1858 the federalists fled to the neighboring island, including the future president of Venezuela, Antonio Guzmán Blanco. He moved into a building behind the post office in Otrobanda and gave refuge to so many freedom fighters there that the Venezuelan government threatened to invade Curaçao. Requests to have him extradited were refused, however, and Guzmán Blanco was finally able to return to Caracas as a free man. The black president of Haiti, who in 1852 had had himself crowned Emperor Faustus I, was forced to flee the country in 1865. He stowed away on the Curaçaoan schooner Rigoletta bound for Willemstad. Until his death he lived in the Keizershof (Emperor’s Courtyard), a practically windowless complex he had had built above the Santa Annabai and Otrobanda. At an angle below that Dracula castle, the next generation of exiles settled in houses built in the style of Havana, with flat roofs that served as verandas. For those Cubans who were at odds with the colonial authorities, Curaçao was the preferred place of exile, for they could make themselves understood in their own language and enjoy a staggering array of Spanish-language periodicals and radical documents.

      Curaçao emulated Amsterdam, which had given refuge to exiles and scarcely prohibited them from expressing their opinions, whether or not they were in writing.

      The liberalization of South America was far from being achieved by the middle of the nineteenth century. The political climate remained gruesome, owing to dictatorships, coups d’etat, and civil wars. Notas y Letras advocated that South America proceed along the lines set down by Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Miranda. The revolutionary general De Miranda, who died in a Spanish dungeon in 1816, had been an excellent flautist who practiced his passion for music every evening, even on the eve of the battle he would lose through an act of treachery. To him, the struggle for freedom should also lead to the cultural revival of South America, an idea that Augustin Bethencourt also adopted.

      Shortly after his arrival on Curaçao, Bethencourt set up a bookstore, a store selling musical instruments, a music and magazine publishing company, and a printing office. He owned a special typesetting machine that made it possible to print musical scores. It was his idea to establish Notas y Letras. He did not live to see the first issue, but his four sons took over the printing business and produced the weekly publication with its mid-section of musical scores, an absolutely unique publication in the huge area where it was distributed: from Santo Domingo to deep in the interior of Venezuela, from Puerto Rico to Argentina, Chile, and Peru.

      Latin America was floating on a cloud of prosperity. The small army of generals and potentates had not yet ransacked its riches; it exceeded North America and other continents in terms of affluence. It exported coffee, cacao, sugar, meat, wood, bananas, gold, precious metals, and (toward the end of the nineteenth century) rubber. The standard of living of the middle classes was one and a half to twice the size of Western Europe; there was an opera house in practically every city, and nearly every merchant’s home had a piano or even grand piano. The well-to-do, usually of Spanish descent, wanted to be entertained by infectious dance music. Notas y Letras supplied this demand, providing scores by Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Venezuelan, and Curaçaoan composers.

      This weekly publication was of enormous importance to the development of Curaçaoan music. Not only could composers publish their work, but they could also count on having a wide audience throughout Latin America. Among the fourteen people that made up its staff were the pioneers of Curaçaoan music, the composers Jan Gerard Palm, Chris Ulder, and Jules Blasini. Joseph Sickman Corsen was the editor-in-chief, a poet-musician who went down in history as having written the first poem in Papiamentu. Notas y Letras did indeed spark a cultural revival.

      The dances Corsen, Jan Gerard Palm, Ulder, and Blasini published in Notas y Letras were all influenced by Cuban music. In the first section, the chaîne, they remained Western European in terms of rhythm, somewhat sedate. Next came the transition to the melodious Iberian song theme in the second section. But—and this is the Dutch Antillean influence—in the third section they became much more rhythmic than the dances from Oriente; they were more hybrid, heterogeneous.

      Curaçao intensified the African elements of the danza. In the second and third sections after the seventh chord comes the cinquillo rhythm, in two-four time with alternating triplets and two eighth notes. In the second section the cinquillo is still played in a somewhat restrained manner, but in the third section the rhythm cuts loose. The beat alternates from 5/8 to 6/8 and becomes just as ambivalent as in the tambú, the drum music to which the African slaves on Curaçao danced.

      The waltz, too, was also rendered with more fiery rhythm, and not always in 3/4 but often in 6/8 time. That had to do with the temperament of the dancers, but also was due to the available space. The dance salons in the Caribbean country estates were quite small compared to European ballrooms; because they were smaller, steps had to be made more quickly. This explains the 6/8 beat.

      6

       As Melancholic as a Sunset

      One European composer was an instant hit when his work reached Oriente, Havana, Saint-Pierre, San Juan, and Willemstad. The primary reason was that he was able to elevate all sorts of banal dances into sublime forms of music.

      Chopin was best suited to the Caribbean temperament, with his mix of volcanic fire and cooling wistfulness, of refinement and rhythm, of melody and dance. To a Caribbean islander, music is only music if you can dance to it, as is certainly the case with waltzes and mazurkas. Consequently, Caribbean composers started composing waltzes and mazurkas in great numbers.

      Polish dances were used by European composers from Rameau to Mozart, long before Chopin was born. They even enchanted Johann Sebastian Bach, who composed a polonaise in his Leipzig period. Chopin heard the simple harmonies at their source: the peasant weddings and harvest feasts he attended on the country estates of his friends in the region around Warsaw. The polonaise and mazurka were excellent vehicles for him to use in his attempts to radically implement musical innovations without shedding traditional structures. Within the fixed confines of a dance form they offered him great stylistic freedom, and he was able to ingeniously exploit them to the fullest.

      The mazurkas became, as Benita Eisler wrote, “the laboratory of the alchemist.” They were a place where Chopin could experiment with expanding the traditional structure of the dance form, but where he could also play with fire. He kept erupting out of strict rhythmic confines, leaning more toward the volatile, the asymmetrical, to mutant forms and sharp dissonances, allowing them to accelerate at a feverish pitch before collapsing in the end. In the words of Benita Eisler, his mazurkas “complied with the ultimate demands of the romantic: ‘beauty that is touched by the exotic.’”

      Chopin already had something in him of the jazz musician who thrives on balancing at the cutting edge of every single measure. His contemporaries had a hard time accepting that aspect of his playing. Even Hector Berlioz, himself an innovator and upstart in many ways, complained in his autobiography like an old schoolmaster about some young whippersnapper: “If you ask me, Chopin has pushed rhythmic freedom far too far.”

      Chopin СКАЧАТЬ