Alcides lanza: Portrait of a Composer (review)

Over ten years in preparation, this biography is the fruit of a thirty-year friendship between author and subject, both of whom live in Montreal. Pamela Jones is a musicologist specializing in baroque music and dance; lanza is an avant-garde composer and pianist. (For reasons that are not explained in the biography, lanza uses the lower case for his name and for the titles of all of his compositions.) Although not a contemporary music specialist, Jones went to great lengths in researching this book. She completed eighteen hours of interviews with lanza over a period of five years and conducted an even more extensive series of interviews in Argentina, the United States, and Canada with about two dozen people who have known lanza variously as friends, family members, and professional associates. One testament to the thoroughness of her research is that she unearthed information about lanza’s early life that he himself did not even know.

lanza has enjoyed an active career throughout North and South America as a pianist who specializes in contemporary music. His compositions, most of which combine conventional instruments and/or voice with electronic sounds (either ‘live’ or on tape), are fairly well known to those with an interest in avant-garde music. He was born in 1929 in Rosario, Argentina’s second-largest city; his forebears were of European stock (from Italy and Spain), though there are also indigenous Guaraní ancestors on the maternal side. His advanced formal music education came late in life, when he moved to Buenos Aires at the age of twenty-four, after having completed a diploma in electrical engineering. Jones paints a vivid picture of musical life in Buenos Aires during the 1950s and 1960s, when lanza was studying there. The city boasted five orchestras, the splendid Teatro Colón opera house, and a flourishing new music scene; despite increasingly repressive political regimes, it was a cultural centre to be reckoned with. After lanza won a Guggenheim Award in 1965, though, he decided to continue his career in New York City, working at the renowned Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. After six years in New York, where he was intimately involved in the city’s vigorous and influential new music scene, he was hired at McGill University in 1971 and went on to serve as the director of the McGill Electronic Music Studio from 1974 until his retirement in 2003.

Combining the story of lanza’s life with commentary on eighteen of his most important works, Jones proceeds mostly in chronological order from birth to retirement. She adroitly links significant life events with musical consequences that arose out of them. A long spell of nephritis as a child, for instance, isolated lanza from his peers, but also led to a deeper involvement with music. His own first child was born with a crippling degenerative illness and died at the age of six. This tragedy led to the dissolution of lanza’s first marriage, but years later it inspired lanza to create two moving musical portraits of this child, the first in the autobiographical composition ekphonesis V (1979), and the second in his choral work un mundo imaginario (1989).

Jones deftly weaves into her narrative salient information about lanza’s second wife, the singer Meg Sheppard, who is an important vocal artist in her own right and has commissioned, inspired, and premiered some of his finest compositions. The descriptions of lanza’s music are illuminating and do not require detailed prior knowledge. The numerous musical examples are carefully explained and will be decipherable even by non-musically trained readers, as most of them use a graphic notation devised by lanza. Much of the information about the significance and meaning of the works was supplied by lanza himself; insightful as these commentaries are, Jones seems too ready to take what he says at face value rather than offer her own interpretation of the music. That quibble notwithstanding, this is an informative and well-written account of a...