Nuestro Tiempo / Our Time by Juan Blanco (review)

In 1961, using only an oscillator and three Sears Silvertone tape decks, Juan Blanco (1919–2008) became the first Cuban composer to create a piece of electroacoustic music. This composition, Música Para Danza, along with five others, appear on innova’s recent release entitled Juan Blanco: Nuestro Tiempo / Our Time. It contains the first collection of Blanco’s work on compact disc, featuring his compositions spread over four decades. Blanco’s early works, composed in the 1950s, utilized nationalistic themes. During the Batista regime he was a successful tax lawyer representing large American corporations such as Coca Cola. After his clients fled following the overthrow of Batista in January 1959, Blanco gave up law to practice music full-time. Apparently Blanco’s negotiating and compositional skills were savvy enough to win over the likes of Che Guevara, who met with Blanco’s Nuestro Tiempo composers’ group to congratulate them for their role in the resistance movement. During the 1970s Blanco created electroacoustic music for the Department of Propaganda of the ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con Los Pueblos). Later, he was appointed the director of the Laboratorio National de Música Electroacústica (LNME), and also served as musical director for the National Council of Culture (Consejo Nacional de Cultura).

Saxophonist and composer Neil Leonard not only supplied the well-researched liner notes for this CD, but also performs on a piece that is dedicated to him, and contributed his mastering and audio restoration skills to this project, which he co-produced with Philip Blackburn. Leonard first met Blanco in 1986 during a visit to Cuba, and went back to work with Blanco at the LNME studio from 1989–1990. From then on Leonard kept in contact with Blanco, closely following his work for the last 22 years of his life. In 1993 Leonard worked with several organizations based in Boston, as well as Dartmouth College, Wesleyan University, and the Berklee College of Music, to bring Blanco to the United States for a series of concerts and guest lecture-ships. Given the personal connections to the composer and his work, this innova release represents a real labor of love.

Cirkus Toccata (1983), the first piece on this collection, is scored for two percussionists and tape, and like Ella (1983) and Galaxia M-50 (1979), was realized in the ICAP studio. For Cirkus Toccata Afro-Cuban percussionists improvise to a tape part that Blanco prepared using a Roland Jupiter 8 synthesizer and an eight-track tape recorder. According to Leonard, “the co-existence of electronic sound, Afro-Cuban rhythm, improvisation and experimental composition had never been explored to this extent in Cuba.” Blanco used the sequencer on his synthesizer to compose melodic patterns that he then manipulated in real time by changing their tempos and timbres, and by detuning them. The arpeggiator was used to produce a succession of melodic fragments that adhered to a steady sixteenth-note pulse. For the live percussion accompaniment he originally wrote parts in order to guide the performers through changes in style, meter, and tempo. But the two percussionists heard on this track decided that they were more comfortable, and could perform better, simply improvising along with the tape part.

Near the beginning of the piece, after a brief percussion introduction, Blanco fades in a harp-like timbre playing major thirds. Eventually the harp sound changes to other timbres through timbral manipulation and by changing the attack values of an envelope generator. Juxtaposed arpeggiated lines are heard together, each at a different tempo. On the surface one hears the percussionists playing in a relentless manner similar to the tape part. This is clearly one of the primary focal points of the piece. But the machine and humans also swap attributes. The tape part provides a mechanical, motoric approach to rhythm that begins to take on human characteristics as the piece progresses...