A Guide to the Latin American Art Song Repertoire: An Annotated Catalog of Twentieth-Century Art Songs for Voice and Piano

22 Venezuela

207 22 Venezuela Kathleen L. Wilson An overview of Venezuelan art song in the twentieth century must begin with Vicente Emilio Sojo (1887–1974) and Juan Bautista Plaza (1898–1965), who were primarily responsible for the nationalist movement in Venezuela that had begun ten years earlier in other parts of Latin America. Both pedagogues and composers, they drew their inspiration from Afro-Venezuelan and Andean folk songs, rhythms, and dances, and they influenced several generations of Venezuelan composers to follow. Vicente Emilio Sojo collected and arranged well over one hundred Venezuelan folk songs, but his influence as a teacher of composition was his enduring legacy. Juan Bautista Plaza also collected and catalogued folk songs, and wrote several didactic works in addition to compositions for piano, chorus, and solo voice. His Siete canciones venezolanas are excellent examples of the nationalist school in Venezuela, using dance rhythms such as the joropo and vals and texts that evoke the Venezuelan countryside. His harmonies are neo-Romantic, with some influence from the French Impressionists (a style which would have been familiar to composers and audiences in the 1920s in Latin America). Reynaldo Hahn (1875–1947) was born in Venezuela and immigrated to France at age three. As part of the late Romantic tradition of French chanson composers, his music lies outside of the Latin American school of nationalism. Other composers of the early nationalistic style in Venezuela include Moisés Moleiro (1904–1979), Angel Sauce (1911–), Inocente Carreño (1919–), Carlos Teppa (1923–), Gonzalo Castellanos a guide to the latin ­american art song repertoire 208 Yumar (1926–), Modesta Bor (1926–1998), and José Luis Muñoz (1928– 1982). These composers graduated from the music school established by Sojo, but Castellanos also traveled to Paris, Teppa to New York and Italy, and Muñoz to Poland, while Bor studied in Russia with Kachaturian . This essentially European post-Romantic/Impressionistic style with nationalistic influences of folk songs and dances prevailed until the 1960s, when many Latin American composers began to experiment with new compositional styles, having been influenced by U.S. and European composers using alleatoric, electronic and non-diatonic systems. One of the most important composers of this period is pianist and composer Alexis Rago (1930–). He began his musical education in Caracas and later studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, in Vienna and Rome, and he immigrated to London in 1969. He has received many prestigious international awards for his performances as well as his compositions. His cycle Rapasgotori for tenor and piano, commissioned by the Venezuelan Cultural Council, is a decided departure from the harmonic language of his predecessors. While not as experimental as some of his international contemporaries, Rago uses extended harmonies and shows the influence of minimalism in these songs. Rago has also written several operas. Alberto Grau (1937–) is best known as a conductor and has made an international name for himself as such. One of Venezuela’s leading choral conductors and pedagogues, he founded the Schola Cantorum of Caracas and has won national and international awards for his compositions as well. Having studied with Sojo and Plaza, Grau’s choice of texts and use of lyricism evoke a nationalistic quality, while his harmonic language is more dissonant. A younger generation of Venezuelan song composers includes Beatriz Bilbao (1951–), Victor Varela (1955–), Marianella Machado (1959–), and Ricardo Lorenz (1961–). Varela studied electronic music and has had his compositions performed in the Caribbean and Europe, while Bilbao, Machado, and Lorenz studied at Indiana University with Juan Orrego-Salas. Lorenz was appointed director of the Indiana University Latin American Music Center and has had his compositions performed in the United States and Europe as well as in Latin America. Venezuelan art song—and by extension Latin American art song— tends to be lyrical in nature, written for medium voices and therefore venezuela 209 accessible to most voice types, heavily informed by dance rhythms, and based on nationalistic and often socio-political texts. Suggestions for performance include paying close attention to the dance form that often defines a song’s structure. The tempos, syncopations and hemiolas inherent in these dance forms—vals, merengue, and joropo, for example —must be carefully observed. Note the very effective use of joropo rhythms in Alexis Rago’s “Glosa de Beatriz” and in the vals pattern of Juan Plaza’s “Por estos cuatro caminos.”1 Keeping in mind the original instrumentation of a setting’s...