"Don't knock the hybrids": Musical Polystylism in Celso Garrido-Lecca's Duo Concertante

“DON’T KNOCK THE HYBRIDS”: MUSICAL POLYSTYLISM IN CELSO GARRIDO-LECCA’S DUO CONCERTANTE ANDRÉS CARRIZO S ONE OF THE GUEST SPEAKERS during the 1961 East-West Music Encounter Conference in Tokyo, composer Henry Cowell delivered an eloquent lecture, arguing for the artistic validity and necessity of “hybrid” musics, or musical creations influenced by a variety of stylistic currents (the lecture was later summarized by his disciple Lou Harrison, who was present at the Conference, with the phrase used in this paper’s title).1 Given during a period in which art music composition was dominated by the practice of Total Serialism, as exemplified by the Darmstadt School and Milton Babbitt’s article “The Composer as Specialist,” Cowell’s address stands out as a daring defense of musical polystylism. One of the early twentieth century’s great musical innovators, Cowell must also be hailed as a great prognosticator in light of this speech: the decades that followed its delivery, which saw the rise of several polystylistic composers and styles of composition, surely validated his plea. The musicians that populate this renaissance of musical polystylism read like a who’s who of late twentieth-century composers in Europe A 102 Perspectives of New Music and the United States, replete with artists who came of age during the late 1960s and 1970s.2 However, this essay is focused on the work of a musician whose career began during the era that prompted Cowell’s admonition, and who yet developed an idiosyncratic polystylistic compositional style: Peruvian composer Celso Garrido-Lecca. Widely hailed as one of Latin America’s pre-eminent dodecaphonic composers during the 1950s and 1960s, Garrido-Lecca blazed a unique, personal path towards musical polystylism. Yet his polystylistic technique—characteristic of his work from 1985 to the present—does not emerge out of an interest in postmodern stylistic mixture (à la Mauricio Kagel), nor through the adoption of an “exotic” aesthetic. Rather, it is a compositional language forged out of the composer’s biography and musical experiences, equally indebted to his ethnic background, his training in European compositional techniques, his long career in Chile, and his ethnomusicological study of Andean music upon his return to Peru. The composer thus abandoned strictly serial procedures in favor of a polystylistic musical language. Of Garrido-Lecca’s mature, post-1985 compositions, his piece Duo Concertante from 1991, scored for charango and guitar, stands out as an excellent representative of his late-period compositional style. Due to its inclusion in the collection published by the College of Latin American Art Music Composers,3 it has become one of Garrido-Lecca’s bestknown works. Every aspect of the piece, from its instrumentation to its harmonic vocabulary, reflects the confluence of the composer’s dual musical traditions: the Andean and the European. Rather than being a simple framing of Andean materials using European techniques (a common practice amongst Peruvian composers of the preceding generation4 ), the work shows a clear integration of, and interaction between, the two elements. In order to achieve this, Garrido-Lecca fashions the piece’s harmonic vocabulary by overlapping particularly significant modes and scales, derived from both the European and American musical cultures he is versed in. It is a duality given added significance through the inclusion of a number of explicit musical signifiers which reference the idea of mestizaje, a term used to denote the process of racial hybridization between the Amerindian peoples and their European conquerors.5 Following a brief summary of the composer’s biography and career, I will trace the ways in which Garrido-Lecca’s background, and the lived experience of mestizaje, are reflected through musical signifiers in Duo Concertante. These include the instrumentation, the use of particular scales out of which the piece’s harmonic vocabulary is woven, and several semiotically laden sonorities. My analysis demonstrates, in a theoretical sense, how his dual influences are not merely juxtaposed, but are rather stylistic interactions, integrating with one another in his music as they did in his life. “Don’t knock the hybrids” 103 My analysis of Duo Concertante is heavily indebted to Dmitry Tymoczko’s work on Stravinsky’s “Russian Period” ballets, particularly his article Stravinsky and the Octatonic...