Music Like a River of Sound - Wales to Argentina

On the 5th December 2018 I have the pleasure of being a guest vocalist once again with an ensemble of musicians in Buenos Aires. The concert is in an important festival of new music, CICLO DE CONCIERTOS DE MúSICA CONTEMPORáNEA TEATRO SAN MARTíN.

ENSAMBLE NACIONAL DEL SUR (ENS) is a electroacoustic ensemble first created by Oscar Edelstein in 1997 to play within his chamber operas. Now with scores of critical acclaim, a second album, and the third generation of musicians, they continue to traverse sectors and styles with a music that has momentum and intensity as instruments intertwine - a drum imitates a voice, a voice becomes a saxophone, a saxophone loses itself into an electric guitar. It is that playfulness of sound colour that has won them their reputation as a leading part of new music in Latin America.

Often playing in quadraphony (surround sound with four speakers placed around the audience) Edelstein creates a strong environment in which the audience feels emerged in sound. 

The sonic choices feel unforeseen - leaps and twists in rhythm and timbre - and so it does not seem at all strange to me that Edelstein is from a province in Argentina dominated by a serpentine river. Coming from Wales I also know the feel of the closeness of water - we've got 398 natural lakes; a maritime climate dominated by highly unpredictable shifts in Atlantic air masses; and 55 inches of rain per year which is either a blessing or a curse however you take the sea of green land that it gives us. 

Edelstein is from the province north of Buenos Aires, called Entre Ríos which means “between rivers”, something that is evidenced by the immense presence of the river Paraná in Edelstein’s hometown of the same name. 

In the indigenous language of Tupí, Paraná means “like the sea” or “as big as the sea”, and in fact the Paraná does indeed eventually reach the Atlantic after running through Paraguay, Brasil, Uruguay and Argentina, Crossing so many territories means that like the river the music of this region is touched by many influences and folk traditions where the songs are in Spanish and Guaraní. The Paraná is the eighth longest river in the world and the region called the “Litoral” (Spanish for coastal) has given birth to “música litorale?a” chamamé, la polka correntina, Vals Criollo and many others. 

So whilst for a large amount of people there may be the expectation that music from Argentina will be influenced by tango, we are making big assumptions and forgetting how far stretched is the landmass of Argentina, and that Buenos Aires is a small geographical part. Each province has their own very particular influences and patterns.

Many critics allude to how Edelstein’s music enshrines the avantgarde. This is for many reasons - one of which is perhaps because of his way of making music that is strongly influenced from his province yet not in a folkloric sense and not à la Bartok - however because of his use of rhythm critics have mentioned Stravinsky and Bartok, yet they equally make comparisons to Varese, King Crimson, Cecil Taylor - rather it is an essence and sense of landscape and texture that is reflected in his varied compositions. Edelstein likes to quote a story of Jorge Luis Borges in which Borges notes there are no camels in the Koran - in other words reminding us that a portrait of a landscape need not be so literal. 

Another aspects that makes him “new” is in the combination of forces that he gathers. With an attention to detail of how sound is experienced that led him to join forces with colleague physicist Manuel Eguia and work together with Sonic Crystals, you could say that the music of Edelstein is labyrinthine, and here there is inevitably a subtle and indirect influence of a quintessential Argentinean artist who of course is Borges whose concept of the “Aleph” has been crucial to many artists, where all is contained in one place at one time with every angle perceptible simultaneously;

“The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand…”

Anyone knowing Borges will know how reading a short story of his feels like falling through space with battered map in hand and spinning through footnotes, histories, libraries, and invented bibliographies as if caught in far more violent and unpredictable winds than those that sent Alice in Wonderland in a spin. One short story can leave you reeling for weeks. 

In this context of cross winds, and Buenos Aires has it’s fair share, then Edelstein’s music owes as much to Wittgenstein, Freud, Foucault or Lacan because as well as a strong hold of the repertoire of classical and contemporary music, Edelstein is very much a beast of Buenos Aires which is filled with kiosks selling both Vogue and Hegel, Cosmopolitan and the Collected Essays of Durkheim on suicide. These contour lines provide a strong emotional understanding from which to create and forge (or often force because Latin America is never full of easy choices) connections where there are no dividing lines, and where music has no time to be either this genre or that genre, it simply has to sound itself, to feel itself in space, and to touch a public with no boundaries. 

So how did I get here to be part of this musical picture? Perhaps because being Welsh the idea of sacred lands is always close at hand - that idea of sacred lands that had inspired the Welsh to travel to Patagonia in the hope of at last finding a place where they could recover their traditions and sleep dreaming of Golden hills. Or because there is something in the doing, so I follow my nose in search of the magical, following what director Peter Brook calls “the formless hunch” that defies the initial definition. Or that the idea of creating new spaces for people to be able to reconfigure their experience of the world is very important to me - to make spaces that have new agendas or no agendas, in other words spaces that are not churches or shopping centres; museums or streets - rather spaces that have a new history. 

These themes I have written about before; 

I remember a leap - oceans were pinched together between thumb and forefinger. This land will not lie gently - it’s all ruffled up and un-easy. Here there is not “as the crow flies.” Here it’s as the butterfly fly. Follow the whim of the land - the twist of the rock. It’s all close and far - Forgotten and forever. So much green you could drown - A seasickness of green. When does leaving become arriving? When does there become here?

It is impossible to be Welsh and not have spirals and interlocking circles in your blood and bones. 

“Time has stopped, says the Black Lion clock, and Eternity has begun”, said Dylan Thomas in “Under Milkwood.”

This holding back of time is exactly what art can and must do for us. That is the beauty of live art. That is “Communitas”, the term anthropologist Victor Turner used to describe an all important but often rare and transient personal experience of togetherness. 

Welsh poet R.S. Thomas said, “We were a people bred on legends.” This drives me forward to re-think, re-feel, re-see and re-know in every way I can and thus my work as a guest vocalist with an avant garde group as iconic as Oscar Edelstein's Ensamble Nacional del Sur feels an honour because it is all about Utopias and dream spaces; unconscious to the conscious; in-between places (or "thin places" as the Celtic Christians would say); the real and the mediated; the close and the far; and the all important juxtaposition between the familiar and unfamiliar landscape.

? Deborah Claire Procter 2018

NEXT CONCERT OF ENS: 5th December CICLO DE CONCIERTOS DE MúSICA CONTEMPORáNEA

TEATRO SAN MARTíN - EDICIóN XXII - 2018 - CONCIERTO VI - Ensamble Nacional del Sur

Huellas digitales sobre arenas movedizas - Paso cinco (Digital Fingerprints over Moving Sands - Step 5) Oscar Edelstein

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“The timbres are obstinately pure and clean...there is an evident presence of the electrical guitar, the look of a band of rock, developments that approach without shyness free jazz, and above all a work without guilt about rhythm. If the rhythmic revolutions of Stravinsky and Bartok had the paradoxical effect of taking perceptible rhythmic measures to extinction, what happens here is another thing.” Diego Fischerman, Pagina 12

“Never have you heard or will you hear again something similar in the city.. like the Aleph (Borges) it contains, in its interior, the music known and a glimpse of the future. Classical? Popular? Jazz? Tango? It’s impossible to pigeonhole and classify that which knocks down genres but at the same time contains all within something new. The solos of guitar, saxophone, piano & drums allow you to recognise the solid technique and formation of each one of the musicians who stand out brilliantly. To the singer Deborah Claire Procter it is only necessary to be grateful to her for the opportunity that toasted the audience to be able to re-discover the incomparable and inimitable singularity of the beauty of the human voice. Her intervention (perhaps for coming closer to something that might unite scat or the onomatopoeic phonetics of certain African traditions) was simply dazzling for the technical solvency in the range and her versatility in having intervened in a work that demands superlative competences in order to translate the complex interior world that it expresses.” / “ Nunca se escuchó ni se escuchará en la ciudad algo semejante...como el Aleph, contiene, en su interior, la música conocida y un atisbo del porvenir. ?Clásico? ?Popular? ?Jazz? ?Tango? No es posible encasillar y clasificar aquello que derriba géneros pero a la vez los contiene a todos en algo nuevo... Por momentos, los solos de guitarra, saxo, piano y batería, permitieron dar cuenta de su solidez técnica y formativa, y cada uno de los músicos descolló en forma brillante. A la cantante Deborah Claire Procter, sólo cabe agradecerle por la oportunidad que brindó a la audiencia de redescubrir la singularidad incomparable e inimitable de la belleza de la voz humana. Su intervención (acaso por aproximarse a algo podría ligársela al scat o a la fonética onomatopéyica de ciertas tradiciones africanas) fue simplemente deslumbrante por la solvencia técnica en el registro y su versatilidad al intervenir en una obra que exige competencias superlativas para traducir el complejo mundo interior que expresa.” Carlos Marín, El Diario - Paraná