“Three Salvos for Cultural Appropriation” by Ricardo Nirenberg

1.

If you prefer, three shots against cultural chauvinism.  André Gide’s Notes sur Chopin (1931), read long ago, provided my first encounter with a French artist or intello trying to rank that which cannot possibly be ranked.  In the Dedication, Gide attributes to an old Abbot of Monte Cassino whom he visited before WWI this astounding phrase regarding Chopin’s music: « C’est la plus pure des musiques » (It’s the purest music).  Gide found this judgment clear and indubitable: « C’est bien cela », he writes, whereas I found it absurd and incomprehensible.  Two questions came to mind: what is “pure music”?  And when is music A “purer than” music B, or how can purity in music be ranked?

Those words, plus pur(e), and those questions extend the conundrum well beyond the realm of music.  In 1876 Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in his homage to Edgar A. Poe: « Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu ». (Give the words of the tribe a purer sense).  Does purity of sense mean univocity, or lack of ambiguity, or what?  Those are tough questions: let me try just to examine what Gide may have meant by purity in music.

Gide’s very notion of purity in music is itself tainted by French chauvinism and the hostility and rancor towards Germany which was especially strong in the years between the war of 1870 and WWI.  Lack of purity, according to Gide, affects German music from Beethoven onward.  Gide places Chopin above Schumann —even though he loves both— because the latter is not a pure artist like Chopin, but rather a poet whose music is contaminated by literature.

I read Gide’s notes when I was in my late teens, and they left me not only perplexed but perturbed.  Like Gide, I loved both Chopin and Schumann; I still do.  Schumann’s Lieder, however, especially his settings of poems by Heine and Eichendorff, were and are an essential part of my love, and I could not, for the life of me, detect any impurities in them.  The way I felt confronted with Gide’s passion for ranking reminded me of the way I felt earlier in life, when some impertinent adult asked, “Who do you love more, Mom or Dad?”

Music contaminated by literature!  Strange that no one, no poet to my knowledge, has maintained the reciprocal, namely that poetry, or for that matter prose, are or can be contaminated by music; to the contrary, the French poet Paul Verlaine famously recommended, « De la musique avant toute chose » (Music before anything else).  The colossal ineptness of Gide’s ideas about pure music, not contaminated by poetry, is even more vividly illustrated by Orpheus, proto-poet and supreme musician both.

Yet Gide was not the only Frenchman to proclaim such nonsense.  Right after WWII, the French composer Francis Poulenc, attempting to defend the French pianist Marcelle Meyer from those who criticized her for having performed a Mozart piano concerto with a German orchestra during the Occupation, wrote in Le Figaro, April 1945:

“Indeed, it would be impossible for Meyer to successfully perform the likes of Beethoven and Schumann in Paris, as they so encapsulate the German aesthetic that we French musicians are looking to separate ourselves from.  Rather, Meyer is an advocate mainly for French and the ‘universal’ composers, such as Bach and Mozart, composers praised by Debussy as capturing the French aesthetic.”

Debussy, indeed, was the great promoter of the division of the music coming from beyond the Rhine into an earlier “universal” kind (thus also French) where Bach and Mozart belong and shine, and a later, exclusively German kind, from “the likes of Beethoven and Schumann.”  In 1913 Debussy writes in a music journal (Three Articles for Music Journals, in Source Readings in Music History, volume 7):

“The music of our time has learned how to free itself from the romantic fancies of this literary view of things, but other weaknesses remain.”

And about Bach and Mozart, in contrast to Beethoven:

“What a pity Mozart was not French.  He would have really been worth imitating!  ...  Geniuses can evidently do without taste: take the case of Beethoven, for example. But on the other hand there was Mozart, to whose genius was added a measure of the most delicate ‘good taste.’ And if we look at the works of J.S. Bach ... in his works we will search in vain for anything the least lacking in ‘good taste.’”

Thus Debussy, and Gide and Poulenc after him.  It is pertinent to ask: where is the dividing line, the break between the earlier universal kind of music and the later Germanic kind?  It is not a difficult question.  When Bonaparte declared himself Emperor of the French in 1804, Beethoven erased the dedication to the First Consul of his Third (Eroica) Symphony, a work that is a deliberate departure from the models of Mozart and Haydn. Napoleon’s victory of 1806 over the Prussians at Jena kindled the first flames of German nationalism, which were then spread all over the land: it should be acknowledged that the French musical chauvins were not off the mark in connecting German nationalism and German Romanticism.  The Denker J.G. Fichte, who in 1796 had been the catalyzer of Jena Romanticism, helped spread German nationalism with his Addresses to the German Nation in 1808.

We can take those five years, 1804 to 1808, as a rough limit: universality and good taste before it, tasteless romantic fancies afterwards.  Purity in music is granted to Bach and Mozart, and supremely to Chopin, but is considered absent from the works of middle and late Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and especially Wagner, all of whom represent the Germanic, Romantic, rather monstruous side of music.  So thought Debussy, Gide, and Poulenc.  Other French composers did not concur: listening to Saint-Saëns Third (“Organ”) Symphony of 1886 I am reminded of his Austrian contemporary Bruckner — but then old Saint-Saëns was despised as a reactionary by Debussy and his clique.  Gabriel Fauré was called by Aaron Copland “the French Brahms” — no wonder, since Fauré was Saint-Saëns’ student and lifelong friend.  In the twentieth century Arthur Honegger was also influenced by German Romanticism — but he was not really French, he was Swiss.

I’d like to suggest that the whole concept of purity in music is meaningless; it is only a pretext for nationalism and xenophobia.

 

2.

Before I ran into Gide’s Chopin and his meaningless musical purity, I had suffered the pedagogical assault of another kind of meaningless purity which, fortunately, is not familiar to those who were schooled in the U.S.A.  I was born in Argentina in 1939; at age twelve I entered the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, the prestigious public high school whose history goes back to the founding in 1661 of a Jesuit school adjacent to the Church of St. Ignatius.  The first book we were assigned in our Castellano class was Juvenilia (1884), a memoir of his youth by the Argentine diplomat, politician, and writer Miguel Cané, who had been a student at the Colegio in the mid 1860s.  It was an apt choice for boys our age (no girls allowed during my time, in the 1950s), and although many lessons on rhetoric and the art of storytelling can be drawn from Juvenilia, our attention was almost exclusively directed to the detection of galicismos.  By which it was not meant obviously French expressions such as hors d'œuvres or île flottante, but French words disguised so as to appear to be Castilian, while not recognized as belonging to the language by the Real Academia Española (RAE), whose motto, “Limpia, fija y da esplendor” — It cleans, settles and makes splendorous — joined to the image of a crucible, makes it abundantly clear that we are talking purity here.  But before we dip again into purity, let me offer a couple of examples of galicismos as our professors understood them.

In Castilian the word “masacre” is considered a galicismo because it is borrowed from the French “massacre” and is not recognized by the RAE, even though it is familiar to everyone.  In English, the same word, “massacre,” was also borrowed from the French, and used by Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, without the requisite of any royal permission.  Another word borrowed from the French, “gigoló”, was familiar to everyone: it sounds in the lyrics of a hundred tangos.  In English, according to the OED, “gigolo” appeared first in the U.S. monthly Woman’s Home Companion in 1922, which seems like a rather fitting place for it.  The RAE, on the other hand, recently responded to a consultation about “gigoló” by Tweeting that it is a crude foreign expression, “un extranjerismo crudo”.

The warriors against extranjerismos crudos in Latin America are called cultural nationalists: they want to keep their culture pure — the language, the music, the dance, and, above all, the education of the young —, purged from foreign influence.  Disregarding for now what was that culture, Iberian, autochthonous, or a combination of both, it so happened in countries like Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil that the foreign influence to be purged was mostly French.  At the time when French nationalists were trying to keep their music (and their science too!) pure and free of Germanic influence, Latin American nationalists were struggling to free their educational institutions from French tutelage.  The insensate war against Gallicisms was part of that struggle, and to its absurdity was added, in my own experience, a dose of pathos by the fact that the battle ground happened to be that particular book, Juvenilia, where the main theme is the deep reverence of its author, Miguel Cané, for his old French teacher, Amédée Jacques.

A modern knight errant who had made it his duty to know as much and widely as he could, and to teach it wherever there was thirst for knowledge, Jacques, born in Paris in 1813, earned there a degree in letters as well as a degree in natural sciences, taught at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and at the École Normale Supérieure, and founded a liberal journal, La Liberté de penser.  In December of 1851 he abandoned France, like Victor Hugo, Edgar Quinet, and Alexis de Tocqueville, to escape from the tyranny of Louis Napoleon, and sailed to Montevideo, with a letter from Alexander von Humboldt recommending him as an organizer of public instruction.  That didn’t work, and after some years of moving from one Argentine province to another and of holding all sorts of jobs, he was named a professor at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires and then became its rector.  This happened in 1860, when the country was somewhat pacified and reunited after the long civil wars between Federales and Unitarios, and during the presidency of Bartolomé Mitre (1860-8), who thought that Argentine culture had to be imported from Europe, as horses and cows had been centuries before.  Nothing local would do.  A purity equally insensate and absurd as the xenophobic one, if of opposite sign.  To appreciate the symmetry, think of José Hernández’ masterpiece, El gaucho Martín Fierro, published in 1872: just as my professors decried the galicismos in Juvenilia, Mitre disparaged the barbarisms in the gauchesco epic.

Jacques, however, brought to Argentina something precious that was lacking there, un plan de estudios, a modern, secular educational system beyond and above elementary schooling that would replace the dogmatic programs of the Jesuits, intellectual servants of the Church.  President Mitre, a 33rd-degree Mason, founded the Colegio to replace the old Jesuitic school, and Jacques was the pedagogue who performed the actual change.  Miguel Cané reports that whenever some professor called in sick, Jacques would replace him and give a superb lecture on the topic for that day, whether it was in math, physics or chemistry, biology or in philosophy, Latin, or in anything else, with one exception: he didn’t know English.  Sometimes, says Cané, Jacques would revert to his native tongue, but students didn’t mind it, for they all knew French.  I imagine Jacques committing quite a few galicismos in Spanish.

There are reasons why the precious pedagogical gift had to come from France.  The impulse to consider the rapidly progressing modern sciences as a whole, paying attention to sameness and differences in their methods, was at work in that country from the 18th century on.  Outstanding stages were the encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert, the École Polytechnique and the École Normale Supérieure founded by Napoléon, and Auguste Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy, which he began teaching in 1826 with the attendance of prestigious scientists such as A. von Humboldt, François Arago, F.J.V. Broussais, Joseph Fourier, and Louis Poinsot.  The Course was published in six volumes between 1830 and 1842; the first three deal with mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology, and the final three volumes deal with the social sciences.  You can see the outlines of a tradition behind the polymathy of Amédée Jacques.

The French impulse to consider the sciences as a whole produced a magnificent result: a plethora of instruments for learning.  To begin with, the great dictionary of Émile Maximilien Paul Littré, who was an admirer of Comte’s Course, popularizer of his ideas in numerous works on the positivist philosophy, and co-author of Histoire littéraire de la France.  And to end with my own childhood favorites, le Petit Larousse, with its logo, « Je sème à tout vent » and the fairylike lady blowing the achenes of a huge dandelion to every wind — how beautiful and how true, this metaphor of the activities of a great teacher errant like Jacques.  That small encyclopedic dictionary was the result of the industry of a contemporary of Jacques, Pierre Athanase Larousse, and of the assiduous work of a younger pedagogic genius, Claude Augé, whose triple Grammaire (elementary, middle, and advanced) made the study of the French language a pleasurable adventure.  Some schoolbooks that had belonged to my oldest uncle, who attended an Argentine high school before 1920, ended up in my parents’ house: Albert Malet’s History of the Orient and his History of Greece and Rome; J. Langlebert’s Chemistry, his Physics, and his Natural History: all those books were in Spanish, translated and published right after or together with their pubication in Paris.  French pedagogy, arm in arm with the secular positivist philosophy, had conquered Latin America, especially Argentina. Brazil, and Mexico.

But Newton’s Third Law also applies to the mechanics of the spirit: all actions elicit their reaction.  The triumphs of French pedagogy provoked a nationalistic, xenophobic reaction whose earliest manifesto in Argentina is a book by Ricardo Rojas, The Nationalist Restoration: Critique of Argentine Education and Bases for a Reform of the Study of Modern Humanities, published in 1909.  By the 1920s French textbooks had vanished from the desks of high-school students.

The title itself, “The Nationalist Restoration,” is telling enough for the Argentine reader, who right away thinks of Juan Manuel de Rosas, self-styled “el Restaurador de las leyes” (the Restorer of the laws) a dictator who terrorized the country for over twenty years, until he was defeated in the bloody battle of Caseros in 1852.  The power passed to men who were Masons and internationalists, among them the already mentioned Mitre, who founded the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires and brought Jacques to it, and Domingo F. Sarmiento, who succeeded Mitre as president and gave great impetus to the education of young men and women by bringing teachers from abroad — in particular from Emma Willard School in Troy, NY, just across the Hudson from where I have lived for the past fifty years.

Ricardo Rojas had a clear goal: to undo what had been achieved with the educational policy of the previous fifty years, especially in respect to history, language, and literature.  It was more problematic when it came to math and the natural sciences, by nature more universal. Nevertheless, Rojas was sharp and extremely general in his statements:

“Our education has failed, too, as I have shown, because of its empty encyclopedism and our apish bent for imitation, that lead us to sterile universalist studies instead of a fertile national education.”

This metaphor — sterile universalist studies versus fertile national education — merits some reflection, beyond its blatant wrongness.  It points to the soil and to the massive immigration that had been arriving from Europe, facilitated by the liberal governments after the battle of Caseros.  We have seen first-hand, alas, how the appearance of growing groups of people with different accents, customs, and aspirations, be it in France, in Italy, in Hungary, or elsewhere — and even in a vast immigration country like the U.S.A. — gives rise to xenophobia and to right-wing, anti-democratic, violent movements.  Argentina was no exception.  The largest immigrant contingent came from Italy; the Spaniards were almost as numerous, followed by the Jews from Eastern Europe.

The same year that Rojas published his nationalist manifesto, 1909, Simón Radowitzky, a young Jew from Ukraine who had been indoctrinated by immigrant Italian anarchists killed the chief of the federal police, a bloodthirsty repressor, an event which couldn’t but help Rojas’ sales, the resonance of his message, and the force of his metaphor, “Sterile universalism, fertile nationalism.”

Yet Rojas couldn’t well avoid the obvious fact that many of those immigrants were or became farmers, not sterile by any means.  So, what did he do?  He invented a distinction among farmers: unlike native ones, immigrant farmers “harvest their wheat from the plains they labor without love.”  We see Blut und Boden lifting its bloody and muddy mien.  Ten years after the publication of Rojas’ manifesto, the fear of bolshevism had been added to the fear of anarchism and the reaction was correspondingly increased: not only were striking workers attacked by the armed forces, now to the shouts of “Death to the Jews!” pogroms were carried out in the city of Buenos Aires.  According to the U.S.A. embassy (the Argentine news hardly mentioned it) a total of 1,500 Jews were killed in the riots.

Argentine literature was not much affected by Rojas’ cultural nationalism: Sur, the journal founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo, was cosmopolitan to the bone; in fact, its articles were often translations from the French brimming with galicismos.  My high-school education, however, did suffer from the wave of cultural chauvinism.  Not only from the waste of time imposed by the silly chase after galicismos, but from the uninspiring choice of texts we were assigned by our professors of the Castilian tongue, all directly or indirectly influenced by the soi-disant cultural nationalism of Ricardo Rojas.  Instead of making us read the jewels of Argentine literature of the last two centuries, we were assigned flat, dull anti-Semitic novels like Julián Martel’s La bolsa (The Stock Exchange, 1891), and we had to pretend that we were reading the unreadable book by Eduardo Mallea, Historia de una pasión argentina (History of an Argentine Passion, 1937).

I hold Rojas partly responsible for my adolescence deprived of better literary instruction, and totally responsible for the design and construction of the house where I grew up and lived until I left Argentina in 1963.  The house, in fact, was another statement of Rojas’ cultural nationalism, and a reaction against foreign, mostly French, influence on urban architecture (Buenos Aires, its denizens often boasted, was the Paris of South America).  To counter the Gallic dominant styles, Rojas built his house in a “pure” Hispanic style: I remember hearing, as a child, people refer to it as “Spanish Renaissance.”  The view from the street — calle Rivera Indarte 493 — through the green-and-silver iron grille, nods to the Alhambra because of the abundance of glazed ornamental tiles, and the fountain with the spout protruding from a lion’s maw.  However, the arches are all half circles, not pointed, horseshoed, or elongated; and they are double, separated by a column definitely not in the Moorish style.  Inside, the kitchen ceiling is barrel vaulted with traverse ribs, in imitation of the Visigothic style, and the dining room has its own double arch: a winged cherub presides over the family meals from the capital of the supporting column.  In the living room, above the taller-than-thou wainscoting, the walls show lattices of alternating fleurons and fleurs-de-lis; eight Solomonic columns support a sort of ciborium to house the wood-burning boiler for the radiators upstairs.  I could go on and cover pages with descriptions of the carved wood ceiling beams, the ornaments on the spandrels, the magnificent peacock of stucco blue and gold, but I’ll briefly focus instead on some telling details.  The cast-iron wood-burning boiler was made in Sweden; the stove and the oven in the kitchen bear the brand Orbis Mertig, an Argentine firm founded by a recent German immigrant, Robert Mertig, in 1921, which gives us a terminus a quo for the finished building.  Going upstairs, into the bathroom, we first notice in a corner a metal contraption shaped like a domed cylinder flanked by a jumble of pipes: it looks like the prototype of the gas water heater.  Getting closer we read the plaque: “Califont, made in London, England.”

If you don’t mind another visit to the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE), bulwark of Castilian against the encroaches of foreign languages, you will see that it does include the word “calefón”, and delimits its use to Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay.  The RAE offers an etymology: “De Calefont®, marca reg.” (From Calefont®, trademark).  Two things spring to view from this brief etymology: the foreign, English, origin is not acknowledged, and the brand name is misspelled, Calefont instead of Califont.  Xenophobia and carelessness often go together.

We are still in Rojas’ bathroom, admiring his vintage Califont.  Look at the other fixtures.  Bathtub, sink, toilet, and bidet all bear the name “Standard,” a Pennsylvania company.  Likely they were all imported together in the mid 1920s, a time of relative prosperity and low custom duties.  Those were the times, the golden age, as I have often heard it said.  But we’ve spent enough time in the bathroom.  The most visible element in the whole house, by far, are the roofing tiles, as you could already appreciate from the street: come now with me to the terrace, where we’ll be able to inspect those tiles in more detail.

See, each of these red tiles is stamped Marseille.  They are not Hispanic; they rather conform a massive Gallicism, indeed one to top them all.  In spite of its professed status as an example of cultural nationalism in urban architecture, the house on Calle Rivera Indarte, the house of my childhood and youth, reveals that cultural nationalism is a lie, a Potemkin façade, a vain fantasy as long as a country remains open to commerce with the outside.  It may only work if a country is closed off from the rest of the world, as happened in China under Emperor Xuando, who in 1434 issued the Edict of Haijin that prohibited all contacts with foreign lands, or as happened on a smaller scale in Spain under Philip II, whose edict of November 1559 forbade his subjects to attend foreign universities.  Two examples of how cultural isolation condemns a country to long sterility and backwardness.

3.

For some splendid examples of the fertility of cultural crosspollination, we turn again to music, and lift the curtain in Venice, during the carnival of 1708, or else (for the historical record is confused) in Rome the following year, 1709.  Two young virtuosi of the same age, twenty-two or twenty-three, compete before an audience of connoisseurs.  Georg Friedrich Händel and Domenico Scarlatti were both born in 1685, like Johann Sebastian Bach; both played the organ and the harpsichord; Händel, aka il Sassone (the Saxon), was deemed the better organist, and Scarlatti, the son of Alessandro Scarlatti, a prominent composer of Sicilian origin, seems to have been preferred on the harpsichord.  The two young men became friends and mutual admirers, as Ralph Kirkpatrick tells in his book, Domenico Scarlatti.

Both composed Italian operas, but their fames do not primarily rest on those.  A few years after his encounter with Scarlatti Händel moved to England, where he changed his name slightly to George Frideric Handel, and where he imparted his polyphonic genius and introduced the vigor, the regal energy of his oratorios with their masterful use of choirs, of which the most famous is the still ever-present Messiah, of his festive pieces like the Water Music and the Royal Fireworks, and of his solemn Coronation Anthem, Zadok the Priest.

That, by itself, is a brilliant example of cultural fusion. It was, to be sure, a cultural fusion made possible or at least facilitated by the change of reigning dynasty from the Stuarts to the German Hanoverians, the change from Queen Anne to King George I in 1714.  It was a fusion of a special kind, in that Handel brought musical changes to England but his music wasn’t changed by England.  Except possibly for the Birthday Ode for Queen Anne, HWV 74, Handel does not seem to have been inspired or influenced by English composers, not even by the great Purcell.  In particular, if we listen to Handel’s keyboard music, the sixteen Keyboard Suites he explicitly dedicated to his new country, we find that the composer brought all his materials, all his tools, from the continent.  The courtly dances — Sarabande, Allemande, Courante, Minuet, Gigue, etc. — that constitute J. S. Bach’s Suites or Partitas, play the same role in Handel’s suites, and they were all imported, from France or Italy first into Germany, and then by Handel into England.

The history of those dances is an interesting example of cultural crossbreeding.  In their book Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach, Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne note that after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the end of the Thirty-Year War, during an era that included the lifespans of J. S. Bach and Handel,

“Many German courts and cities imported culture from France and Italy as part of a peacetime cultural competition, striving to build brilliant, elegant centers of civility which would outshine those of their neighbors.”

An all-important part of such elegant civility was the dance, in great measure because of Louis XIV’s passion for dancing and for ballet spectacles.  Not to deviate too long from our main theme, which is the divergent musical destinies of those two friends Georg and Domenico, only one of the dances used by J. S. Bach and Handel will be mentioned here, the saraband.  Its origins are obscure: it is said by some to show Iberian Arabic influences, it is traced by others to aboriginal peoples of Mexico or Central America, and still by others to ancient Dionysian cults.  What is certain is that the zarabanda appeared in Spain and became popular in the 16th century, and that it was a lewd, arousing dance and a very indecent song, so much so that in an entremés Cervantes mentions the zarabanda and identifies its origin in hell.  Philip II of Spain issued another edict in 1583 forbidding his subjects to sing or recite a zarabanda under penalty of two hundred lashes and forbidding them to dance it under penalty of six years of rowing in the royal galleys for men and banishment for women.

In the first quarter of the 17th century, well before the end of the Thirty-Year War, we know that the zarabanda had crossed the Pyrenees into France, where it was called sarabande; some memoirs of the times and Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (chapter 8) mention the scandalous “affaire de la sarabande”: Cardinal Richelieu, it was said, was in love with the Spanish-born queen and had danced for her a saraband, disguised as a buffoon.  However, when the saraband is taken over by the court of Louis XIV, it becomes, without shedding its rhythmic structure, a stately, courtly dance, as in Handel and Bach.  Little and Jenne have this to say:

“Writers of Bach’s time used a wide variety of terms to describe the saraband but consistently alluded to an intensity of expression.  Some spoke of it as “grave” or “ceremonious.”  Others called it “majestic” or “serious.”  Rémond de Saint-Mard believed that it was “always melancholy, and exudes a delicate yet serious tenderness.””

“A delicate yet serious tenderness” doesn’t come close to the sublimity of J. S. Bach’s Aria of his Goldberg Variations, the saraband at the beginning that is repeated without change at the very end, and yet, for those who have listened to the thirty variations in between, it feels different — the Aria at the beginning is beautiful, the Aria at the end is both beautiful and true.  Not a logical or objective truth, but a truth about our being in time.

Zarabanda from hell to saraband the sublime.  Not a purification, mind you, but a transfiguration that was made possible by cultural miscegenation.
 
Just as Handel had emigrated to England in 1712, Domenico Scarlatti left Italy for Portugal in 1719 and lived there in the royal court until 1729; then he moved to Spain, lived in Seville for four years, until he established himself in Madrid from 1733 to his death in 1757.  And just as Handel’s success in his new country was sponsored by a new dynasty, the Hanoverian, so Scarlatti’s was favored in Spain by the first Bourbon kings, Philip V and Ferdinand VI.  The divergence is in the manner of their influence: Handel influenced English music but was not influenced by it, while Scarlatti was deeply influenced by the Spanish musical tradition, an influence that is clearly on display in the 555 keyboard sonatas he composed during his last twenty-five years in Madrid.  Those are not sonatas in the later, classical sense, like those by Clementi, Haydn, or Mozart, but brief compositions, between less than a minute to five or six minutes long.

To my ear, some of the sonatas where the Spanish influence is most obvious are K380 in E major, especially when played by Vladimir Horowitz; K141 in D minor and K27 in B minor, especially as recorded by Emil Gilels or by Martha Argerich; the Sonatas in E flat Major K193 and in C Major K132, especially as interpreted by Clara Haskil; and the G minor K450 by Ivo Pogorelić.  K13 and K14, both in G major, or K28 in E major are also good examples, but the list could go on and on.  In each of those and in many more, one must pay attention to the imitations of the rasgueado, the rumba, and the picado of the flamenco guitar, the stomping of flamenco shoes, and the claps of palillos or castanets.

Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard pieces had a manifest influence on the sonatas of the Spanish composer Padre Antonio Soler, who may have been Scarlatti’s direct disciple, and musicologists are agreed that they also had a strong, general influence on the Viennese Classical style; I timidly suggest that Scarlatti is still audible in Beethoven’s Bagatelles op. 33, op. 119, and op. 126.  Moreover, just as zarabanda from hell was transfigured into saraband the sublime, something similar occurred with Spanish flamenco music.  Its remote origins are, as usual, rather confused.  Today, however, thanks to new research into ethnic dances —Miriam Phillips, for example, has studied the connections between flamenco and Northern India’s kathak dance— it seems clear enough that we owe flamenco mainly to the Spanish Roma, los gitanos, and in less measure to Muslims and Jews: three ethnic groups living mostly in Andalusia, who were persecuted, banished, and reduced to misery by edict after edict of the monarchs who were obsessed with limpieza de sangre, blood purity.  Accordingly, flamenco was considered obscene, music from hell and dance of the devils, like the zarabanda.  To tell precisely how the flamenco sounds became part of our Classical tradition would require a plectrum better than mine, but I would feel bad if I forgot to mention that flamenco also resounds in Luigi Boccherini (1743 -1805), who followed on Scarlatti’s steps and moved from his native Tuscany to Spain.

Impossible for me to examine here more musical and dance forms that were initially despised, then rescued and exalted by cross breeding, except that I must talk about Argentine tango because I grew up listening to it, and on occasion dancing it.

The origins of tango and of the slightly earlier milonga are shrouded in more confusion and downright nonsense than the origins of the saraband or flamenco, perhaps because of the universal popularity of tango at present time.  On one thing everyone agrees: those origins were low, miserably low, consisting in two conjugate pits, the brothels and the margins.  Brothels densely dotted the city of Buenos Aires until 1936, when they were closed by law.  Margins were those of the same city, its borders, arrabales or suburbia.  The word arrabal(es) recurs in countless tango lyrics, but I don’t recall a single mention of the brothels: surely such mentions were prohibited.  As for the suburbia, those were the opposite of what the word may suggest to the modern American ear.  The primitive industries were located there, foul yet essential to survival, kept at a distance by decent city dwellers: el matadero, the grounds reserved for the slaughter of livestock; the meat-packing plants on the banks of the stinking Riachuelo; the vast fields where the city garbage was burned, called la quema, the burning dumps.   

The margins or arrabales were supposed to be teeming with malevos, thugs, or cuchilleros, knifers, as Jorge Luis Borges calls them.  The matadero was the only place where I saw gauchos in regalia back in the early 1950s.  In the dumps, in caves dug into the huge mounds of garbage not yet set on fire, lived whole families of a tribe called los cirujas.  The name, related to Spanish cirujano and English surgeon, derives from Greek cheir (hand) and ourgia (operation); this might be because cirujas operated with their hands the change of some refuse back into something useful; or, since the cirujas had a fame for wielding a fatal knife, the name could be a joke about the surgeon and his scalpel.  In any case, it’s hard to imagine a group of humans lower in the social scale, except perhaps the pimps.

Those two groups and those two sinkholes, the brothels and the margins, were there at the beginnings of tango music, usually traced to the 1880s and to the larger brothels, where men danced among themselves while waiting for sexual services.  But why or whence the conjugation, the joining together of the two pits, brothels and margins?  For after all, they weren’t neighbors.  Should we imagine the malevos or thugs from the margins patronizing the downtown brothels in large numbers and dancing?  Unlikely.  My theory, which may be novel, is based on familiarity with Argentine masculinity, acquired by years of examining myself and my male compatriots.  In a few words, a macho man hates having to pay for sex; he feels it should be offered him for free; he should indeed be begged by the woman.  The men facing one another at the brothel, waiting for their number to be called, felt shame, sexual shame, and to prove they weren’t maricones (not macho enough), they tried to imitate the malevos, who were the “real” machos.  They copied their clothes, the slant of their hats, their tough guy poses, and their argot, later dubbed lunfardo.

Back in the 1880s and 90s, tangos and milongas were not sentimental.  They avoided tears and love longings and embraced “the quasi-indifference of the singer of bloody deeds,” as Borges described the compositions he preferred in El tango: cuatro conferencias.  I bring Borges up at this point because the great Argentine writer is a prime exhibit for my theory of sexual shame assuaged by tough guy mimesis.  When Borges was a teenager in Switzerland, his father, don Jorge Guillermo, seeing that the boy was too shy to procure a female by himself and fearing that consequently he would become a masturbator or, perish the thought, a marica, arranged for him a visit to a brothel.  That in itself is not surprising to anyone familiar with the mindset of many generations of Argentine males, but on this occasion the results were unfortunate.  We don’t know au juste what transpired during the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boy’s visit to the brothel at the Place de Bourg-du-Four in Geneva, we only know that afterward Borges was never able to lie with a woman — nor with a man.  You can find more details in Erwin Williamson’s 2004 biography of Borges and in Estela Canto’s memoir, Borges a contraluz.  That is the sexual shame part, cruel enough; as for the conjugate reaction, the mimesis of the tough guy, it is enough to point to Borges’ many stories and anecdotes about knife-wielding thugs, men from the fringes whose fierce contempt for women achieves its climax in the story “La intrusa” (The Intruder, 1966), where Borges claims that his intention is to show the nature of the old-time tough guys (“la índole de los orilleros antiguos”).  That old time, when men were real men and never wept (although at the end of “La intrusa” the Nilsen brothers pointedly almost weep), was around the 1880s.

But times were changing.  As I said in the second salvo, Argentina was being flooded by European immigrants: they softened the ideal of a tough guy and with it the nature of tango.  By the late 1910s the cultural appropriation of River Plate music — its European colonization — was complete.  Historians seem to agree that the decisive victory of the “tango-canción” or the bel canto type over the old tough-guy kind was won by Carlos Gardel’s 1917 rendition of Pascual Contursi and Samuel Castriota’s “Mi noche triste” (My sad night).  In his talks on tango Borges concurs, and interprets it as a victory of dramatic over epic poetry.  In my opinion, Gardel was simply free from the sexual shame that afflicted most patrons of the brothels: indeed, beautiful women begged him for sex, so he didn’t have to play the tough guy.  Note, incidentally, that Gardel was born in Toulouse, France, and arrived in Argentina with his mother at age two; the lyricist and the composer of “My Sad Night,” Contursi and Castriota, were sons of Italian immigrants.

The following years, through the 1920s, are remarkable not only for the burst of lyric creativity, but also because some of those tango lyrics are the clearest expressions of the radical changes that the original scheme — sexual shame assuaged by tough guy imitation — had undergone: they are clear because they are willed and conscious.

In 1926 Francisco Alfredo Marino, the son of an Italian immigrant, thought of writing the lyrics of a tango that would revive its origins and be so thickly packed with lunfardo that the most seasoned lunfardistas would have trouble with it.  Incidentally, the word lunfardo itself is a deformation of the Italian lombardo (from Lombardy).  The result was an immediate success: “El ciruja”, with music by Ernesto de la Cruz.  As soon as the ciruja is released from long imprisonment, he hoofs it back to his old haunts in the arrabal, fearing that he’ll find everything changed (nostalgia has become an increasingly important mood in tango, and so has the old motif ubi sunt, “where-are-they?”)  While walking, the thug remembers the times when he made a good living as a pickpocket, the good times at the horse races and the night parties, and then we come to the love triangle at the center of the drama.  He remembers his girlfriend:

“Era un mosaico diquero
Que yugaba de quemera, 
Hija de una curandera
Mechera de profesión.  
Pero vivía engrupida 
De un cafiolo vidalita
Y le pasaba la guita 
Que le chacaba al matón.” 

(She was a gorgeous broad /Who sifted through the dumps /Daughter of a she-quack /Shoplifter by trade. /But the girl was taken in /By a two-bit pimp /And she handed him the dough /That she would get from the thug. )

A knife-wielding ciruja, an attractive female ciruja — nota bene: not a whore, but a fellow worker at la quema —, and a low-class pimp: the two men fight a duel, and the knife-nimble ciruja kills the pimp.  Here are the last four lines:

“Hoy, ya libre’e la gayola y sin la mina, 
campaneando un cacho’e sol en la vedera,
piensa un rato en el amor de su quemera
y solloza en su dolor.” 

(Today, free from jail and with no girl, /catching any bit of sun on the steet, /he remembers the love of his quemera /and weeps in pain.)  

The old elements subsist: the tough guy, the brothel barely suggested by the cafiolo or pimp, but now the tough man weeps.  He’s still in love.  Not a minor change.

A stronger statement of female power, “Malevaje” (1928), is a dramatic tango, definitely not “epic,” therefore “decadent” in Borges’ sense of those words.  The music is by Juan de Dios Filiberto (originally Filiberti, a son of Genoa) and the lyrics by Enrique Santos Discepolo (1901-1951), a son of Naples.  A hard-as-iron guy, a super macho, complains bitterly to the female who has captured his heart: “Decí por Dios qué me has da’o, que estoy tan cambia’o, no sé más quién soy...” (Tell me, by God, what you have given me, that I am so changed, I don’t recognize myself...).  The malevo has declined so badly that he’s unable to fight:

“Ayer, de miedo a matar,
en vez de pelear
me puse a correr...
Me vi a la sombra o fina’o; 
 pensé en no verte y temblé...”  

(Yesterday, afraid to kill, /instead of fighting /I ran... /I saw myself in jail or dead; /I thought of not seeing you and trembled...)

Enrique Santos Discepolo, by broad agreement, was the greatest tango lyricist.  Not only for his rich, memorable metaphors, but also for the great variety of subject matter, of emotions and moods, that vastly extend the model of the insecure male of the River Plate.  Above all, Discepolo bares the contradictions which are the soul of Buenos Aires — compare the bitter cynicism in “Yira-Yira” or “Qué vachaché” to the counter-cynical, denunciatory “Cambalache.”  Or the wrenching cry in “Confesión” — “Sol de mi vida, fui un fracasa’o; y en mi caída, busqué de echarte a un la’o...” (Sun of my life, I’ve been a failure; and in my fall, I tried to push you aside...) — the saintly generosity of a loser.  Can a saint be said to be a failure?

Just when I was leaving Argentina for the USA in August 1963, Borges published in the daily La Nación his sonnet “Buenos Aires” which begins:         

“Y la ciudad ahora es como un plano 
de mis humillaciones y fracasos...”  

(And the city is now like a map /of my humiliations and failures...)

and ends:

“No nos une el amor sino el espanto;
será por eso que la quiero tanto.”

(We’re linked not by love but by horror; / perhaps that is why I love her so)

Despite his reactionary stand regarding tango, Borges thus ends up agreeing with Discepolo: Buenos Aires can be sung of only as paradoxical coincidences of opposites.  Once the rigid rules of both Aristotelian logic and sexual shame were relaxed, along with the strictures of machismo, the ground and the atmosphere were right for the sublimation of tango music.

Astor Piazzolla’s grandfather, Pantaleo Piazzolla, was an immigrant from Apulia, and on the mother side his grandparents were from Lucca in Tuscany, the birthplace of both Luigi Boccherini and Giacomo Puccini, so one may say that Astor himself, born in Mar del Plata, 250 miles South of Buenos Aires in 1921, was a product of cultural crossbreeding.  Like Odysseus the epic hero, he saw many cities and got acquainted with many mindsets; he also narrowly escaped death: barely fifteen and about to accompany Gardel in his fatal flight, his dad, his nonino, forbade it.  He lived in New York City between the ages of four and fifteen, then, back in Buenos Aires, in the early 1940s he studied with Alberto Ginastera, the foremost Argentine classical composer at the time.  In the mid 1950s he lived in Paris as a student of the great Nadia Boulanger, who encouraged him on the difficult ascension: as a daring, exotic dance, tango had been a world success early in the century; now Piazzolla transformed the bandoneon into a classical orchestra instrument and tango into a classical musical genre.  People who don’t know a word of lunfardo and little or no Spanish, now can catch some of the pluck and nostalgia, of the love and horror that is Buenos Aires, through its music.

 

* * *

I have given some examples of the miseries of cultural isolation and the glories of cultural impurity: they are just examples; they don’t pretend to add up to a general theory.  If next we had some counterexamples, that is, cases where purity and isolation work in some sense better than cultural miscegenation, then perhaps, as it usually happens in mathematics, interesting general theorems could follow.