4/15/20

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Arturo Márquez (1950- )

The piece I have selected for today’s post is the first piece in the blog which I have performed, and also the piece which I have admired the longest. Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No. 2 is perhaps one of the most famous orchestral works by a contemporary Mexican composer, gaining its popularity from the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar’s 2007 tour of Europe and the Americas under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel, as well as from the 2008 documentary El Sistema. I was first exposed to Danzón No. 2 from the documentary, and having fallen in love with the piece then, I was very excited when my youth orchestra in Milwaukee announced that we would be performing it on our tour in Argentina and Uruguay. Having had that experience, I can now confirm with complete confidence that the piece is as fun to play as it sounds.

In the span of 10 years (starting in 1994), Márquez composed 8 Danzones for orchestra (with the exception of the fifth, which is written for saxophone quartet), all of them incorporating musical elements from Veracruz. Establishing himself as a prolific composer with a wonderfully engaging Latin sound, it becomes evident as to why his music became so popular following the development of music programs in Spanish-speaking countries. El Sistema was one of the first of these programs, starting in 1975 in Venezuela as a publicly funded program to get children of all ages engaged in music, and in turn to keep them away from the country’s crime and drug problems. Gustavo Dudamel is perhaps the most accomplished and famous musician to have origins in this program, as he would go on to become the artistic director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar (a position which he has had since 1999), which at a time was the flagship orchestra of El Sistema until the group matured to a point where it could no longer be considered a youth orchestra. El Sistema acts as sign of just how profound music education can be - aside from countless children in Venezuela learning music despite their poverty, they were given a program that kept them away from danger and involved in academics. Countless studies have shown how music education improves student performance in their academic studies, meaning that this program has changed lives even if any given student to come out of it did not pursue music any further. Personally, I would highly recommend watching the documentary El Sistema - it goes into much further depth about the development of the program and how it was able to continue despite the financial issues surrounding accessible music education for impoverished families.

So now let’s take a look at why Danzón No. 2 works so well. Your first impression of it might be that it is actually relatively straightforward - and that is certainly true to an extent. The piece immediately establishes a clave rhythm with a clarinet on top presenting one of the main melodies of the piece. Those two elements right there are all you really need to know about the piece to understand quite a bit about it - Márquez is able to take that material and spin it several different ways, giving the melody to the oboe next (while the clarinet plays a game of counterpoint) and then passing it to the strings and horn. The clave rhythm gives a constant pulse to the piece, pulling the listener along through each new textural and harmonic variation. The flow of it all is truly captivating, and just when a listener might become too comfortable in the piece’s warm swaying, it changes. With the entrance of the second theme, Danzón No. 2 takes a dance-like spin to reveal a much more bold and fiery theme. The change of tempo and style pushes the piece forward and keeps the listener from ever becoming too bored or used to any one given setting. The brilliance of Arturo Márquez is that from just after that point (around the piccolo solo) the listener is now set up with just about every individual element there is in the piece. You might not know that there is a trumpet solo later in the piece (which is absolutely killer, by the way), but you can understand the dueling nature of the two themes, the main rhythmic principals, and probably even how Márquez’s use of harmony makes every turn feel fresh and as if it were pulling you somewhere. So even as I might initially set up the piece as straightforward, I’d like to also mention that beneath the surface there is a lot more genius to how individual elements come together in the variations, and as to why the piece is so catchy. If there weren’t, I probably would not have listened to the piece several times many evenings for a brief moment of my teenage years.

There is one more thing that I’d like to mention about the piece in regards to its place in contemporary music. After composers like John Cage used up all the remaining good ideas for how to make music sound new and different (that’s a joke by the way - there’s certainly more John Cages still to come in the world of music), people often ask where classical music is headed. I believe that the answer may lie in pieces like Danzón No. 2: fusion of styles. While this specific example may be predominantly Mexican or Latin sounding, there is undoubtedly influence from the same tradition that gave way to the other composers which I have discussed in previous posts. The piece was written for an orchestra (a European tradition) with solos that resemble those found in a Romantic symphony, and with a clave rhythm (traditionally found in Afro-Cuban music) underneath it all. What I’m getting at is that with the globalization that has happened in recent history, I believe that the classical music of the future is bound to see the fusion of more and more cultural styles.

Below I am linking my absolute favorite recording of the piece, which a performance by the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel (a few years after their 2007 tour). If you’re interested in following the score of the piece, there is a recording of the Los Angeles Philharmonic which, coincidentally, is also with Dudamel conducting - that video can be found here. Is it becoming obvious I’m a Dudamel fan? Regardless, I hope you enjoy the piece - I have no historical, academic, or theoretical evidence to support it, but I do believe that it is impossible not to get the urge to dance to it. If I had to make a guess, however, I would have to put my money on the quarter-note triplet flares that show up from time to time being the culprit.