Leo Brouwer
(Carla Franco/courtesy of the artist)
Betto Arcos
April 11, 2017
Heard on All Things Considered
"To be useful is something incredible, because you're at the service of the world," Brouwer says in Spanish. "Humans, when they communicate, when they teach, when they show, when they give ... they're doing one of the most beautiful things in life ... Perhaps my roots in solitude, of being an orphan — it forces me to these reflections."
His parents divorced when he was very young, and his mother died when he was 11. So he decided to go look for his father.
"I found him playing a guitar, and it was the instrument that fascinated me," he says.
Brouwer taught himself everything he knows about music. Even though
his grandmother was the sister of renowned composer Ernesto Lecuona, the
wealthy family refused to pay for any kind of music education and
wanted nothing do to with him.
"I'd say that being in an orphanage made me reflect on the
'what' and the 'why' — especially the 'why' — of the essential things
in life," he says. "What is a man? What am I doing here? What is
culture? Why am I fascinated with this?"
Brouwer says he
listened to Cuba's classical radio station all the time and learned how
to read sheet music by haunting music stores in Havana when he was 15
years old.
"I arrived and showed my clean hands, so I could
touch the sheet music. 'Sure, come on in, boy,' they'd say. I spent four
hours a day standing, studying Stravinsky, including one of Mozart's
string quartets, who was one of my first teachers of the traditional
forms ... That's the world in which I began to compose," he says. "I
didn't have a piano, I don't need it. I trained the ear and I wrote on
the table. And I still write music that way. The guitar was a reference,
for fingerings and things like that."
Brouwer's models were Bartok, Schumann, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. He wanted to do for the guitar what they had done for instruments like piano and violin.
Brazilian guitarist Carlos Barbosa-Lima first heard Brouwer's music when he was touring in Europe, in the early 1970s.
"For
me it was a new experience, because I saw a composer-guitarist with
incredible view of the music and different styles too, including the
popular roots, and also his knowledge," Barbosa recalls. "I think
probably he had his style, when he was in his teens, already defined."
No comments:
Post a Comment