Admiring Leo Brouwer: A Memorable Experience

2018. This year’s guitar festival in Lucca is dedicated to the music of the world-acclaimed Cuban composer and considered by many as the greatest living guitarist-composer of our time, Leo Brouwer. A homage to his momentous works, particularly to his indispensable contribution to guitar repertoir. Alongside the series of concerts in celebration of his music, the city of Lucca is also blessed to have the occasion to hear the maestro talk of his inspiringly intense creative life and ideas on culture.

The program starts with a short film documentary about the contemporary Mexican guitarist, Pablo Garibay’s travel in Havana, Cuba, to meet the legendary composer and to learn personally from him about his work Cantata de Perugia. The film shows scenes of the lively, working streets of Havana and its festive inhabitants; Leo Brouwer reading a line from Shakespeare during a rehearsal; and the intimate collaboration between Garibay and Brouwer which culminated in the performance of the Cantata de Perugia at the International Guitar Festival in Saltillo, Coahulia in Mexico with Garibay playing the guitar and the maestro himself conducting the Coro y Orquestra Filarmonica del Desierto.

Leo Brouwer enters the auditorium all smiling. He has a shy and elegant manner. One feels something monumental and brilliant in his presence but nothing snobbish or aloof about him. His attire is simple: his usual black turtle neck, jeans, leather shoes, and an unremarkable black jacket. His square, handsome bearded face has the image of a 19th century intellectual and revolutionary. One immediately notices, too his beautiful, long, worked-out fingers.

Brouwer talks. He speaks in Italian, throwing some Spanish, English and French words here and there. His voice is soft and at the same time seething with intensity, experience, and authority. He begins with stories of his childhood.

As a child he was musically precocious. He recalls when he was a little boy he would hide inside the body of the piano just to feel the vibration of the hammering notes. It was vibration which fascinated him more than the sound. At an early age he was introduced to the guitar by his father and since then he couldn’t get over the instrument. He was enthralled, absorbed. Early on he developed an unusual taste for strange sounding chords. While mostly young learners were attracted to the simple and catchy chord progressions of pop music, the young Brouwer’s sensibility was attuned to the play of dissonance. The unmistakable style of his music perhaps can be traced back to this childhood experience. Popular music was everywhere like sunshine and rain, he says, that he never had to listen to it. Instead, he listened voraciously to classical music on the radio. He places high importance on the early musical (artistic) education of children to discover and develop their creative capacities. All children are painters (artists), he exclaims with full conviction.

All the more inspiring is the fact that his musical education is mostly self-taught, except, he confesses, the few hours he had spent with a wonderful guitar professor whom he recalls fondly with so much enthusiasm. He taught himself to write and conduct music by rigorously listening and studying the works of the masters. For Brouwer it takes a vast amount of love, energy, and curiosity to study by one’s self. The solitary, private enterprise of studying was in itself an intellectual adventure, never a lonely occupation. To rely on, trust, and  judge for one’s self is the most intimate and constructive way of approaching the work of a composer. He says in a serious tone that one cannot write a symphony without studying at least half of Beethoven’s symphonies; one cannot write a concerto without studying at least half of Mozart’s concertos. This says of the austerity of Leo Brouwer’s studiousness—he wrote his first music (a string quartet?) at seventeen years old—and his infinite gift of admiration for his musical predecessors and contemporaries.

Admiration for Brouwer is not a passive act; it implies an active passion for studying, examining, analyzing, listening, and above all, appreciating the great works of the past and the present (he acknowledges his friendship with diverse artists from rockstars like Sting to jazz greats like Ron Carter, Stanley Clarke and Al DiMeola). Many composers touched and taught him: Monteverdi, Boccherini, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Puccini, Stravinsky, Webern, Orf, Ravel, Debussy, Bartok, Prokofiev and the list goes on. He talks of great composers with reverence and humor. On Beethoven he remarks ambiguously: “After Beethoven everything else is complicated.” On Schoenberg he judges his music as “too academic and contradictory.” His musical sensibility, he professes, is closest to the Hungarian Bartok and the Russian Prokofiev. Admiration is the foundation of composition, of creation. To admire is to learn to compose.

When he talks about composing he is full of childlike amazement. Seriousness and childishness are the essential attitudes when composing. Composing is child’s play which involves all the passion, intellect, playfulness and imagination– the way a child synthesizes the different objects he or she is playing with, so the composer must be able to synthesize everything he or she admires.

His admiration and enthusiasms go beyond the sphere of music. The immensity of his influences covers paintings (especially the works of Paul Klee), history (world history), literature (with which James Joyce’s taste and method of composition he sympathizes), architecture (particularly the works of the eclectic Bauhaus group). Every art form empowers another art form. This demonstrates the solidarity of all arts. And collaboration between artists is necessary for growth and discovery. A person of culture perhaps is he or she who embodies this solidarity of arts and whose appreciation is wide-ranging and inclusive. “That man,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.” Admiration is the opposite and enemy of provincialism and parochialism.

Brouwer also emphasizes a very important attribute of the artist that is, alertness. Nothing must be taken for granted. Even when you’re driving a car, he says, turn the radio on and you will learn something. Learning is the fruit of alertness. A composer takes something out of everything be it Mexican salsa, the Raga of India, the festive percussion of the streets of Havana, or the various indigenous music of Asia. Alertness is the wisdom of the composer. It is about creative and appreciative appropriation of diverse traditions and differing perspectives and a radical openness to one’s immediate environment.

But it’s hard, he affirms; the work of the composer is not easy. Mozart’s words come to my mind:

“People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.”

Later in the program, Leo Brouwer welcomes questions from the audience. I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to voice my question to the patient maestro, and asking him face to face is perhaps one of the most overwhelming moments in my life. My question:

“In this historic moment we are living through in which the world is facing an ecological catastrophe, in what direction should musical composition go?”

I do not remember verbatim everything the maestro has said. But I immediately understand the heart and ideas of his response:

We live in the age of information; everything we “want” to know is there in our tiny cellphones. The fact is, we do not look for information, information comes to us whether we like it or not. Our daily lives are regulated by the influx of information. Nowadays we know about a lot of things but understand little. Mass media has successfully claimed our culture, a great part of which is based on entertainment. And as we all know the U.S., the global power, dictates the direction of this culture, that of distraction and manipulation. Most of the information that we receive from the mainstream media is distorted, manipulated to distract us. So what can we do as individuals, as musicians, as artists? Search the truth, find it out for ourselves, analyze the information that we receive, think critically. In a world where reflection and concentration are declining and every act is reduced into a form of consumption, we musicians should keep the tradition of critical and imaginative thinking, of attentiveness and reflection, of study and discovery, of amazement and giving... Do it the old fashion way: read books, read Shakespeare, read Joyce, they will not manipulate you... (this remark is most interesting if not ambiguous).

I am reminded of Nietzche’s prophecy in The Will to Power:

“For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”

In this unreflecting time of distraction and manipulation one of the noble duties of the artist is expressed by Eugene Delocroix in his journal:

“Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul. You are always being lured away by foolish distractions.”

It is indeed an elevating experience to hear personally the inspiring and courageous words of an artist of Leo Brouwer’s stature. He is a man of deep intelligence and moral integrity. Despite his lofty status in the cultural world, he is extremely amiable. Coming from Cuba, he has a happy personality and a generous spirit. His vision of culture is an ideal one; his standards for the artist are inconsistent with today’s obsession with false glamour, quick recognition, and instant success. The artist, as Leo Brouwer himself embodies, plays a vital role in the community, and that is to give, through his work, hope and beauty which this world desperately needs. This work, remarked Oscar Wilde, “requires the combination of intelligence and feeling of the highest order” for which Leo Brouwer is certainly qualified.

An encounter with Leo Brouwer and his music reinforces the hope of a culture that is committed to critical and imaginative thinking, intellectual engagement, serious commitment to beauty, and the boundless capacity for artistic work and collaboration. Despite the appalling conversion of culture into aggressive forms of self-glorification and an insensate mode of entertainment, the work of Leo Brouwer is a living testament of the dignity of the artist’s passion. Passion as admiration; most importantly, passion as the indestructible faith in the humanizing capacity of culture.