Failure at the Auditori and folk art in our lives

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ablo Heras-Casado has vindicated, like many other great artists of the past, the serious character of popular or folk music. Music created by the people, transmitted from generation to generation, which composers like Igor Stravinsky or Manuel de Falla reformulated with new means and -above all- an inspiring radicalism, ultimately demonstrating the true universality of its scope. They were not alone; one of the most illustrious accomplices, Pablo Picasso, designed the set design and costumes for ballets such as Pulcinella or The Three-Cornered Hat, both premiered in Paris exactly one hundred years ago, in 1919, commissioned by a visionary Serge Diaghilev, the artistic promoter who had already caused a great scandal with the premiere of the Rite of Spring.

The source that inspires El amor brujo or The Three-Cornered Hat is popular, but it only later becomes a cliché, as a result of its systematic link to celebrations and events.

Stravinsky's foundational composition, which in 1913 generated a true revolution, articulates sounds of the earth, guttural roars, strident whispers, in short, impossibly natural dramatic effects, illustrating the human need to tame the elements. The anthropological dimension of music, its essential presence in festive times -we will return, later, to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mircea Eliade- was transferred to the collective imagination through notions that today sound ancient, such as "national school" or "folkloric nationalism." Certainly, the source that inspires is popular.Love, the MagicianorThe Three-Cornered Hat, but it only becomes a cliché -something alien to the composer- as a result of its systematic linkage to celebrations and events, subsequently, with which it tends to become fused. In this way, the creative element disappears, the originality that truly exalts the creator, whether they belong to the musical field or any other.

The statements by Ferran Adrià or other multi-award-winning chefs -Arzak, for example- about the simplicity of their culinary tastes -fried eggs, olives, fried fish bones- may seem like boutades launched in absurd contrast to the sophistication of their cuisine. But let's repeat something often said: all artifice, like its alchemist spirit, is born from the desire to decant the essence, the purity of a flavor that is revered as mythical. The recovery of that sensitive and fundamental truth -which is at the base or origin of experience, of contact with the world- is outlined from a prior deconstruction, through the use of improbable technologies that allow glimpses of flavors that gustatory memory -as Marcel Proust and the creators of the popular Ratatouille knew, among them Ferran Adrià himself, as an advisor-, preserves intact. The metaphysical distance of the original is overcome by artificial and humorously recreated perfection. The spherified olive is one of the symbols of that victory.

Claude Lévi-Strauss dedicates his work Le cru et le cuit («The Raw and the Cooked») "To Music," and in fact organizes ethnographic descriptions and mythological explanations -which largely concern the inherent meaning of cultivating and treating food, a civilizing element and developer of culture- from epigraphs with musical resonances. Lévi-Strauss considers that music, like myth, stops time: "while we listen to it, we access a kind of immortality." The mythical celebration or festivity is characterized by taking place in a separate temporality -Mircea Eliade explained in The Myth of the Eternal Return- which offers the possibility of strengthening ties with life; it enables a fusion with nature, an undifferentiation with the living, which is felt as fullness by the participants. Similarly, the consumption of foods from the earth influences -from the artifice of their gastronomic elaboration, a true ceremony- the realization of primordial reality.

Falla turned out to be that thin old man on the hundred-peseta banknotes, as well as the involuntary accomplice of the soundtrack of the scarce television channels.

Returning to Falla, whose work Heras-Casado performed on March 10 at the Auditori de Barcelona -a journey in his international tour titled "Magia", leading a group of virtuosos, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra-, it is evident that the presence of traditional dances (Fandango, Seguidillas, Farruca, Jota) refers to specific territories, which are more or less distant to us, just as the composer himself is more or less familiar to each person. For some of us, Falla turned out to be -we learned later- that thin old man on the hundred (the really old) peseta banknotes, as well as the involuntary accomplice of the soundtrack of the scarce television channels, which through traditional images obstructed the synesthetic suggestion of his music.

It is to do musicology-fiction, to pretend to convey the composer's opinion regarding such uses, and his way of permeating the collective imagination. What we know is that Manuel de Falla loved his land, but not at any price. After the civil war, he was offered a lifetime pension and a decoration, but he chose to remain in exile. It is probable that the true value of music of popular or folk origin -be it Falla, Bartók, Stravinsky or Gershwin- does not lie in its affiliation to a specific territory or tradition, with which it can indeed be historically identified, but -as Pablo Heras-Casado and Javier Perianes explained to us just a year ago- in the degree of elaboration and the potentially universal character of the vibration. It is rhythms, timbral colors, ingenuity in the development of materials that enable the emotion of personal experience and the return to a mythical truth, transcending strict dependence on that geographical determinism.