What You’ll Hear at Wei Phi | Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999)

A la busca del más allá (In Search of the Beyond)

background

In a long multifaceted career, Joaquin Rodrigo worked as a pianist, music critic, university professor, radio executive, and as an activist for the Spanish National Organization for the Blind. (Rodrigo was almost completely blind from age three as a result of Diphtheria.) However, from the 1940s onwards he was also recognized as one of Spain’s foremost composers. As a young man, he studied in Paris, the center of the avant garde, but Rodrigo described his own style as neocasticista (neo-traditional). Much of his mature music was rooted in distinctly Spanish forms and rhythms, and he was particularly focused upon the guitar, the most prominent instrument of Spanish traditional music. However, in this case, there is not a guitar in sight and the music is more generally abstract and modernist in style.

In 1971, Rodrigo visited the United States—in part to be at the American premiere of his duo-guitar concerto, the Concierto madrigal, at the Hollywood Bowl, but also to be a tourist. While in Houston, he and a companion visited what is now called the Johnson Space Center, and they welcomed to the Spanish composer warmly, even allowing the blind Rodrigo to handle a moon rock brought back by one of the Apollo missions. Then in 1976, the Houston Symphony asked him for a work celebrating the American Bicentennial. Rodrigo responded with a symphonic poem titled A la busca del más allá, which he dedicated to NASA astronauts. And in factS, panish-American astronaut Miguel López-Alegría—who had been born in Rodrigo’s hometown, Madrid—took a CD containing the work with him when he flew on the space shuttle in 2002 on a mission to the International Space Station

What You’ll Hear

If your previous experience with Rodrigo’s music has been Spanish-flavored works like the Concierto de Aranjuez, this will come as a surprise. There is little about this work that is identifiably “Spanish.” As the composer wrote:

“the work can be classified as a Symphonic Poem, although with a marked abstract character, since its music does not have the story or descriptive content normally associated with this genre. However, at the beginning and end, there are drum beats that fade into the distance, with the purpose of evoking in the listener the sense of mystery associated with ‘the beyond’.”

This is in fact perfect “outer space” music, anticipating by a few years what John Williams would much more famously do in his scores for the Star Wars movies, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Much of the music is static, with flute, English horn and other woodwinds combining with quiet percussion above an unchanging harmony. At several points, a grander theme is introduced and dominates, but it always fades back into the ethereal woodwind music.