Un encuentro con José Luis Turina / An Encounter with José Luis Turina

By Arild Suárez

(Interview published in the program book for the III Concert Series "Masters and Disciples" at the Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, March 2009)


I meet José Luis Turina at the National Auditorium, in the office where he serves as Artistic Director for the Spanish National Youth Orchestra [JONDE]. Coordinating with him wasn't easy: his schedule is packed with trips and meetings, as his work extends to organizing and coordinating numerous other musical and educational events, in addition to his responsibilities as a composer.
When I arrive, the door is open, and José Luis greets me as always, warm and welcoming. We start by looking over some details of the score he composed, which we've included in the concert program. The score is meticulously annotated, with extreme precision, though we do find a small detail that could cause some confusion, and he promptly notes exactly where adjustments should be made for future editions. José Luis is one of those rare people who return calls immediately, who always respond to messages, and whose attention to detail is exceptional, which is not so common in Spain, by the way.
Then, we discuss the concert, Salvatore Sciarrino's music, and the relationships between masters and disciples.

Arild Suárez: Well, Jose Luis, tell me a little about your relationship with Sciarrino.
José Luis Turina: Actually, I don't know Sciarrino personally; we've never met, though his music has had an enormous, possibly decisive, influence on my career.
AS: I thought you had met, during a JONDE event he attended in 2003. Tomás Garrido [another composer featured in this "Masters and Disciples" series] told me he met him then and was quite struck when he saw him eating shrimp with the shells on...
JLT: Oh yes, I know the story, but no, he didn't come to JONDE. It was actually for composition courses organized by the Youth Institute, with JONDE only collaborating. Tomás [Garrido] was coordinating those courses.
AS: So, how did you first encounter Sciarrino's music, his work?
JLT: In 1979, I went to Italy with a scholarship from the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where I stayed for the 1979–80 academic year.
AS: Who awarded the scholarship? Is the program still active?
JLT: Yes, I believe it still is, managed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
AS: What was the atmosphere like at the Spanish Academy?
JLT: Back then it was led by Federico Sopeña, and the environment was very active. The Spanish Academy is similar to institutions in other countries that once hosted many composers in Rome, like Debussy, for example.
AS: The same Villa Medici that the persistent Ravel tried so hard to join...
JLT: Yes, that kind of institution. It's a place that provides you with lodging and stay, but there's no regular teaching. My classes were at the Rome Conservatory, the famous Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Specifically, I attended an advanced Composition course with Maestro Franco Donatoni. But what truly impacted me during that time was discovering Sciarrino's work, hearing his music for the first time.
AS: Had you heard of him before arriving in Italy?
JLT: No, not at all. He was completely unknown to me, but I remember the enormous, truly enormous impression his music made on me when I first heard it. It opened doors I hadn't even imagined. Sciarrino was already a prominent composer in Italy and Europe, so I had numerous opportunities to hear his work.
AS: What struck you as so novel in Sciarrino's music?
JLT: His treatment of instruments, his exhaustive exploration of their possibilities, even the most extreme ones, the level of detail he brought -and yet the implicit form remained traditional.
AS: In what sense was it traditional?
JLT: In the sense that it still had an introduction of material, development, sometimes a recapiyulation. The form followed the European tradition, but with unconventional uses of register and sound. Also, while he used traditional instruments, his work on their tone colors was very innovative. Yet, there was development -a truly musical progression. What was new was that the themes were timbral rather than melodic or harmonic.
AS: Perhaps a piece's form and even development can be conveyed with any content, as Ligeti demonstrates in the first movement of his Musica Ricercata, where he writes a Sonata -with contrasting themes, development, climax, recap, and coda- all with a single note.
JLT: Exactly. In European music, development had always involved themes or motifs, even with Schoenberg or in more avant-garde composers. But with Sciarrino, different sonorities, different colors took on the role of "theme".
AS: What was your background at that time? You had studied at the Madrid Conservatory. What do you remember about what you learned before Sciarrino opened up these new possibilities?
JLT: Well, I have varied, even contradictory memories from the Madrid Conservatory...
AS: Let's stick with the positive.
JLT: I remember my piano classes with Manuel Carra very fondly, as well as my harpsichord lessons with Genoveva Gálvez and Counterpoint with Francisco Calés.
AS: And the composition classes?
JLT: They were excellent. My teacher, Antón García-Abril, was a very good mentor. Regardless of whether one subscribed to his pan-tonal or expanded-tonality aesthetics, he left a lot of freedom and didn't impose his views.
AS: What would you say you learned from him?
JLT: Very important things: respect for your own work, attention to detail, and rigor, whatever the chosen aesthetic may be. He left plenty of room for personal choice.
AS: Quite different from what you found with Maestro Donatoni in Rome…
JLT: Yes, in terms of aesthetics, he was very closed-minded.
AS: Was he still teaching? I met him a few years later in Amsterdam, and he was quite frail by then.
JLT: No, no, at that time he was brilliant, exceptionally intelligent. His classes were famous internationally, but for me, he didn't work as a teacher because he left little room beyond his hyper-serial aesthetics. Ironically, despite being so avant-garde, he was more academic than García-Abril's post-Romantic tonalism in Madrid.
AS: It can be challenging for teachers to balance freedom and method, right? Have you ever taught composition?
JLT: No, I've never taught composition -not sure why- but I have taught technical subjects. The only time I gave a composition course, at the Alicante Festival in 1990, I spent a good part of it introducing Sciarrino's work, which was still almost unknown in Spain.
AS: Whereas in Italy, you said he was already in high demand.
JLT: Yes, he lived in Milan, but in Rome, he was frequently performed and on the rise.
AS: Do you remember what you heard first?
JLT: It was at a RAI Auditorium concert, in the Via della Conciliazione near St. Peter's Square. I heard Il paese senza tramonto for soprano and orchestra in late 1979, although the piece had been written a few years before.
AS: I imagine you went to a lot of concerts. How was the cultural life in Rome compared to Madrid, where you came from?
JLT: At that time, Madrid already had concert activity, especially with big-name performers, but Rome fascinated me -the city itself, Roman life, the history, architecture, and archeology-. Meeting artists from other disciplines, which I had neglected as a conservatory student, was also very new to me. The interdisciplinary atmosphere of the Spanish Academy was enriching.
AS: The same idea promoted by the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid…
JLT: Yes, it's similar. I remember the human connections, the lasting friendships with other artists. The academies of various countries interacted too. On a visit to the German Academy, I met a young Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Michael Hamel, and Manfred Trojan.
AS: Were they also following the innovations Sciarrino was introducing?
JLT: I don't think so. They knew his work, of course, but for me, understanding those radically new sounds and delving into Sciarrino's work became an obsession.
AS: So you sought out his scores and recordings...
JLT: Yes, actually, the first record of Sciarrino's music I heard was lent to me by another musician, Miguel Martín Lladó, who was also on a scholarship that year.
AS: What happened to him? I haven't heard of him.
JLT: Miguel won every composition contest at the start of the 80s and had a brilliant two-year career. Then he disappeared, just vanished.
AS: Well, he lent you that record…
JLT: It was part of a collection of Italian contemporary music published, I think, by RCA. I had already heard Il paese... for orchestra and voice, but this record interested me because it had smaller-scale works, chamber music, and solo pieces. The first piece I heard was the enigmatic Ai limiti della notte for solo viola [the opening piece in tonight's program]. Later, I discovered others like the Piano Sonata, masterfully performed by Massimiliano Damerini, and All'aure in una lontananza for solo flute.
AS: What effect did this have on your writing?
JLT: At the risk of oversimplifying, I'd say that at that moment I saw myself as someone who had been something of a "broad-brush painter" up until then, and who now wanted to become a meticulous "goldsmith," or a detailed painter working with enamel and a fine brush on a small panel.
AS: Working at a nearly microscopic level of detail, like the Flemish schools of the 15th century, like a Van Eyck…
JLT: No, the analogy would be more with Seurat, with the French pointillists. Until then, the direction in my music had been achieved with sustained notes, long gestures with bold strokes. I wanted to keep that -a clear general direction- and although the composition would now be very detailed, I wanted all those small particles to come together to create a decisive gesture. A kind of fragmented writing, but with direction. On the other hand, Sciarrino worked only with cells of color or timbre, but in my music there were still themes.
AS: Is this level of detail in your writing comparable to what Brian Ferneyhough develops to deconstruct musical discourse?
JLT: In terms of score notation, perhaps a little, but in my case, I insist, the detail is aimed at forming part of a larger gesture.
AS: What is the first of your works to include this new style of writing?
JLT: During the Christmas holidays in '79, I returned to Madrid, and Radio Nacional de España commissioned me to write a piece for Easter in 1980 -as they had done in previous seasons with other composers-. So as soon as I returned to Rome in January, I started working on a string quartet that would be titled Lama Sabacthani? ["Why have you forsaken me?" -the second work in tonight's concert program].
AS: Will this influence continue in your later works?
JLT: Yes, I've truly kept that interest in meticulous instrumental work up until today. It was an important and lasting influence in my music.
AS: How come you haven't invited Sciarrino to JONDE?
JLT: Well, to be honest, I'm not sure exactly. My personal interest, my fascination with his music, was something of those years, but later, although I've followed his career -obviously, he's the most prominent living Italian composer right now- I haven't done so systematically.
AS: His music is also difficult to access. I mean, it's complex to perform, and if it isn't done really well, it doesn't work.
JLT: The truth is that a few years ago I heard a very long work of his here in Madrid, and I found it rather disappointing.
AS: Another factor that may influence the low circulation of his music is that lately he's increasingly turning to highly unusual, even extravagant, combinations of instruments. The last thing I heard from him was La bocca, i piedi, il suono for 104 saxophones.
JLT: Where? In what concert?
AS: No, at home, on a recording. But you have to listen to it with complete concentration -I could only listen to it once.
JLT: Sciarrino's music, I believe, doesn't work in a recording.
AS: Perhaps it's music that doesn't fit into the cultural dissemination criteria that prevail today, which are based more on the ease of reproducing a work than on its appreciation or interpretation. But there's another aspect of Sciarrino's trajectory that's more accessible, one you also share: his taste for re-instrumenting, exquisitely, pieces from the past. That's why we included Esercizi di tre stili [the piece closing the concert], based on sonatas by Scarlatti.
JLT: Yes, by 1977 Sciarrino had already started with his transcriptions and arrangements. I remember Canzoni da battello, based on Venetian folk songs. This is another aspect of his music that has always greatly interested me. In my catalog, I have numerous pieces that recreate works by past composers. Specifically, I also composed Variations on Two Themes by Scarlatti.
AS: Sciarrino's piece, in this case, stays very close to the original in terms of discourse and structure, but his research is, once again, in the color and sonority of the instruments. [I show him the score, and we discuss some of the elements he works with.] I think this piece perfectly shows that Sciarrino's interest in sometimes pushing instruments to extremes is based on a profound knowledge of their possibilities, including their more conventional ones.
JLT: I didn't know this particular work, but I see refined details in the instrumentation. I'd really like to hear it. I think it's the perfect complement to the program.

I say goodbye to José Luis, and on my way home, I recall how, in 1988, I arrived in Madrid full of enthusiasm and eager to learn. In the confusion of that period, and after some significant disappointments, I found myself in a conservatory course called "Analysis and Harmony," where we were learning to investigate and recreate the language of some small pieces from the past. In that class, I found a teacher who taught with dedication, enthusiasm, and rigor. Although that course was initially designed as a complement to our training as instrumentalists, in this teacher's hands it opened a door to the interest in creation and its languages. It also helped me reconnect with the teacher-student relationship and even with the institution of the conservatory and the career path of a musician. The story of that encounter is another story, but you may have already guessed that this teacher was José Luis Turina.
When a few months ago the Residencia de Estudiantes asked me to write a piece to be included in a program alongside works by Sciarrino and Turina, I realized that, regardless of the appreciation or admiration I feel for both of them, the sonic result of my work would not resemble the sound of their respective productions -which are also different from each other in terms of outcome.
But there would be a much more important connection in terms of the approach to the work and the process of construction. Just as Sciarrino takes a microscopic look at instruments to seek out details of color and sound, and just as Turina uses that same microscopic approach to assemble gestures with decisive direction, my microscope would be focused on amplifying pulses and rhythmic offsets between various lines that interact with each other.
Formally, my piece, like theirs, looks to the past. Specifically, this piece, which premieres today, looks to a past where cross-references, imitations, and symmetries within a piece were considered so fundamental that they determined the entire structure on which the discourse rests.
This links to another fundamental aspect that I admire in these two composers: they don't strive to break away from tradition but instead attempt to reinterpret its forms and even its conventions. In doing so, even if the material or surface is innovative, the construction and distribution of material throughout the work maintain proportions affirmed by other styles or languages -and perhaps tied to universal human measures and preferences, if such a thing is possible.

March 2009