The lives and music of Silvestre Revueltas and Gabriela Lena Frank

00:00:00

John Banther: I'm John Banther, and this is Classical Breakdown. From WETA Classical in Washington, we are your guide to classical music. In this episode, I'm joined by WETA Classical's Evan Keely, and we're exploring the lives and music of two composers, Silvestre Revueltas and Gabriela Lena Frank. We'll look at the small but powerful musical output of Revueltas in Mexico during the 1930s, whose life was eventually cut short. Then we'll dive into two 21st century works by Latin Grammy- winning and Grammy- nominated composer Gabriela Lena Frank and her unique perspective.

Silvestre Revueltas is a composer known well, I think, amongst musicians today, Evan. We've certainly studied and performed his music. It's used in auditions, but I think he is still relatively unknown to most audiences today, at least outside of Mexico.

00:00:58

Evan Keely: Yeah, and this is a composer who really deserves to be better known. As you said, John, his music is not completely obscure and unknown and we can find recordings of orchestras here in the United States going back decades, but hopefully today's Classical Breakdown episode will bring more attention to Silvestre Revueltas.

00:01:15

John Banther: I think so, and some may have heard his work, Sensemayá, which is based on a poem. I think it had some popularity in the '90s and 2000s. It certainly has a very well- known tuba part that's used in auditions, and it's also Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs September 15th to October 15th. So we're going to talk about Revueltas, who remains in the past as one of the pioneers of early Mexican composers, but we're also going to talk about Latin Grammy- winning composer Gabriela Lena Frank to look at composers today and towards the future.

But looking at Revueltas, Evan, we see he was born in Santiago Papasquiaro on December 31st, 1899 and then he died on October 5th, 1940 at age 40. There's a lot of information missing in his life, but we know at least he didn't live, well, a long time, but also not a real short amount of time.

00:02:11

Evan Keely: Yeah, and we don't know a great deal, as you said, about his early life. We know he got into music early on, studied the violin. Eight years old, he started playing. Eventually, he ended up here in the United States. He studied at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and he also studied at the Chicago College of Music. He was an accompanist there. He got a lot of sort of gig work. You and I listened to a radio excerpt from 1967 about this composer. Really fascinating piece. We'll put that on the show notes page. Talked about him being independent but not of independent means, so not a wealthy person, and he did a lot of things to support himself, a lot of performing, and he composed music for specific occasions or specific ensembles, so a lot of his music is not preserved for that reason. At 29 years old, he became the assistant conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra for a few years, National Symphony Orchestra in Mexico.

00:03:09

John Banther: And it's during this time he's conducting that orchestra, he gets his first big break with film composing. In 1934, he is asked to write the music for Redes, and we have a great selection of music from that, but some might be wondering, well, okay, 1934, his first big break with his first film score, well, doesn't he die in 1940 just really a few years later? And the unfortunate truth is we don't have a lot of music from this composer. The earliest work I think we have, Evan, is from 1924, and there's only one or two works. Basically, everything was written in the last 10 years of his life.

But there is a larger story, I think, about Revueltas when you look at his music, his life and his legacy. He did little to promote his music and he did not earn a whole lot of money, as you said, and he ended up dying in poverty at 40 from pneumonia and it was complicated by alcoholism, which it sounded like it was pretty much, I mean, it was pretty bad. I mean, not like a lost cause, but it was almost terminal at this in a sense.

00:04:18

Evan Keely: He really kind of fell apart, unfortunately.

00:04:21

John Banther: And in a way reminded me of Mussorgsky, a composer who creates a unique or distinct musical identity in their country. They reject notoriety. They also die from alcoholism. But looking at his life in reverse, we can see that his political actions as a progressive are really inseparable from his music. In 1937, he went to Spain during their civil war to conduct concerts organized by the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists. And I heard, Evan, that while they're performing in these concerts, they can hear bombardments and shooting nearby.

00:05:02

Evan Keely: He's not literally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, but not too far removed from it, literally and figuratively.

00:05:09

John Banther: You can imagine these concerts were quite impactful and quite heavy, not knowing if it's your last concert or not. A work I love that comes out of this is Homenaje a Federico García Lorca, and Lorca was a Spanish poet that was assassinated in 1936 among thousands of artists over a period of time there, and Revueltas wrote this work pretty much immediately after it happened. One thing you notice in his music and in this piece after a solemn trumpet solo, there's a wide gap in the sound. It doesn't feel like a thick sound like a big tidal wave of something from Bruckner. Rather, it feels like there's a big space. You can kind of stick your head in it and look around and observe the parts.

I think of the tuba part is a great tuba part in here, a bit of a solo, and then there's also high oboe and piccolo parts. Even though they're totally different instruments, they feel like similar size objects that can hold and observe in my hand in the way that Revueltas portrays them. I think, Evan, what I hear in his music, it's almost like a child playing with dolls. He's simply just moving all these characters around and telling a story.

00:06:27

Evan Keely: Yeah, that's a great way to think about Revueltas' music. There's this kind of this, I wouldn't say fragmentation, but there's these very distinct bits of musical themes and they kind of come and go in ways that there's a kind of a playfulness. I think comparing him and contrasting him to a composer, you mentioned Bruckner earlier, that sort of thick wall of sound kind of experience with a composer like that, this is much more kind of sparse, and yet there's so much going on and you just get drawn into this sound world of trying to find where's the theme and what am I listening for, and there's something very exciting about that.

00:07:04

John Banther: When you mentioned fragmentation or the lack of fragmentation here, that really lit something off in my head because you hear all of these moments unfolding, things change quickly. Like Bruckner, you think of a line that just takes forever to find its place. Here, you close your ears for 30 seconds, a million things have gone by, but it doesn't feel like a bunch of fragments of things.

00:07:27

Evan Keely: There's a spontaneity to Revueltas' music, but it never feels random or chaotic.

00:07:35

John Banther: That is a good point. It doesn't feel random or chaotic. And he's also, I think using these ideas, he's able to make chamber music sound bigger than it is, especially by pairing instruments like tuba against a high wind instrument. We hear that especially come together in the final movements, and I will put a link to this and all of the music here on the show notes page because this is definitely one worth listening to. I've heard it performed a couple of times I think since 2022. And the fun thing is this was written in 1936, but it feels like it could have been written last year.

00:08:12

Evan Keely: There's a real freshness to this music that it definitely sounds like it's from a particular time and place, but there's also that quality of something that endures.

00:08:21

John Banther: Yes. Okay. Evan, what does a work that grabbed you from Revueltas?

00:08:24

Evan Keely: Well, John, you mentioned earlier Sensemayá, which is one of his better- known compositions. It was originally composed in 1937 for a small orchestra, chamber orchestra. And then the year following that, he revised it to write it for much larger ensemble, very large orchestral ensemble for the second version, 15 woodwinds, 17 if you count the two flutes that are also doubling on piccolo, 12 brass instruments. There are 14 different percussion instruments in this score, 16 if you count the piano and the celesta as percussion instruments.

A lot of those percussion instruments are what we might think of as traditional European orchestral instruments like the timpani and the cymbals and different kinds of gongs. There's a glockenspiel in there, but there's also percussion instruments in this score which we would think of as being associated with Latin music and Afro- Latin styles. There's a gourd, there's the claves, maracas are in there, there's a scraper instrument. There's a lot of different terms for that instrument, the raspador or the güiro or reco-reco, and you'll hear that in this music.

John, you mentioned earlier this piece draws inspiration from a poem, the Cuban poet, Nicolás Guillén, who was a contemporary of Revueltas. They were born just a few years apart. Guillén, like Revueltas, spent time in the United States. In fact, Guillén, when he was here in the US, he met Langston Hughes in 1930, and that was a real meeting of the minds, and both Guillén and Revueltas draw from cultural influences throughout Latin America, as well as from artistic movements in the United States. They draw from African traditions, Afro- Caribbean traditions, First Nations, Native American traditions, Spanish traditions. There's Portuguese and Anglo- American influences all present to some extent in Revueltas' music, as well as in Guillén's poetry. We certainly see some of those many influences. We hear them in this music, Sensemayá.

Guillén's poem, Sensemayá, is a evocation of this Afro- Cuban religious ritual in which a snake is being sacrificed to a deity by a mayombero, it's a kind of shaman or a priest figure. And the poem has this chant- like repetition. This phrase is repeated over and over, mayombe-bombe-mayombe, and we can maybe even hear the circle of worshipers chanting this as the ritual is taking place. And there's this sensual quality of the poem. There's kind of dangerous power that I find and this sense I think of something sacred and something terrible and beautiful, of something terrifying but also almost playful in this poetry and this interaction between the human and the natural world. The snake is being described with the glassy eyes and how it's winding itself around a stick and so forth.

And so you have this kind of playfulness in Revueltas' music, but there's also this air of sanctity. There's something really powerful that's happening, but there's also this wild energy that it's both spontaneous but also very contained in a way. I'm not sure if I'm even describing it in a good way. There's a sense of direction. There's a sense of purpose to it. As we were saying earlier, it's not chaotic, it's not random, but there's this fierceness about it. There's this energetic power that just bubbles up from it.

You have this seven beats to a measure kind of rhythm, and the poem has this repetitive phrase, and the music takes that up in the same way in this phrase, mayombe-bombe- mayombe. I don't even know what language that is. Maybe it's Habla Bantú or Habla Congo or one of those languages that we find in the Caribbean, especially among the Afro- Caribbean population, but most of the poem is in Spanish depicting the snake, and it's kind of mysterious power and the power of the ritual.

So we had a conversation last season, John, about Bruckner 200th birthday. This season, I should say, the first episode of this season of Classical Breakdown, we talked about Bruckner for his 200th birthday, and we talked about Bruckner's use of repetition to create this dynamic energy, repetition as a means of producing power and drive in music. And in Revueltas, and especially in this piece, Sensemayá, I think he really understands this idea of repetition in music as a way of driving energy. It draws us in, creates this atmosphere of terror, but also this atmosphere of wonder and vitality. And the many different percussion instruments in this score really add this extraordinary color and complexity to the sound world of this piece.

There's a layering in this piece too, these three different thematic groups coming together. And I can't help but feel that this is emblematic of a composer like Revueltas whose music draws from so many different cultural layers. There's the First Nations' traditions, the Black American traditions, Spanish traditions, the Caribbean, different aspects of the culture of the United States where he spent some time. And of course, there's this extraordinary complexity of Mexican culture, and this is such a powerful musical expression of that.

Revueltas is a serious composer of art music we would think of like you'd hear in a conservatory in a concert hall, but there's also a kind of music hall quality. He wrote for a lot of very specific occasions. There's film scores. There's things that were written to be played once and never heard again. He was a gig musician, so there's these different aspects of his artistic personality, one of which is very practical, just performing and composing music that's meant to be heard in an ephemeral way and then this more sort of enduring, sort of what we think of as art music quality. I really hear a lot of that in this one piece, Sensemayá, where there's a sense of this very high art, but there's also this very appealing, this broad appeal that's in this music.

00:14:34

John Banther: I think you're describing it well. A word you said that grabbed me was layers. If you think about those, I think it's like Japanese woodblock prints or something in general where you have a beautiful image that's painted with the woodblocks but one color at a time, so it's stamped or whatever maybe 10 times or like a croissant, there's a million layers. So there's all these layers of influence, but also literally built up in the music from the cyclical aspect of the percussion and then up through all of the lines. It doesn't feel overly complicated or random, as you said. He's got all of these layers built up in just the right way balancing on top of each other.

00:15:15

Evan Keely: He's not trying to be esoteric and go over our heads and have this sort of secret message. He really wants to reach us where we are. He does it in a very sophisticated way with great complexity, but it isn't baffling.

00:15:29

John Banther: And another work I want to point out is called Ventanas because this brings to life this point I have in that is his music seems naturally programmatic, maybe even when it isn't. I had an interesting moment. I was listening to this piece, Ventanas, I had not heard it before and I'm just listening and I was doing something else and it was just starting to grab me. There's a definite drive and some unique characteristic to this. I thought, " Hmm, what's going on here? It sounds like something is being depicted purposefully here in the music." So you Google it, I found a Wikipedia page for it, and it mentions actually the programmatic aspect, which Revueltas wrote. The name doesn't mean anything. It might be called Skylights or anything else. Nevertheless, a window does offer a fertile literary theme and it might satisfy the taste of some persons who can neither understand nor listen to music without a program without inventing something more or less disagreeable, but fortunately, I am not a literary man.

Evan, I felt like I was putting on clown makeup as I was reading this. I mean, can you imagine asking Revueltas, "Wow, Ventanas, this is a wonderful work. Tell us more about this, Ventanas meaning windows, what's going on?" " It's about nothing, you idiot."

00:16:44

Evan Keely: " It's just a title."

00:16:46

John Banther: "I did that so-"

00:16:46

Evan Keely: "I did it so I could sell scores."

00:16:50

John Banther: Yeah, and appease you and calm you down. I found that very interesting, very funny. I think it also tells you a little bit more about Revueltas, who he is, and this is a just fantastic piece which exists on its own, and I guess in just some way sounds purposeful.

00:17:10

Evan Keely: There's a certain ironic quality to Revueltas perhaps, and you really feel like he's telling a story. Even if it's strictly absolute music, there isn't any program to it, there's a narrative sense to it. So maybe he's being a little ironic here when he says, " Oh, I'm not a literary man." Well, okay. I think that's sincere, but it's also maybe talking out of both sides of his mouth in a clever kind of way. I don't mean that to be disparaging. On the contrary, he's letting us know, don't look for an elaborate program here, but if there's deeper meaning in it for you, well, what does that say about you as the listener?

00:17:46

John Banther: I think that one more or less speaks for itself. What is another one you have, Evan.

00:17:51

Evan Keely: We mentioned earlier that Revueltas was, among other things, a film composer and a lot of the film scores that he wrote got lost. They were written for the film and then nobody bought the to keep the scores. That's also true of this piece, La noche de los mayas, the Night of the Mayas, a 1939 film of the same name. He died the following year. He never prepared a concert version or a suite from this score. And years after he died, Paul Hindemith, the German composer was in Mexico. He met the composer's sister, Rosaura Revueltas, and got this music that was sitting around. Hindemith arranged a two- movement suite from the film.

And then a few years after that, Mexican conductor José Yves Limantour created a four- movement suite, this was in 1959, based on Revueltas' film score, but we might want to emphasize that based on quality, to what extent is it Revueltas and to what extent is it Limantour. It's hard to say, but that suite, that four- movement suite that Limantour arranged in 1959 is actually now getting played a fair bit and been recorded a number of times by a number of different orchestras and conductors, and we can maybe share some of that on the show notes page. It's a wonderful suite of really good music, and we can be confident that most of it is indeed Revueltas so it gives us a sense of this music.

00:19:15

John Banther: Well, talk about a chance encounter between Paul Hindemith and his sister. Otherwise, we might not even have this to begin with.

00:19:24

Evan Keely: Right. Well, Hindemith had the good sense to recognize a really fine composer. So he came across this music and he's like, " We got to hear this music. This should be listened to. It's great that maybe somebody will see this film," but this music is really worthy in its own. So I'm grateful to Hindemith for keeping this music alive.

00:19:44

John Banther: And we'll put the video of the movie on the show notes page, but like you said, I mean, it's very rough. I mean, you can't really tell what's happening much of the time, but you'll get an idea. I particularly like how each of the four movements of the suite is a night because we've had works like Respighi's Pines of Rome, which takes you through a whole day through four movements or one night in Gottschalk's A Night of the Tropics, but here, it's four different nights in a row. I just like how that was portrayed, and I especially like the second one.

A couple of other things not to miss from Revueltas are his string quartets, which he wrote in the early 1930s, some of the first works he was writing seriously when he was really turning to composing. I love these. They're naturally quite different from his work for orchestra or chamber orchestra, but they still have that Revueltas aspect of not fragmentation, but never- ending small musical moments that just continuously unfold.

So that is a bit about Silvestre Revueltas, who was one of Mexico's earliest composers in this style of music. Alongside his colleagues, Carlos Chávez and Manuel Ponce, they paved the way for future composers in Mexico. And coming up next, we're going to talk about composer Gabriela Lena Frank.

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Okay. Now onto composer Gabriela Lena Frank. She was born in Berkeley, California in 1972, of Peruvian descent. She is currently composer in residence of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and she's had orchestras like Chicago Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra and more. They've commissioned, they've performed her music. You'll also find her in media, in several documentaries, a couple of books. She does a lot of civic outreach, and even, she's co- authored articles as a climate activist. Evan, she is quite busy not just in music, but also in outreach. I mean, she is kind of all- encompassing, and talk about a list of orchestras that are playing her music.

00:22:13

Evan Keely: She's a very gifted composer. I think you mentioned the Grammy nomination and other things about her, very distinguished career as a composer, very engaged composer and really has, I think, a great breadth of perspective. Like you said, she's an environmental activist. She's a very passionate educator, really works very hard to bring in other composers and help them to get their work performed and to grow as composers. Really just a very remarkable person.

00:22:43

John Banther: I want to read a little bit from her bio, from her website because I think it really paints a picture here. Gabriela has traveled extensively throughout South America in creative exploration. Her music often reflects not only her own personal experience as a multiracial Latina, but also refract her studies of Latin American cultures, incorporating poetry, mythology and native musical styles into a Western classical framework that is uniquely her own.

While the enjoyment of her works can be obtained solely from her music, the composer's program notes enhance the listener's experience for they describe how a piano part mimics a marimba or pan pipes or how a movement is based on a particular type of folk song where the singer is mockingly crying. We hear all things depicted in music, right, Evan? But now, we're getting to things that were, before I knew this composer, more, well, totally foreign. I'd never heard of a singer mockingly crying depicted into music or strings depict totally different instruments than I'm used to.

00:23:48

Evan Keely: And you have this layering and these emulating other instruments or different kinds of voices and so forth. And you mentioned her Peruvian ancestry, and she's this wonderfully complex figure whose mother was Peruvian and Chinese and whose father has a Lithuanian Jewish background, and she's born in Berkeley in the early '70s. So she's bringing together all these different aspects of herself, and she travels around the world and meets all these different interesting people. I just see in her this incredible openness and curiosity and inquisitiveness, and you really hear that in her music.

00:24:25

John Banther: You really do, and one I want to talk about right away is Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout. This is a work I've heard performed a couple of times in string orchestra form, but it was originally a quartet, and I hope it will also leave you motivated to really search out more of her music if you don't know it already. This piece demonstrates some of the things we mentioned in the bio. The work, Leyendas or Legends, is in six movements, and each movement explores a different Andean character or personality. And I'll tell you my favorite one that actually I think about every couple of months, it just pops into my head, it says, " Fourth movement, Chasqui," and here's what Frank wrote about it. " Chasqui depicts a legendary figure from the Inca period, the Chasqui runner who sprinted great distances to deliver messages between towns separated from one another by the Andean peaks. The Chasqui needed to travel light. Hence, I take artistic license to imagine his choice of instruments to be the charango, a high- pitched cousin of the guitar and the lightweight bamboo quena flute, both of which are featured in this movement."

One, I love the subject matter here and learning about this Inca empire messaging system. If you go to the Wikipedia page, I'll put that on the show notes page too, it is very fascinating, this system they had, and we're talking about in the 1400s, where they could deliver things like 190 miles in a day. I mean, think about 1400s. If you said, " I'm going to go deliver this to 190 miles," I'm like, " Okay. Well, he's probably going to die or I'll never see that person again."

And two, using just a string quartet, she is able to depict that little charango guitar, which sounds rather high- pitched kind of plinky, and you also hear the quena flute more naturally and the higher sustained lines, but she's not just mimicking, I think, that guitar, Evan, because I also hear that in the writing, it's not just the sound of the guitar but little licks that are reminiscent of other examples I've heard when looking at that guitar.

00:26:35

Evan Keely: And one of the things I love about Frank's music is she's able to do those kinds of mimicking depictions in a way that doesn't sound hackneyed or it's easy for a composer who's not very talented to do that like, " Oh, that violin sounds like a flute," but it's easy for that to be kind of kitschy.

00:26:52

John Banther: See what I did there?

00:26:53

Evan Keely: Yeah, " See what I did there? Oh, it sounds like a guitar," but she does it in a way that's kind of ironic and thoughtful, and there's a funny aspect sometimes. Other times, there's a really deep feeling that isn't just maudlin or sentimental. She really engages your imagination like, " Wow, what am I hearing? What is that violin or what is that viola doing? It sounds like some other instrument," that it really makes you think. And here we are, of course, we're in this world of the Inca world from the pre- Columbian, this whole other civilization that had this incredibly sophisticated and complex way of communicating, and she's invoking that in this music in such an engaging way.

00:27:31

John Banther: And each movement really does bring to life different people and personalities that she would find. She just brings them all out in a very unique and authentic feeling way. And I want to mention a great piece that she actually wrote. We mentioned she's written a couple of things. She wrote a piece for the New York Times titled, I Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His Music. In this, she writes about how Beethoven's music changed and evolved and how that happened with his hearing loss. It's so fascinating.

Gabriela Lena Frank, she was born with neurosensory high- moderate near- profound hearing loss, and she writes about this in the article with her composing process. Maybe, Evan, you can read a bit what she wrote here.

00:28:20

Evan Keely: This is a quote from this article. " If I don't wear my hearing aids for a couple of days, my composing ideas start to become more introverted. This can produce music that is more intellectual, more contrapuntal, more internal, more profound, more spiritual, more trippy, and I think these are also hallmarks of Beethoven's later music, and not just for piano. Yet more from my own experience, when I'm really under a deadline and need to get new ideas quickly, I don't usually listen to music as some composers do. In fact, I do the opposite. I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It's a bit like being in a dream when unusual and often impossible events come together, the perfect place from which to compose. And when I put my hearing aids in again, I can feel all these wonderful ideas and connections fly away just as a dream disappears when awakening." So Gabriela Lena Frank, not only a wonderful composer, but also a really thoughtful writer.

00:29:23

John Banther: Yes, and again, we're going to put the whole thing, a link to it on the show notes page. It's so fascinating because one thing that grabbed me about this, Evan, was, yes, taking the hearing aids off, being in silence for a few days, I think we can understand what that's like and what that means, but she writes about here also later in the piece, I think, about how it's almost like a dream. When you put the hearing aids back in, all of these things fly away from you almost as if you've been underwater or in another world. So that just really grabbed me. It's like when you wake up from a dream, it all slips away.

00:29:57

Evan Keely: She goes into this introverted place and then she releases it. It's just a really fascinating comment, and I don't even really know what her experience, neurosensory high- moderate near profound hearing loss. I mean, I can intellectually conceptualize what that might mean, but clearly, this is someone who experiences reality in a way that's different from a lot of people's, and she takes that exceptional experience and transforms it into something that's incredibly creative and that then all of us can hear it what she's created and we can relate to it.

A piece that she wrote in 2007 that I find really exciting and interesting is a string quartet in five movements called Quijotadas. The title, I guess you could translate it as Quixotisms. It's a musical homage to Don Quixote and the novel by Cervantes, and to some extent, a tribute to old Spain. There's a lot of evocation of 17th century Spanish world that Cervantes depicts so memorably. It's kind of a tone poem in a way, but it's also, as you were saying, John, you're quoting her as talking about being in this sort of dream world. And in this piece, as in so much of her music, there's this dreamlike quality, unlike a piece like the tone poems of Franz Liszt, for example, where there's a battle and you can hear the horse's hooves and hear the cannons going off. She does things in a much more subtle way in a dreamlike wave.

So a five movement piece, and a lot of them are based on these old Spanish forms. First movement is an Alborada. We think of a famous Alborada, the Alborada del gracioso, Maurice Ravel. That's an old tradition, an old Spanish folk tradition of dance and song. And in this Alborada, this morning song, this obad, we hear the sound of a chifro, a panpipe. And this is, again, where Gabriela Lena Frank is evoking other instruments, in this case, a string quartet.

The second movement is a Seguidilla, another old Spanish form, a Spanish dance form that goes way back to probably the Renaissance. Gabriela Lena Frank is evoking the sounds of that traditional Spanish instruments in this movement. There's that sound of a six- string guitar and these old instruments that are part of the tradition of Spanish music going back to the Renaissance and even earlier.

Third movement is a Moto Perpetuo: La Locura de Quijote Quijote. The madness of Don Quixote is depicted in this as a perpetual mobile. He's losing his mind. He's reading these books of chivalry, and he goes out of his mind, decides he's no longer going to be Alonso Quijano, an ordinary country squire. He's going to sally forth and become a knight and revive the age of chivalry. It's, of course, one of the great works of literature and world literature. And she depicts this in a way that's comical, but there's also a humanness to her music that's not mocking him, but we're entering into that world ourselves, how we ourselves can get caught up in this perpetual motion of our own fantasies or our own desires.

Fourth movement is Asturianada and depicts the Cave of Montesinos, which is a memorable passage in Cervantes' novel. Don Quixote goes into this cave and he comes out saying that he had these extraordinary adventures there, no one believes him. And there's this sense, again, of this like we're in this fantasy world where it's not clear what's real and what's imaginary and how much of it is how we wish to be perceived by the world.

The fifth movement is La Danza de los Arrieros, The Dance of the Muleteers, and that's the sort of conflict between the fantasy world of Don Quixote and the very real world of these ordinary people, these muleteers and others that he runs into and his adventures. Usually, they beat him up or he has some terrible misfortune because he can't really understand how the world is and the world can't understand his idealism. And there's a sense of idealism maybe being defeated in this music or maybe idealism persevering or it's not really clear who the victor is in this music, but it's a music that makes you think it's funny, it's interesting, it's exciting, it's complex. There's a kind of ironic quality to it, but you never feel like you're being intellectually beaten up by someone who's smarter than you are. You feel like you're being invited into this world, ancient world of 17th century Spain, but also our own world.

00:34:30

John Banther: This is a work I had not heard until you mentioned it, Evan, and I particularly liked the fourth movement, the cave where he descends into the cave, all these wild tales just losing himself. And when you mentioned she's riding a knot in a mocking or making fun of way, that stood out to me because in this fourth movement cave, it's not exactly what you might expect for something like this being depicted. When I think of Don Quixote, of course, I think of Strauss and, of course, that can be very mocking in the music. Here, it's just depicted in a totally different way, and it's interesting to hear a 21st century depiction of this because so much of what we have of Don Quixote in music is much older.

00:35:15

Evan Keely: Yes. Early 17th century novel by Cervantes, one of the great works of world literature and so many musicals like Richard Strauss and the Massenet Opera and then so on and so forth. And a lot of them have this very literary, very ... You can see the windmills and you can hear the hooves of the horses and so forth, and this is different. Gabriela Lena Frank invites us into a different world, one of the many musical tributes to this great work of literature in ways that are really compelling.

00:35:46

John Banther: So that is just a little bit about Gabriela Lena Frank. She has a new work that the Philadelphia Orchestra is premiering this season. It's called Pica Flor or Hummingbird, and they're premiering that in March 2025. I'll put a link to that and more from her on the show notes page and also resources for more Hispanic American composers. So I hope everyone's learned a little bit about Revueltas and Frank here and are excited to listen to more of them.

00:36:16

Evan Keely: I want to end with a quote from Gabriela Lena Frank herself who said, " I firmly believe that only in the United States could a Peruvian Chinese Jewish Lithuanian girl born with significant hearing loss in a hippie town successfully create a life writing string quartets and symphonies."

00:36:36

John Banther: I love that, and I think we're all better for it.

00:36:39

Evan Keely: Absolutely.

00:36:42

John Banther: Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown, your guide to classical music. For more information on this episode, visit the show notes page at classicalbreakdown. org. You can send me comments and episode ideas to classicalbreakdown@ weta. org, and if you enjoyed this episode, leave a review on your podcast app. I'm John Banther. Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown from WETA Classical.