Chacarera meets the Puna

Chacarera meets the Puna (2005) unites elements of Viennese atonalism with traditional Argentine songs and dances in a strong and introspective work for solo violin. In 2005, Argentine violinist and conductor Alejandro Drago proposed to me to compose a piece for this instrument. A CD performed by him had been recently released by Tradition, a label from Buenos Aires, and he was working on a second one for the “Classical Music Collection” of that record company. Both albums were somehow linked to Argentine musical nationalism, which incorporated into classical music elements of local folk dances and songs (as seen in works by Alberto Williams, Alberto Ginastera, etc.) while often including references to rural landscapes. In my case, after gladly accepting this proposition, several associations came to my mind.

I was born on the coast of the Baltic Sea, in Stockholm, and then raised close to the Swiss Alps, in Geneva. In part, this is why the sea and the mountains have always fascinated me. Years later, during my adolescence, I took my first trip to Argentina and found out that my French high school was supporting a settlement in the Argentine Puna. This region is a part of the Puna de Atacama, an arid high plateau in the Andes Mountains that belonged to Bolivia and today is shared by Argentina and Chile (not to be confused with the Puna grassland ecoregion). All these memories converged when thinking about this commission and, in my mind, I saw a violinist playing in the middle of the Puna desert, absorbed in the music like in a trance-like state. And that is how Chacarera meets the Puna was conceived.

In this piece, I associated the Puna with the baguala, an Andean chant based on the pitches of a major triad chord, embellished by melodic ornaments called kenko, accompanied by a frame drum called caja and performed solo or in groups at a slow tempo. As an antagonistic element for this work, I selected the chacarera, an Argentine lively couple dance that makes profuse use of syncopation and vertical hemiola. My previous knowledge about baguala and chacarera allowed me to extract and rework their core rhythmic patterns, which I used to create the motivic material of Chacarera meets the Puna after adding them a pitch organization based on elements of Viennese atonalism, in which I was educated. Then, by making use of pseudopolyphony, I created for this piece a musical discourse based on the interchange of equivalent-beat simple- and compound-time meters. Finally, I added to this work a contrasting tremolo texture of ternary rhythm, as well as glissandos and taps on the violin’s body that recall the mentioned kenko and caja, respectively.

Commissioned by and dedicated to Alejandro Drago, my work Chacarera meets the Puna was included on the CD Obras para violín solo Vol. II (2007), performed by him, released by Tradition (TR060427), Buenos Aires (Argentina) and included in the Naxos Music Library (Japan). Chacarera meets the Puna was then premiered in Kiskunhalas (Hungary), on 20 September 2013, at the Áron Szilády Reformed High School by Édua Zádory, who also performed it in the Americas at venues such as the Usina del Arte in Buenos Aires (Argentina).

Dr. Jan Emanuel Abras, Ph.D. (born 1 February 1975 in Stockholm, Sweden)

www.janemanuelabras.com