Townsend: El Decameron Negro III Balada de la Doncella Enamorada by Leo Brouwer

The third and last of the three movements of El Decameron Negro by Leo Brouwer is titled "Balada de la Doncella Enamorada" which translates as "Ballad of the Maid in Love". It is the longest movement and in some ways the most charming. It is in rondo form, meaning that there is a theme--interestingly enough, a very standard 8-measure theme, with two measures of introduction and two measures of transition at the end--and this theme keeps coming back. There are two episodes, one in the subdominant and another, perhaps, in the mediant. In between there is the rondo theme, which also returns at the end. So the form is ABACA. The title and the reference to African folk-tales in this and the other movements is like window-dressing. The bones of the music are really very neo-classical. In fact, the model for this piece could very well be a Beethoven piano sonata: three movements, the first in sonata form with repeated exposition, the second a set of variations and the third a rondo. You could do far worse! I've been working myself up to something similar, so far unsuccessfully. Here is the first movement. Here is the second movement. Now for my performance of the third movement. I have included scans of the rondo theme from the original manuscript and from the printed edition. I think you can see, in red, my corrections of the published version. Then a photo of the composer and some photos of my hands and myself.

If you want a Beethoven sonata for comparison, you might try this one:

The character of the themes and the harmonies is quite different, of course, but the formal plan is the same as the Brouwer piece.

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Townsend: El Decameron Negro, II Huida de los Amantes by Leo Brouwer

This is the second movement of Leo Brouwer's El Decameron Negro. My performance of the first movement is here. The full title of the second movement is "Huida de los Amantes por el Valle de los Ecos" or "Flight of the Lovers through the Valley of Echos".

There are a number of interesting things about this movement. It brings together two elements that are new to Brouwer's work and that will return again and again in his later music. The first of these is the influence of the 'minimalists', namely Philip Glass and Steve Reich. At the beginning of this movement, as we hear arpeggios that have more and more notes added to them creating groups of 4, 6, 8 10, 20, 11 or 14 notes, there is evident the influence of the early music of Philip Glass. The way these ideas develop, though,  owes nothing to Glass, but is typical of Brouwer. He uses brief canonic passages, which Glass would never do. Later on he uses arpeggio figures that only the guitar could execute. In these figures, which occupy the middle of the movement, slurred pairs of sixteenth notes are played against triplets. The repetition of smaller and smaller parts of the arpeggio, combined with a diminuendo, suggests the echos of the title. Brouwer has always had a unique gift for exploiting the timbres of the guitar. This brings me to the second element: the evocation of nature. More and more, especially in pieces like Cuban Landscape with Rain, Brouwer creates lovely passages that seem drawn directly from nature.

Considered from a more technical view, this movement is a series of variations on a simple arpeggiated major seventh chord. But, of course, the beauty is all in the details.

Again, I have included in the video a scan of the first page of the manuscript and of the published edition. I was lucky enough to get a copy of the manuscript which revealed quite a number of errors and omissions in the published score. It is often easy to determine if there is a misprint in a piece by Fernando Sor or Giuliani, where the musical 'vocabulary' is very clear. But in a piece by Brouwer, a misprint can go undiscovered forever unless you ask him directly. There is a glaring misprint of a chord in Brouwer's Danza del Altiplano that you would never guess! (For those studying the piece, in the original Max Eschig edition, without the later introduction, it is on page two, third system, last measure: the last eighth note chord in the measure should read, from the bottom, B, C, E, not A, C, E, the B being the second string open.) And the publishers never seem to get around putting out a new edition, or, much cheaper, just a little sheet of errata. Oh, well... Also in the video are photos of Leo Brouwer, myself working with him in a master class in Toronto and some pictures of my hands.

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Townsend: El Decameron Negro, I El Arpa del Guerrero by Leo Brouwer

One of the recording projects I have been most happy with was my recording of Leo Brouwer's El Decameron Negro. It was written in 1981 and published in 1983. Mine was the first recording, in 1987. I sent a copy to Leo in Havana and when I next saw him, in Quebec at a Guitar Foundation of America conference, he was very gracious and complimented me on the tone quality of the recording.

This piece represents a major shift in Brouwer's approach to composition. With this piece he turns away from the atonal, aleatoric avant-garde style he had been using since the early 1960s and returned to a style that used tonal harmonies, though often in new ways. I attended a panel of composers in Toronto in the 1980s that included Brouwer, Stephen Dodgson and Gilbert Biberian and posed to them all the same question: why are you returning to using tonal harmony? Brouwer's answer at the time was that atonal music caused a fatigue to write and listen to. He later gave a much more complete explanation:

…I became saturated with the language of the so called old avant- 

garde…the atomized, crisp, and “tensional” language of this kind 

suffered, and still suffers today, a defect related to the essence of 

compositional balance, a concept that is present in history: Movement, 

tension, with its consequent rest, relaxation. This “law of opposing 

forces” – day-night, man-woman, ying-yang, time to love-time to hate 

– exists within all circumstances of mankind….The avant-garde lacked 

the relaxation of all tensions. There is no living entity that doesn’t rest. 

This is one of the things I discovered….In this way, I made a kind of 

regression that moves toward the simplification of the compositional 

materials. This is what I consider my last period […which] 

encompasses the essential elements from popular music, from classical 

music, and from the avant-garde itself. They help me to give contrast 

to big tensions.

This is exactly the point I have tried to make on several occasions on this blog. If you search under "harmony" you will probably find over a dozen posts on the issue, but here is a typical one.

El Decameron Negro consists of three movements of which "El Arpa del Guerrero" (The Warrior's Harp) is the first (though Brouwer has indicated the movements can be played in any order, everyone usually follows the printed order). Brouwer has said that the inspiration was a collection of African folk-tales. The original Decameron is a 14th century collection of 100 tales by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375). I cannot find, however, the African collection that was the direct inspiration. What I do find is a 1972 Italian film directed by Piero Vivarelli entitled Il Decamerone Nero which consists of five African folk-tales. Perhaps this was the inspiration.

In any case, "El Arpa del Guerrero" is a brilliant and lyric re-interpretation of both tonality and sonata form. It is set in an irregular 5/8 time signature that tends to give everything a different lilt. There are two main themes, the 5/8 arpeggio you hear at the beginning and a tranquillo contrasting passage in chords with rising appoggiaturas. These two ideas are developed in interesting ways and the movement ends with a brilliant ascending passage and a statement of simple E major harmony. Up until then, the movement has been rather coy about what the tonic chord might be: D flat? A minor? But this ending resolves the tensions.

I have accompanied the recording with a photo of the first page of the original manuscript, the original published cover, the first page of the published edition (if you look very closely, you can see some red ink marking misprints in the printing), a photo of Leo Brouwer, a couple of photos of my right hand and a photo of me. Here is the first movement of El Decameron Negro, "El Arpa del Guerrero":

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