Music of Guatemala - Art Music

Art Music

The field of art music, also known as "classical music", includes various musical styles such as Renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, 20th century music, and post-modern music. Guatemala was one of the first regions of the New World to be exposed to European music. The Spanish missionaries and clergy introduced Flemish and Spanish liturgical music during the early 16th century as part of the Roman Catholic rite. The first cathedral (1534) at the newly founded city of Santiago de Guatemala was endowed with a choir in charge of plainchant and Latin polyphony. Later in the century, three chapel masters from the Iberian peninsula enriched the cathedral's repertoire with their compositions: Hernando Franco (1532–85), Pedro Bermúdez (1558–1605), and Gaspar Fernández (1566–1629). Scholars have shown that musical activity in the missons of Huehuetenango, in the northwestern mountains of present-day Guatemala, was significant. Native musicians learned the art of polyphonic composition from the missionaries and also contributed a number of villancicos in Spanish and local Mayan languages to the repertory of matins and vespers music at their parrish churches.

The main composers during the late baroque and pre-classical period were Guatemalan-born chapel masters of the cathedral, Manuel José de Quirós (d. 1765) and Rafael Antonio Castellanos (d. 1791). The latter successfully introduced Guatemalan folk-music elements in his vocal works, especially his villancicos for Christmas, which often show traits of Afro-Caribbean and Mayan rhythms, melodies, and accompaniment styles. His 176 extant works reflect Castellanos' mastery of the style of his time, as well as an unusual originality based on plainchant models, baroque part-writing, and the frequent inclusion folk-music idioms. Several of Castellanos' disciples attained mastery of the villancico and the cantata, as is reflected by extant works by Pedro Antonio Rojas, Manuel Silvestre Pellegeros, Francisco Aragón, and Pedro Nolasco Estrada Aristondo. The successor of the latter as chapel master of the cathedral was Vicente Sáenz, who served in that capacity from 1804 to his death in 1841. The organist during his tenure was his son Benedicto Sáenz the elder, who prematurely died in 1831.

Among the composers of classical style the most important Guatemalan composer is José Eulalio Samayoa (1781-ca. 1866), the first musician in the New World to write symphonies besides a sizable amount of church music. His Seventh Symphony, dedicated to the victory of the Federal Army at Xiquilisco in present-day El Salvador, is a model of classical balance. His later Sinfonía Cívica and Sinfonía Histórica are kept in an early romantic idiom, with frequent programmatic episodes. José Escolástico Andrino, who worked in Guatemala City, Havana, and El Salvador during the first half of the 19th century, also composed several symphonies. The brilliant young musician Benedicto Sáenz, the younger (d. 1857) on the other hand wrote much church music, such as his Messa Solenne published in Paris by advice of the Italian composer, Saverio Mercadante . At the same time, Sáenz and his brother Anselmo were the first to introduce Italian opera to Guatemala from 1843 on, an enterprise that after initial failures would turn into a huge success, leading to the construction of the magnificent National Theatre, later called Teatro Colón.

The late 19th century is represented in Guatemala by several trends: the aforementioned introduction of opera, the training abroad of several highly talented pianist-composers, the influence of military band music, and the invention and development of the chromatic marimba.

Piano music was enormously furthered by scholarships for study in Italy and France awarded to several young talents. Thus, Luis Felipe Arias (1876–1908), Herculano Alvarado (1879–1921), Julián González, and Miguel Espinosa could present piano music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, and Franz Liszt never heard before in Guatemala. They had also considerable influence on younger composers such as Rafael Vásquez, Alfredo Wyld and Rafael A. Castillo, all of whom flourished during the first decades of the twentieth century.

A group of composers furthered and instructed by the Prussian conductor and bandmaster, Emil Dressner, came from the realm of military bands and salon music. Germán Alcántara (1856–1911), Rafael Álvarez Ovalle (1855–1946), Manuel Moraga (1833–96), Julián Paniagua Martínez (1856–1946) and Fabián Rodríguez (1862–1929) contributed a number of salon pieces, opera fantasies, and dances to the repertoire of bands and pianists.

Another important achievement was the invention and development of the chromatic marimba in the highland town of Quetzaltenango in 1894, by Julián Paniagua Martínez and the marimba builder, Sebastián Hurtado. This new development made it possible to play the fashionable dance and salon music on the marimbas, which previously had been restricted to the diatonic scale. As a result, Guatemalan light music achieved an enormous dissemination at home and abroad by countless marimba bands that were formed from the beginning of the twentieth century. Much of the music of that time is still alive in the memorized repertoire of present-day marimba groups.

By the end of the nineteenth and in the first part of the 20th century, several composers developed a keen interest in Mayan mythology and folk music, on which they based their scenic and concert compositions. Jesús Castillo (1877–1946) was the first musician to collect a sizable amount of folk tunes, which he later used in works such as his opera Quiché Vinak, as well as ouvertures and symphonic poems. His half brother Ricardo Castillo (1891–1966) studied in Paris, where he acquired impressionistic and neo-classical techniques. His piano music, as well as his orchestral output, reflects the fusion of his contemporary art with Mayan mythology such as legends and myths from the Popol Vuh. José Castañeda (1898–1983) also took keen interest in the Mayan past in his stage works such as the ballet La serpiente emplumada (The Feathered Snake), premiered in 1958, while his two symphonies his string quartets are much more experimental.

Composers from the next generation, some of them Ricardo Castillo's and José Castañeda's students who could also profit from the teachings of the Austrian composer, Franz Ippisch, continued to focus on the autochthonous Guatemalan cultures. In their stage, vocal, and instrumental works, they have shown an interest in Mayan and Garifuna cultural elements, which they have stylized in different ways. Among these, Joaquín Orellana (b. 1930) has developed idiophones and aerophones derived from the marimba and other folk instruments, which he uses in some of his aleatory compositions that deal with the social strife of present-day ethnic groups. Among his former students, the Gandarias brothers have focused on electronic process of folk-music and bird calls recorded on site, producing several discs. At the beginning of the new millennium, two multimedia works by contemporary composer Dieter Lehnhoff, Memorias de un día remoto (Memories of a Distant Day) and Rituales nocturnos (Night Rituals) have evoked the Mayan past in a more contemporary style, being conceived as the soundtrack to an imaginary film. The sojourn of the Garifuna to Central American shores on the other hand is the subject of Satuyé, his opera in progress. Among the younger composers, several have written works in a variety of post-modern styles, often returning to traditional or free tonality in their vocal and instrumental compositions.

In 1930 comes to air radio TGW, the Voice Guatemala, first station of long wave. Later, in 1946, begins the time of the national broadcasting. In that period, the transmitters produced dramatized pieces, arose programs from quality that could compete with the foreigners; the broadcasting reached their maximum development. The station has had an entertainment focus, featuring artist such as: Paco Pérez, Gustavo Adolfo Palma, Juan de Dios Quezada, Manolo Rosales, Jorge Mario Paredes and Ernesto Rosales.