Dr. Lorenz visited to talk about the premiere (last week) of his new viola concerto, Canciones de Jara, performed by Roberto Diáz and the MSU Symphony Orchestra. He discussed the complicated relationship between the U.S. and Latin America.
He shared a short film called 9-11/9-11 by Mel Chin, who he met at the MacDowell Colony. The film tells parallel stories about the military coup d’etat in Chile in the twentieth century and the World Trade Center attack in the twenty-first. It links them in a long cycle of cultural violence.
At MacDowell, Lorenz found many of the artists creating works that were critical of the culture, contemporary politics, and social issues. They seemed unaware of and uninterested in “classical” music. “There’s room to make statements and connect to individuals in classical music…It is grounded on very powerful events that affected me when I was growing up and still affect me.”
Lorenz has observed a growing number of students interested in studying film music. He thinks this could be because film music is more present in our society. He is still confident however, that the kinds of specific artistic principles that can be conveyed in film can still be effectively presented in art music that does not include images or text.
composer Ricardo Lorenz and violist Roberto Diáz
“I was playing a double game,” Lorenz says. Canciones de Jara is a statement (about violence, terrorism, and politics) while remaining a concerto. Audiences who know nothing of the Victor Jara’s songs, the source of the musical materials in the piece, can still experience Canciones de Jara as a viola concerto.
After Dr. Lorenz’s remarks, we had a class discussion about music’s ability to convey empathy. Specifically, we talked about some of the specific sounds Lorenz used in the concerto: a siren, a person talking through a megaphone, and a guitar, itself amplified by a megaphone. To conclude, we listened to excerpts from the recorded premiere.
