Brazilian music accompanies the lives of Gabriel Sivak since he can remember. In his childhood he played ball in the garden of the family home with Buarque Boy and many years later he would end up recording pianos and arrangements in the company of Toquinho. A commission from the French string quartet Quatuor Voice It led him to delve deeper into the rhythms of capoeira, candomblé and samba, but when he wanted to enter the Amazon in search of the sounds of the kuikuros he realized that he was entering unknown territory. “The music of these ethnic groups is completely outside the language of Brazilian popular music, these types of rhythms are not installed among the Indians,” says the Argentine composer living in France, who visits Buenos Aires for the premiere of Tears of Tahuaria piece in five movements that condenses the experiences of that trip.
This Friday at 8 p.m. at the Teatro Colón, the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra directed by Manuel Hernandez-Silva will play Sivak’s work, in a program that also includes the Symphony No. 12 of Dmitri Shostakovich and the pianist’s solo performance Teo Gheorghiu in it piano concerto of Edvard Grieg. The Venezuelan Hernández-Silva previously directed the Orchester des Pays de la Loirethe set for which it was written Tears of Tahuari. “It is a great pride to present it here in Colón. It was a place that made me discover a lot of music, from Rostropovich to contemporary music ensembles such as The Strasbourg Percussionswhich I ended up working with later in France,” says Sivak, who as a teenager bought Mozarteum season tickets.
In Tears of Tahuariincluded in the recent monographic album Dance in the waters of Buriti, sound textures, ethnic colors and tribal rhythms are combined that Sivak transfers to a contemporary language for a symphony orchestra with two flutes, two clarinets, two trumpets, woodwinds and three percussions for strings and three percussions. At the same time, says the musician, it is a piece that addresses the destructive aspect of man in the face of nature: “I built the project little by little, but the fires of 2019 gave it a completely unexpected turn. There I began to hear music inside my head that had a flight and a political relevance marked by the situation of that moment, the Amazon was on fire and Bolsonaro let that happen.”
Until that moment, Sivak had been working in Nanterre with the ethnomusicological archives that exist on the three ethnic groups that inhabit the Xingu indigenous territory, and although he was impressed by the improvised phrasing of the flutes – with a few bars less than Western music –, he felt that That material was not enough for what he was looking for: “I spent a good time listening to those recordings, analyzing them, creating counterpoints and putting together textures with what seemed most interesting to me. But when the fires broke out I understood that I could enrich the imagination with sounds that departed from the purely ethnomusicological, such as the deforestation machines, the fires or the water of the third movement, which somewhat represents the tears of the trees.
The ideas finished germinating in the jungle with the real experience of kwarupa ritual with which Indians exorcise the pain of the death of a loved one, or the huka-huka, a martial art practiced by tribes. Also in the waters of the Buriti, where Sivak imagined the sound of a submerged orchestra to give an aquatic texture to the third movement. Neither the arrival at Xingu Park, in Mato Grosso, nor the first contact with the kuikuros were easy. “I entered thanks to a French ethnomusicologist who gave me his blessing. They had bad experiences with documentary filmmakers who presented themselves as travelers and then negotiated films behind the Indians’ backs at very high prices. That generated an attitude of certain suspicion in them that luckily I was able to quickly overcome. I was totally transparent and when they understood that there was not a commercial purpose but rather an artistic or cultural one, they opened up a little more and in the end we created a very deep and very nice fraternal bond,” he says.
During the month he stayed there, Sivak spent several hours every day in a rural tribal school where he composed on his computer. As he worked on the fifth movement of the piece, “Kuikuros”, one of the Indians approached him to ask if he could hear what he was doing. “It was a very strong moment. I had been there for several weeks, and although there was a dialogue, I was generally the one asking them questions. I made him listen to that whole part with headphones, which is the most tribal part of the work, and the guy started making the rhythm with his feet that they do during the rituals. That later remained as a mark in the fifth movement, which begins with that sound of the feet,” the composer recalls.
Just a kilometer from where he was staying, everything was burned by fires. “The tribe that received me had been saved by a miracle. It was very shocking to see that among all the vegetation that surrounded us, as one imagines the Amazon, suddenly areas appeared where everything was black and burned. They were very strong and very poetic things at the same time, of very great power,” he tells Infobae Culture. Sivak describes that they are towns hard hit by fires and deforestation, but also historically by evangelization and plagues. “However, they have a very happy and positive energy. I think that by not having commercial exchange incorporated into daily life, the excessive ambition of modern society and competition is almost absent,” he points out.
The entire project was funded by a grant awarded by the Foundation Banque Populaire, which helps artists in the creation of work for three years. The definitive writing of the score was completed during his residency at the prestigious Velázquez House from Madrid, where it ended the night that Argentina became world champion. There he also began working on what would be his first opera, The propagationwho is currently writing with Alejandro Tantanian. “The project changed a lot but we are already halfway through. It is a pleasure to work with a partner like him and it was also a genre that I had wanted to try for a while. It occurred to me that Casa Velázquez was the right space to develop a work of this magnitude,” says Sivak.
* Tears of Tahuari will be presented this Friday the 24th at 8pm as part of the Concert 05 – Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra at the Teatro Colón (Cerrito 628). The program is completed by the Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16 by Edvard Grieg and the Symphony No. 12 in D minor, Op. 112 by Dmitri Shostakovich. Tickets on sale on the theater’s website and at box offices.
