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“Seen from the moon, our planet looks like an innocent blue, reddish-brown and white sphere. If I were a photographer who lived on the moon and shot it from there, could I really say I had taken a picture of the Earth?...For example, could I take a picture of apartheid, another of Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian Knot, another of the Mekong delta, another of a bewitched fakir, another of howitzer bursts over Guernica, another of an oyster struggling to expel the grain of sand that will be the nucleus of its pearl...I must confess that I am an alien dissatisfied with his first photograph of the earth.” — Silvio Rodríguez There was complete silence in the world about Cuba after the Revolution. The world isolated Cuba. Everyone in Argentina, my home at the time, and the rest of South America, was ignorant regarding what was going on in Cuba. We only knew what was told in the official U.S. press. |
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Several Moments from Silvio At the beginning there wasn’t a Nueva Trova. I started to compose songs that were later characterized as being part of the Nueva Trova, or new song. People asked me what I was and my inclination was to call myself a Trovador (troubadour). “What are you?” — “I’m a troubadour.” I don’t know if this was intuitive. At the time I was unclear about the history of the Trova, and the significance of what we were doing. I was in the Army, I had another job --- I was a draftsman of comic strips --- and my plans were to return to my old job once I left the Army. I started off as a young man who liked music, took up the guitar and started to play. Like other young people, I used to dislike the traditional Cuban music played on the radio. However, I liked the traditional songs of the trova I heard my mother sing. At the time, people used to think troubadours were old men who sang out of tune with raucous voices. There was no intention of spreading or recovering our musical history. So, there I was in the barracks, trying to compose my first songs, with the help of some friends who knew a little music. My first audience was my comrades-in-arms, my friends. I started to sing with another man in musical events organized for our unit. Ever since I picked up a guitar, I had the intention of saying things my own way. I always felt I had something to say, I was sure of that. Now, after many years of professional work, having studied music and with the necessary tools to analyze my musical beginnings, I look back to my first songs and realize that my songs had a different intention compared to what was heard at the time. Even in love songs, I always made different propositions. I was just starting to read the Romantic classics: Lord Byron, Becquer, Hoffman, all of them. Later on, I was attracted to Poe’s work. That interest lasted and even today I’m a follower of some of his teachings. From ’64 or ’65 when I began composing rhythmically, to 1967 when I left the Army, I was very prolific. I mostly wrote love songs, not chronicles of the times. However, I wrote my first political songs then as well. The very first one was against racial discrimination in the U.S. called “Por Qué?” and the second one was against the Vietnam war called “La Leyenda del Aguila”. Later on, I wrote others about the Vietnam war. Right after being demobilized, I met Mario Romeu by chance. Romeu directed an ICR (Cuban Institute of Broadcasting) orchestra. He became very enthusiastic about my songs, made the musical arrangements for three of them and invited me to be on Música y Estrellas, the most popular TV program. I was terrified by the TV cameras, just like today. For me, singing and boarding a plane are the same thing, both produce an inexplicable terror. In approximately 1969, I heard Bob Dylan for the first time. Remember that there was a Blockade of Cuba imposed by the U.S., which, at the time, was very harsh and effective. As the years went by and people realized that the Revolution was here to stay, many governments re-established diplomatic relations or trade with Cuba. When the U.S. declared the Blockade in the ’60s, only the Soviet Union, the socialist countries, and a handful of friends like Mexico dared to maintain relations with us. So, I didn’t have the opportunity to hear Dylan until the end of 1968 or 1969. Then he was going through an obscure period which made it difficult for me to understand his songs. I would say that the Beatles left more of a lasting imprint on me. The Beatles expanded all the traditional parameters of “popular” music. They made “cultured” music with “popular&q#148uot; music. I’ve always been an impassioned listener of so-called “cultured” music; the music of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Brahms, Stravinsky... I began to see how the Beatles were doing away with formal aesthetic norms. And I identified with that attitude because I was inclined to experiment with song. For instance, I’ve written plays within songs and made speeches interrupted only by a chorus midway. When I started to sing, someone from TV told me: “If you didn’t sing those strange songs, you’d become a star overnight.” Many people describe me “as a poet who sings.” I don’t think of myself as a poet, but as an author of songs. I’ve tried to write poems, but have never succeeded. I’ve experimented in order to determine how much you can get out of a man with a guitar. Song is a hybrid which produces a mulatto product — music and poetry. That is, song is a mestizo product, just like cinema, because it’s a mixture of more than one artistic form. The Nueva Trova became conscious of its importance to young people at a certain moment. Pablo Milanés, Noel Nicola and I worked together in many events. We began talking a lot about the role of song in a society like ours. What role should music play? Commercialism had relegated song to being a commodified, pseudo art. But song had or could have artistic qualities and could be seen and treated as great art forms like printing, poetry or a symphony. This was the spirit of our work, committed as we were to the revolutionary process. We felt there was no way to evade the lights that had been turned on in our heads. There were people, including leaders, who didn’t believe in us, because before us, song had never been used to criticize or question. We didn’t ask anyone’s permission to do so and there were people who misinterpreted our intentions and even tried to silence us. On the other side, there were people who understood our songs and tried to help widen our audience. We rejected artists’ outdated habits: their way of dressing and performing. We objected to that mythical being who appears and disappears like magic on the television screen amidst colorful lights and sounds. We wanted to clarify that we were human beings, perfectly earthly; that we could compose socially committed songs and that we had to because we all shared the same problems, the same struggle and the same ideology. That was our objective. It wasn’t only a new way of creating, but a new way of being. I feel that art should entertain as well as educate. It fails when it doesn’t entertain. An audience should feel comfortable with an artist. One can also be overcome with awe by a work of art. That too, is a way of learning and being entertained. In that sense, I’m a follower of Brecht. Even nightclubs can be important. I’m not against them. One can have a good time at a nightclub with friends. But nightclubs need constructive content and artistic quality. There will always be music to dance to and music to listen to. When the lyrics to dance music become so good that they deserved to be heard also, we will have reached the ideal. Or, looking at it another way, we troubadours could aspire to compose dance music. I think that today’s dance music has been influenced by the Nueva Trova. When we began, people didn’t like the traditional Cuban music inherited from our parents and grandparents. The Nueva Trova helped renew our tradition. The Nueva Trova has influenced young composers of dance music. They’ve recognized that it has also introduced new options and a new perspective. Juan Formell of Los Van Van understood this. Formell’s compositions also helped young people appreciate Orquesta Aragon’s music and other orchestras which were not as modern as his. We all knew that the term Nueva Trova would eventually become too narrow. The Nueva Trova and its troubadours are not so new any more. We knew that time would do away with this term. But we needed a term when we began to organize. Every time you classifiy and label, a tomb is dug. Nonetheless, the Nueva Trova brought new truths to light and contributed to the development of the Cuban Trova song. I don’t care if the term Nueva Trova stops being used. I stopped being new a long time ago, but I will always be a troubadour. I will continue practicing the Trova, which has always existed as a musical tradition of our people. That’s what’s important. --Excerpts from interview by Rina Benmayor |
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David Byrne on Silvio How does one describe Silvio’s music to someone who has never heard it (or the other singers of Nueva Trova [New Song]? I could say it’s very popular; he performed at a stadium last year in Chile to an audience of 90,000! I could list some of his influences: Leadbelly, traditional Cuban singers like Sindo Garay, The Beatles, Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, Tschaikovsky and Beethoven, Bob Dylan, Ché, Pablo Neruda, Neil Young, and popular Cuban music (what is often called Salsa). I could say that if you think Cuban music is all Rumbas and Cha-cha-chas you’ll be surprised. It’s pop music with beautiful & sophisticated lyrics mixed with some typical Cuban stylings: a “Latin” bass line propelling “Rock” chord changes for example. Mr. Silvio R. lives in a modest house in the suburbs of Havana. We talked on his front porch, exchanging writing and recording methods over some wonderful Spanish wine. We stayed for a lunch of picadillo, rice and string bean salad, then drank more wine and talked of musical influences. Silvio mentioned a Library of Congress recording of Leadbelly on which he improvises a song accompanied by percussion played on bottles and chairs. The similarity to Cuban “roots” music became obvious. The Rumba and Guaguanco are also largely improvised. But Cuban music has evolved in many directions since then. Since 1961, there has been a U.S. economic blockade over Cuba. Cuban music was previously promoted and disseminated mainly by U.S. owned multinational record companies, and when this distribution ceased, knowledge of fresh musical developments in many placed stopped. Most remember “Babalu” on I Love Lucy and The Peanut Vendor. Well, things have changed a lot since then... The Cubans have continued to have access to outside music, but what was evolving and being created on the island was not always getting out as before. A recent law permiting “cultural” exchange allows dialogue, however limited, to begin. This recording is one example. We will follow this collection with a compilation of incredible Cuban dance hits and a third compilation of current new directions. --David Byrne, November 1990 From the album Silvio Rodríguez’ Greatest Hits. |
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It is the fact of the Cuban revolution against the mighty colossus of the North (not just the local puppet dictator) that inexorably brings into focus all the tensions that energize Silvio Rodríguez’ songs. It is disorienting for a citizen of the United States to encounter the world of Silvio Rodríguez: we have been brought up to see Cuba as a monument to hate and lies not truth and love. We find it hard to recognize ourselves in the relentlessly hostile, devouring sea-serpent (Sueño Con Serpientes) or in the savage eagle who ties the worker by the neck and grieves at the sight of a healthy child going to school (Canción Urgente Para Nicaragua). Yet in Nicaragua, schools and health centers were the special targets of U.S.-financed contras. Older Cubans still remember the lot of workers when the Americans owned outright 55% of Cuba’s arable land and all her utilities. From the Cuban perspective the American policy of unremitting hostility constantly threatens to turn the love-inspired achievements of the revolution into the engulfing nightmare of bombs, death squads (evoked indirectly in Causas y Azares) and mass graves. Silvio, aged 14 at the time of the Revolution’s triumph, has devoted his extraordinarily creative adult life to exploring the implications of the endless struggle it takes to build and defend such a revolution. He divides his time between immensely popular tours in Latin America and Europe and free neighborhood concerts all over the island of Cuba; he expresses his commitment to the revolution in every line he writes. Aged 42 at the time he recorded Oh Melancolia (1988), Silvio may seem to put more emphasis on personal needs and personal fantasies. In a vacuum, enemies of Cuba could then read the trajectory from Playa Girón to Oh Melancolia as a movement away from revolutionary commitment toward disillusionment and a sense of personal loss. But this deeply personal side of Silvio has always been there in creative tension with more public visions. Listening through this selection of songs, which extend from the late sixties to the late eighties, I am most struck by the continuity in Rodríguez’ work of fundamental tensions — between nightmare visions of ultimate destruction and soaring optimism, between the longing for private intimacy and the surge of love for the whole human species, between playful fantasy and the harsh cruelties that demand uncompromising commitments. All these tensions are distilled in a perpetual, relentlessly self-conscious meditation over the proper role of the poet/singer. An event like the battle of the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón) the first time in some 130 invasions of Latin America that the United States has been stopped, becomes an occasion not for drum-beating or crowing, but a subtle, understated brooding about the responsibilities of the poet to find appropriate form and to adhere to the truth. Sueño de Una Noche de Verano confronts directly the opposition between the poet who conceives of himself as made to awaken love and the world to which he must respond, a nightmare world full of the intrusive horrors of war, a polluted environment, and pits filled with corpses. The contemporary horrors in this catalogue are more indirectly evoked in the earlier haunting allegory of Sueño Con Serpientes--a nightmarish vision of seemingly futile, Herculean struggle against a Hydra-like monster constantly renewing itself and engulfing both the peaceful dove and the struggling poet. Pain and melancholy intrude on “Our Theme of Love” (Nuestra Tema), the hope of April, and the creative fantasies of the cloud-gazer (Como Esperando Abril). In a searing declaration of faith in what he does, the poet insists his song must be a sledgehammer (La Maza); any alternative role is rejected with a savage bitterness. Except perhaps for Oh Melancolia, the fleeting and evasive vision of love is rarely primarily private: it asserts itself in the optimistic realism of No Hacen Falta and the ebullient tribute to the achievement of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Cancion Urgente Para Nicaragua). I suspect that even the playful allegory of the lost unicorn (Unicornio), written about the same time, is inspired by the same event. The sense of the uniqueness of the Cuban achievement, founded on Love and Truth, is celebrated at the moment that uniqueness seems lost. --Peter W. Rose, Dec. 1990 (Pete Rose is a professor at the Miami University Dept. of Classics, Oxford OH) |
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| Silvio: A Brief Inventory. Why do you sing? I sing for pleasure and also out of consciousness. In other words, I enjoy singing what I make up. But I am also a man who looks at the world in a certain way and has a commitment. And I am inviting everyone to join my band, which is the band of the Revolution and of beauty. Some musical influences: What was important to me from a musical point of view was my mother: she put me to sleep with “trova” songs, she bathed me singing “danzones,” she swept the floor singing “boleros” and cooked singing “sones.” Your songs: I rarely set out to compose something deliberately. When it comes to musical creations, I tend to shoot first and then shout “Halt!” Love: In the abstract. I tend to imagine it as a dark, soft and warm place. Maybe it’s an evocation of the maternal womb... Or instead of an image, a state of the senses. Maybe it’s a talisman or a premonition. But I believe that I could not exist without it. The quality you value most: Will power. Your idea of happiness: Infinity. The defect you forgive most easily: Death. The defect you despise most: Lying. Your favorite occupation: Work. Your favorite poets: Marti, Vallejo, Quevedo. Your favorite composers: Violeta Parra, Beethoven, Chico Buarque, Lennon/McCartney. Your favorite name: Che. Your happiest memory: January 1, 1959. Your saddest memory: October 8, 1968. Your most unusual experience: When my daughter Violeta was born. Your most common experience: Non-conformity. If you had to sum up what you have learned over the years in one sentence, what would it be? WHERE THERE ARE MEN THERE ARE NO PHANTOMS. --Excerpted from the book: Silvio Rodríguez, The Hand Raise the Guitar, By Victor Casaus & Luis Rogelio |
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| Almost every Latin American country claims singers and composers of Nueva Canción [new song]. Full-blown “Nueva Canción” movements have developed in countries like Chile, Brazil and Cuba. In Chile, singers were either assassinated or forced into exile by the brutal military coup of 1973...In Brazil, new song has become a widely recognized expression of opposition to military regimes. But the case of Cuba remains unique. Cuba is the only country in which new song is not protest music and where it is recognized and institutionally supported as an art form. The standard soppy lament over a lover’s betrayal or the profession of eternal devotion belonged to the past. From its inception, therefore, the Nueva Trova has waged war on banality and commercialism in song. It rejects the star syndrome, night club-style performances, glitter and show. The singers appear on stage in street clothes, refuse to be made up and strive to communicate with their audiences in a natural, honest fashion. The Beatles and Bob Dylan, more than any other international musical figures, left a lasting imprint on the young Cuban songwriters. Dylan provided the contemporary archetype of the folk singer-social critic; the trovadores were also profoundly affected by international events, joining in the widespread condemnation of the Vietnam war through their song. The Beatles’ musical audacity and creative genius, expanding all the traditional parameters or “popular” music, opened an infinite variety of new possibilities for young composers. In keeping with vanguard trends, the trovadores began to experiment with their own traditional musical forms — son, guaguancó, guaracha, guajira, bolero, puntos campesinos — contemporizing and adapting them to the requirements of song, and even fusing them with jazz, blues, rock and Brazilian samba. Acoustic and electronic sounds blended as the singer-with-guitar was quickly joined by bands, combos and folk groups. The Cuban trovadores also saw themselves as part of an international movement of new song. They have been great admirers of Daniel Viglietti (Uruguay), Chico Buarque (Brazil), Juan Manuel Serrat, Pi de la Serra, and Luis LIach (Spain), Mercedes Sosa (Argentina), Soledad Bravo (Venezuela), Victor Jara, Inti Illimani, Quilapayun (Chile), not to mention Violeta Parra and Atahualpa Yupanqui, fountainheads of all new song. Rina Benmayor. Excerpted from La Neuva Trova: New Cuban Song, The Latin American Music Review, Univ. of Texas, 2:1 (spring/summer 1981) (Rina Benmayor is the Research Director of Cultural Studies at Hunter College, NYC)
Silvio: You have a place in me, like you do in so many people who find in your songs a refuge, an answer, consolation or the awakening of a sleeping sensuality. |
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