Artist Story: Elbio Barilari
A Professional Musican in Chicago
Recently, and thanks to Michael Orlove, who made the connection, I started to work with one of the most talented Chicago musicians, Orbert Davis. Our first collaboration was in the piece "Lincolniana", that I wrote for the Ravinia Festival, with Orbert as a soloist. On the 4th of July, 2009, at the same Ravinia Festival, we are going to present a full scale symphonic version of this piece during a great concert celebrating Abraham Lincoln's bicentennial. And we have many other exciting projects in the oven!
Community support means a lot. It means almost everything for the music scene, especially in a society that has very limited resources for the arts coming from the federal government. Mostly, you rely on local support, “local” meaning the city government, universities, foundations, festivals and other non-lucrative organizations. I think the secret is building the right alliances and bringing together all kinds of institutions interested in the same goal. An example of that is our Latino Music Festival, which gathers support from the International Latino Cultural Center, the UIC Latino Cultural Center, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago Humanities Festival and 98.5 WFMT, among others. Many other organizations within the Hispanic community have been helpful in different ways, with e-mail blasts, for example. Hispanic and mainstream organizations have seen we are showing a different face of Latin American and US Latino culture and have supported our initiative. When you have a legitimate point to make and you do it professionally, the community doesn’t let you down.
When I was 17 years old in Uruguay, I went to a private conservatory (the public one was almost ruined by the military dictatorship). In the first interview I informed my composition teacher that I wanted to learn everything about music and to compose a piece for soloists, choir, orchestra and organ. He gave me a very severe look. He was a hard-core avant-garde musician, very austere and electro-acoustic and very anti symphonic. Well, now, all these years later, I am still missing the organ but I have written for soloists and choir and orchestra, and I liked doing it very much! Of course, now I know more about orchestration, and about each of the genres I adore, like Tango and Jazz and Latino and African rhythms, because I have been studying those for a longer time. However, I do not change my basic approach to music—a principle I keep no matter what, where, when, or for whom. In the end, one composes for oneself, because one needs to make real those sounds that have been vibrating inside their head. That’s it. Of course, as Astor Piazzolla said, it is always hoped that “they”, the others, are going to like what you wrote.
Writing, in all aspects, is like a second-nature to me. In fact, I feel I am more of a composer/writer than a performer, although performing and practicing comes together with composing. Perhaps, these began to merge after almost 30 years doubling as a journalist. For the last decade I have been so busy with music and journalism that I don’t feel any contradiction between writing music and writing literature. For me, they are one whole experience because I choose to play my own music, or I choose to play music that is so close to me that it feels like my own. On the other hand, I don’t play music that I feel other people can play better than me.
I started writing when I was 7 or 8 years old so; especially after almost 30 years doubling as a journalist. I published one novel and 4 short story collections between 1985 and 1994.
Business? Well, I suppose that is the means by which I earn my living… It is a never-well-balanced-enough combination of making music, writing and working as a producer. I don’t think of myself as being good in business but I have learned how to live being “business challenged.”
How can music communicate the social and political concerns of a community?
Music, particularly songs, can have a great impact on social and political issues, especially when other channels of communication are closed. When the freedom of the press is shut down, like what happened in Latin America in the 70’s, the popular song has the important mission of addressing in some way the issues the media cannot longer touch because of the censorship.
In my opinion, this has been the norm in the US since 9/11. A large majority of the press fails to fulfill or declines to fulfill its mission and converts itself in a propaganda device for presidential policies.
A dictatorship suppressing freedom of expression, or corporate media shutting itself down, both are situations that force the society to find alternative channels of communication. Here come the song and the theater, and in general, the artistic manifestations, that are quicker in reacting to a changing reality.
I don’t think, however, this potential substituting for the “proper channels of communication” is necessarily a good thing for the artistic expression. I think this should be more like a “state of emergency” for the arts, a non-permanent condition. I don’t think the primary mission for the arts is to have a political and social impact. I think art fulfills a much more complex and ambiguous task: one of exploring, translating and questioning its own time and circumstance in an aesthetic. This also includes, of course, producing beauty (an always changing idea) and provoking pleasure. Having fun, whether composing, performing or listening, has a lot to do with my understanding of myself as a musician.
A healthy democratic society with healthy open channels for communication and open political debate allows its artists to be more flexible, to be more free and to include more nuances in their production than a society in which they need to be subrogate journalists, activists and politicians.
As painter Francis Bacon said: “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” The artists cannot do this properly if they simultaneously need to fill-in for a censored media (or a sold-out media) and for censored or anemic politicians.
Does being an artist mean different things depending on how old you are?
Well, when I was seventeen I wanted to be John Coltrane and Astor Piazzolla, all in one, but no. I don’t think in my case age introduced any major changes in how I see myself as a musician. Like the French composer Eric Satie said, ‘when I was 25 people told me: wait until you are 50 and you will see.’ Like him, I am more than 50, and I didn’t “see” anything.
Composer and writer Elbio Barilari was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1953. He received his musical education in Uruguay, Brazil, and Germany. Since 1998, he has made his home in Chicago. Classically trained, while also active in rock, jazz and tango music, Barilari has worked for the last three decades to create a musico-literary dialogue between diverse roots, traditions and languages. His compositions have been performed in Chicago by the Grant Park Festival Orchestra and the Lyric Opera Orchestra as well as by Paquito d’Rivera’s Orquesta Panamericana, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Concertante di Chicago, the Ukranian Chamber Orchestra and the Maverick Ensemble. Among his recent works are Los Cantos, Canyengue and On the Heights of Machu Picchu (all for orchestra), Concerto for Bandoneon and Orchestra, Concerto for Oboe and Strings, 2000’s Piano Piece and Tango for Beethoven. Barilari’s compositions also include Tangata for Orchestra, Three Guitar Pieces, one String Quartet and other orchestral and chamber works as well as more than 40 scores for theatrical plays in the U.S., Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Between 1999 and 2006 he was the editor in chief of La Raza Newspaper, the number one Hispanic weekly in the US.