"A Latino Classical Musician?"
Dr. Leopoldo A. Sánchez M. on mestizaje in the world of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms
From panameño to Latino
I learned classical music in Latinoamérica. Raised in the República de Panamá, I attended a conservatory there filled with practice rooms in the underbelly of a theater where students heard the sounds of Mozart and the language of Cervantes intermingling on a regular basis.
Concert programs listed young orchestra musicians with last names like mine. We were not labeled ‘Latino’. We were simply musicians in training to become future members of our country’s Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, Panama’s symphony orchestra.
Years later, I became a first-generation immigrant to the United States, residing mostly in the Midwest, where I pursued graduate work leading to a career in the formation of church leaders. It was in this world of academia that I was first made aware of my “otherness,” especially when I had to fill out forms asking me to check the box under the ethnicity that best described me.
Being baptized ‘Hispanic’, decades after being born Panamanian, made me wonder: Does this label make a musical difference? If so, to whom? To me? To my new country? To the audience hearing the music I made with the gift God gave me?
“A Latino classical musician?”
This was how an Anglo acquaintance greeted me during intermission at a concert of the St. Louis Civic Orchestra, where I am Principal Double Bass. I had briefly met him in church circles, and he did not know I played classical music. His subtle open-ended question interrogated my place in the world of classical music.
“It was the first time I heard someone actually refer to me as a ‘Latino classical musician’ — and with a question mark!”
What he meant by his comment, I did not ask. Was he perplexed to see a Latino, who should perhaps be playing in a salsa band, meddling with things better left to white folks with European roots? Or was he implying that a Latino performing German, Italian, or Russian works had sold out his own people? Did I belong, and that was fine — or didn’t I belong? Or do I have to stop being Latino in order to be a classical musician?
The unspoken answers I heard behind his question were: Strange. Unorthodox. Impossible.
The world of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms be inhabited by a Sánchez: Strange. Western tonal harmony mastered by a person in whose veins flow the rhythms of Amerindian and African dances: Unorthodox. A string instrument with a history going back to the late European Renaissance becoming an extension of a Latino body: Impossible.
Fiesta Popular in Panama City, 1890. Source: Casa Museo Endara (public domain)
Polyphony as mestizaje
What really was behind his question is the very legitimacy of mixing two different worlds. What seemed to make the questioner uncomfortable was the notion of mestizaje, a term originated in reference to the racial miscegenation of the Spanish and the Amerindians as a result of the Conquest and Colonization of the Americas. Mestizaje is also a metaphor used in religious and other studies to describe the hybridity of U.S. Hispanics, their mixed racial, cultural, and linguistic identities. To some, the term is an insult, or at least means a spot lower on the social or academic ladder. To others, mestizaje represents a celebration of difference and convergence.
The history of Panama is filled with stories of mulatez, a related term that describes the mixing of the Spanish with the African slaves, or their descendants. Historical records in Panama show that social mobility was tied to racial purity: the idea was for women of color to “marry up”. In the effort to become whiter, however, the opposite happened. Over time, bodies, marriages, and families became browner, darker. Panamanian society became more mulatto—and this mulatez came to be seen as a good thing.
There is nothing new or exotic or particularly ‘Latino’ about mestizaje. The same intermingling of cultures happened with music in the West. With the arrival of the Renaissance, a medieval culture familiar with Gregorian chant based on a single melodic line started to experiment with polyphony, in which independent musical lines of equal value interact with each other. Polyphony incorporated the world of the chant by keeping a fixed melody in its plurality of voices—a marriage of two musical cultures many ascetics saw as inappropriate. Even the world of tonal harmony and four-part chorales (which makes possible concertos and symphonies like the ones I play with my orchestra in St. Louis) is a latecomer to the ever-changing musical mestizaje/mulatez of the West.
Gregorian chant based on a single melodic line
Gregorian chant with polyphony
Mixing music and culture has always been the norm, not the exception. But at some point along the way, the colonial mindset replaced the norm with the myth of purity. Classical music teachers trained in Europe often brought those biases with them to Latin America.
Hijacked by a Western dualism, classical music became a thing of the mind, pure spirit, approached as a mental exercise detached from the performer’s ethnocultural identity, and even body. I was taught to leave behind my birth culture to embrace a formalized music culture.
“I was taught not to move my head while playing, not to tap my foot while counting, not to bring my body into the music.”
It took me years to bring the Latino back into my classical music, first by embracing fully the mestizaje inherent in Western music itself. This is a tradition that has gone from single to independent musical lines, from the tonal to the atonal, from privileging consonance and harmony to highlighting dissonance and color and ever more complex rhythms and meters. In every move, the tradition has brought with it a part of the old and included the new. It has embraced otherness relentlessly.
Dr. Leopoldo A. Sánchez M. (center right) with fellow members of the St. Louis Civic Orchestra at a concert that featured Tchaikovsky No. 5, Logan University, 17 February 2018. Source: Chesterfield Lifestyle Magazine
A double-bass principal
Our orchestra recently played a flute concerto by a Mexican Jewish composer. Like the world of its performers, the classical has become increasingly global, incorporating the sounds and movements of different continents, including those of the formerly colonized. Classical music tends toward embracing el otro.
Bringing back my latinidad into classical music also meant seeing the double bass as an extension of my body. I let the body respond rhythmically to the beats of symphonic works, imitating or accompanying them. To do so is not to distract from the music, but to interpret it as a dialogue—yes, as a dance—with the composer and the orchestra.
A Latino classical musician? ¡Claro que sí! I am not a strange, unorthodox, and impossible vision of life to imagine, inhabit, or embody; I am part of the world as it is and has always been.
The question that first questioned the mixing of two worlds has led me to a greater appreciation for intercultural exchanges. Together, my cultural and musical identities allow me to model embracing the strange ‘other’ in an increasingly fragmented society, where myths of racial, cultural, and linguistic purity abound. Being a Latino classical musician allows me to perform before a captive audience—not only to the music but also to such purity myths.
In other words, being a Latino classical musician allows me to perform my hope and vision for a better world.
