Juan Blanco:
Pioneer of New Music
by Neil Leonard

Rhythm Music Magazine
Vol. 3, Num. 4, April 1994
Copyright 1994, Neil Leonard

Cuba’s contributions to the musical avant garde are too often ignored. The country’s presence in international pop music and jazz is widely celebrated. Cuba is also known as a primary center for the preservation and evolution of West African cultures in the Americas. Far less well-known are the disproportionate number of world-class Cuban musicians, artists and writers who helped define the international avant-garde.
No one epitomizes musical innovation better than Juan Blanco, who melded Afro-Cuban roots with electronic instruments, free improvisation, and experimental classical composition. Blanco has been at the vanguard of Cuban music for over fifty years, playing a major role in bringing down musical borders in Latin America. Though he has toured extensively throughout the world, and been a composer in residence at the Pomidou Center in Paris, his music was not heard here until very recently. I had the opportunity to hear Blanco’s work in two electro-acoustic festivals that I attended while in Cuba to research contemporary music. In 1993, I worked with The Space in Boston and The Boston Creative Music Alliance to bring Blanco to the United States to direct concerts of his work.

Juan Blanco changed the way Cuban classical music was written. He went beyond merely filling lines with dots and squiggles; his scores called for fires, sculptures, and projected images. One of his pieces had the Afro-Cuban jazz ensemble Irakere playing to an animated score, each player improvising to the motion of a unique geometric shape. In all, he has composed over 160 works, which have been premiered by virtuosos Merceditas Valdes, Tata Guines and Guillermo Barreto; jazz saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera; Cuba’s foremost guitarist, Leo Brower; and the National Symphony Orchestra.

Blanco was also one of the first to design a sampler. In 1942 he drew up the blueprint that attached a separate wire recording deck to each key on a one-octave keyboard. But fabrication costs proved prohibitive and the instrument was never built. A similar instrument, the Mellotron, was built only 20 years later and popularized by King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Yes, and Genesis. UNESCO collected Blanco’s original schematic for their electronic music archives in Paris.

Juan was born in 1919 in the town of Mariel, a coastal town in the province of Havana. Blanco’s family acquired a player-piano from the pianist at the local cinema as payment for a debt to Juan’s father. Juan was fascinated with the instrument and its ability to “remember” music; by age four he had taught himself to play it. Classical studies came several years later. Juan also loved popular music and at age ten formed a sextet that played Cuban songs around the neighborhood.

Later the same year, the family moved to Pinar del Rio, a rural province of sugar and tobacco plantations. Juan made a habit of following his father to work at the sugar warehouse so that he could hang around the black stevedores who celebrated payday by playing the cajon, a large wooden box that substituted for a drum. As Blanco put it, “In this way I was put in contact with one of the purest musical manifestations in all of the Pinar del Rio.”

Moving to the city of Havana when he was in his mid-teens, Blanco began composing and studying composition in the provincial conservatory. Realizing that his chances of living on music alone were slim, he also enrolled in the law school of the University of Havana. While in school, Blanco found time to win the national diving championship.
Like Alejandro Garcia Caturla, a brilliant composer and lawyer of the previous generation, Blanco wanted to create a new classical music rooted in the island’s folkloric and popular music. Blanco was also greatly influenced by Amadeo Roldan who emerged in the 1930s with Caturla but took Cuban music a step further by integrating Afro-Cuban instruments—the marimbula, clave, hand drums and quijada (mule’s jaw)—with the symphony orchestra. Roldan had been one of the first classical composers to write a piece exclusively for percussion. (French composer Edgar Varese was pioneering percussion music simultaneously, extending classical instrumentation to include police sirens and evoking industrial sounds.) Roldan and Caturla laid the foundation for an identifiably Cuban avant garde. With Blanco as a catalyst, this genre blossomed into a national movement.

Blanco was composing works for classical instruments that combined complex counterpoint with the polyrhythms and lyricism of African roots. But he found the academies uninterested in Cuban roots, virtually ignoring Roldan and Caturla. So he formed the Sociedad Amadeo Roldan in the late 1940s to promote the study and presentation of contemporary works drawing on all of Cuba’s musical traditions. The excitement of a distinctly Cuban avant-garde captured the interest of artists of all disciplines. Responding to requests for a broader mandate, Blanco expanded Sociedad Amadeo Roldan to include artists and writers and changed its name to Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo (Our Time). Much like the group of artists who gathered at Black Mountain College in the U.S. at the same time (John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham), Nuestro Tiempo attracted the participation and attention of the finest artists in the country. Nuestro Tiempo was not sponsored by any college or institution; Blanco often paid for concerts out of his own salary as a lawyer. With his help, the group became the most important collective voice of the mid-century Cuban renaissance.

In 1952, Colonel Fulgencio Batista overthrew the government. Batista shared U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy’s intolerance of intellectuals and suspected communists. As the new head of state, Batista resorted to police brutality to enforce his will, and Nuestro Tiempo was forced underground. Despite being jailed several times for leading the group, Blanco managed to hold concerts, organize clandestine meetings, and maintain the society through years of repression and Mafia-style rule.

Blanco’s standing in the business community helped him survive the Batista years. He had become a successful attorney, specializing in tax law and representing large U.S. corporations like Coca Cola. By the late 1950s he was working for the second-most-successful law firm on the island. When the rebel army entered Havana to overthrow Batista on January 1, 1959, Batista and many of Blanco’s clients fled the country. Blanco soon realized that this could be an opportunity to make music his career, and sought a commitment from the new government to give him a full-time job as a musician. When they agreed, he donned a military uniform, went to the law firm (where no one knew of his musical interests) and resigned.

Shortly thereafter, Che Guevara asked to meet the avant garde composers of Nuestro Tiempo to congratulate them for their role in the resistance. As a reward for their loyalty he appointed them directors of the military bands around the island and assigned Blanco to the Havana orchestra. When the Czechoslovakia became the first socialist state to send an ambassador to Cuba shortly after the revolution, Blanco’s military band was the centerpiece of a grandiose reception ceremony at the Palace de Revolucion. The ambassador showed strong signs of emotion when Blanco’s band struck up the national anthem. His Excellency must be moved, Blanco thought, by hearing his anthem in the Americas for the first time. Unfortunately, Blanco’s archivist had confused the Czechoslovakian anthem with that of Yugoslavia, with whom Czech relations at the time were tense.

The next day Guevara ordered the entire band to Cayo Largo, a remote island south of the mainland, to gather rocks for a construction crew building a tourist resort. As the army was rather undisciplined, a fellow intellectual convinced Blanco that Guevara would not notice if he skipped the construction detail. Blanco’s friend proved correct until Guevara caught sight of Blanco on television hosting a music appreciation program. The next day, Blanco and the archivist turned up bright and early at the construction site to lift rocks.

Despite these setbacks, Blanco remembers the early years of the revolution as a time of unprecedented freedom and experimentation in the arts. The major venues were up for grabs, and Blanco used the symphonic halls and opera houses to present new music. As the newly appointed Director of Music for the National Culture Council, he formed the Orquesta Cubana de Musica Moderna (a forerunner of Irakere) and convinced the state to pay composers a regular salary, as opposed to paying for individual pieces.

Blanco’s work underwent a major transformation during the early sixties. His interests expanded to include the sweeping innovations in the international avant garde. When premier Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier brought information on Pierre Schaffer’s tape collages or musique concrete from France, Blanco began studying electronic music full time. Unable to leave Cuba to visit the studios where the more advanced electronic instruments were being developed, he bought three cheap Silvertone tape decks from Sears in Cuba and began making electronic pieces. Limited to one oscillator, Blanco enhanced its sound with electronic feedback, and relied on tape splicing to obtain abrupt change of texures.

In 1961 Blanco finished his first electronic work, “Musica para Danza” (Music for Dance), which debuted in 1964. A short time later he wrote “Textures,” for magnetic tape and orchestra. While Blanco was the only Cuban composing for electronics, Leo Brower, the young Cuban guitar virtuoso and composer, had recently been exploring aleatoric composition—pieces using or consisting of random sequences—after a trip to a new music festival in Warsaw. Blanco and Brower began working together to reshape Cuban music, using influences from many sources. They refused to limit themselves to the academic tradition; they began writing for jazz musicians and listened to rock. Blanco and guitarist Jesus Ortega wrote a tape collage based on recordings of sonero Benny More. When an Indian diplomat left several dozen records of Indian classical music with the Casa de las Americas, Blanco and Brower locked themselves in the building and listened to the entire collection on the first available weekend.

Blanco thrived during the early years of the revolution, when the avant garde was not censured. But over time the administration grew more concerned about works that expressed independent political views and made attempts to control artists who were critical of the system. Blanco cites as an example the performance of his “Espacios III,” which featured his student Paquito D’Rivera along with 20 actors and 24 instrumental groups, distributed throughout the Garcia Lorca Opera House. The actors act out various stages of human development, beginning with primitive man, complete with pre-speech noises. At each stage they are admonished by a loud voice from a black speaker saying NO!!! Finally, the actors revolt and break the black speaker into pieces. “After the premiere in 1969 they fired the responsable in the National Council of Culture for letting me present this work.”

During the late 70s, Blanco began looking for a place to teach electronic music. The obvious choice, the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), was not interested. Each year Blanco volunteered to teach a course on electronic music at ISA and was turned down. In 1979, Blanco was appointed director of a small studio at the Instituto Cubana de Amistad con el Pueblo (ICAP). At ICAP, Blanco offered free instruction and studio time to composers and young pop musicians interested in electronic music. Blanco initiated a monthly concert series of live and taped music presenting works by composers as experimental as Lugi Nono from Italy and as accessible as Pink Floyd, and facilitated the presentation of works by hundreds of composers from around the world.

In 1983, using ICAP’s modest equipment, Blanco created “Cirkus-Toccata,” a live performance piece in which Afro-Cuban percussionists improvised to a tape prepared by Blanco. The percussionists, Guillermo Barreto (timbales) and Tata Guines (congas), were two of the most celebrated masters of their instruments, virtuosos in many Afro-Cuban genres who had accompanied Weather Report in their mid-seventies Havana concert.

Working with the note sequencer on an inexpensive Jupiter 8 synthesizer, Blanco composed a number of patterns with a fixed pulse, which he manipulated in real-time by detuning and changing the tempo and tone color. After recording the sequences to eight-track tape he mixed down the parts to create a tapestry of patterns fading in and out to create a thick, polyrhythmic texture. To complement the complexity of the tape he wrote parts to guide the percussionists though changes in styles, meters and tempos. However, after extensive rehearsing he found the percussionists inhibited by his score and decided to let them improvise freely. The following year the piece was performed by an entire folklore group in Santiago de Cuba (pictured), as well as Guillermo Barreto, queen of Afro-Cuban song Merceditas Valdes and classical virtuosos Jesus Ortega (guitar) and Miguel Villafruela (saxophone).
“Cirkus-Toccata” addressed Cuban music’s rich melding of disparate sources: the electronics drew on European and North American influences, the congas alluded to African roots, and the timbale invoked the rich legacy of dance music unique to the island. Going beyond Roldan’s use of Afro-Cuban instruments in classical works, “Cirkus-Toccata” was a collaboration with the masters those instruments. The co-existence of avant garde, Afro-Cuban, and jazz sources had never been explored to this extent in Cuba.
Throughout the 1980s Blanco was involved in multimedia, performance, theater, ballet, film and environmental sound pieces. His studios acquired Macintosh and NeXT computers, providing Blanco with a platform for composing that was closer to what his peers enjoyed in the US and Europe. In 1986, Blanco established a biannual International Festival for Electroacoustic Music in Varadero Cuba, that brought the Cuban composers together with their counterparts from the international community. Before long Blanco was asked to serve on the Cuban Committee of the International Music Council of UNESCO and became a member of its Executive Committee of the International Confederation for Electroacoustic Music.

Blanco finally came to the United States in the fall of 1993. He spoke at the Berklee College of Music, Dartmouth College, and Wesleyan University. At Wesleyan University’s New Music Festival he was billed with Ron Kuivila and Richard Lerman, forerunners in the use of interactive computer music and home-made electronic instruments. The program included a masterful rendition of “Cirkus-Tocatta” by percussion virtuoso Abraham Adzenyah of Ghana. “Cirkus-Tocatta” was again performed brilliantly at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston by Sa Davis from the United States. Here Blanco was billed with George Lewis, pioneer of interactive computer music, who also played trombone with Count Basie, Anthony Braxton, and Laurie Anderson. Lewis called Blanco’s music “a revelation.” Blanco’s new works sounded as exciting as those by composers two generations his junior.

Epitaph, a compilation recordings of Blanco’s work including “Music Para Danza,” “Cirkus-Toccata” and “Espacios V,” is available from Arcadio Records, P.O. Box 1070, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130.

Neil Leonard is a composer/saxophonist who spent a year in Cuba researching contemporary music. He premiered Blanco’s “Espacios V” at the New Music Festival at Wesleyan University. Leonard teaches in the Music Synthesis Department at Berklee College of Music and is president of the New England Society for Computer Arts (NEWCOMP).

PHOTO CAPTIONS:
Photo #1: (photo with Blanco facing the camera) Juan Blanco directing Foco Cultural do Los Hoyos during the performance of Cirkus-Toccata, Santiago de Cuba, 1984.
Photo #2: (Photo with Blanco facing the public) Juan Blanco directing Foco Cultural do Los Hoyos during the performance of Cirkus-Toccata, Santiago de Cuba, 1984. Guillermo Barreto on far right.