ANTILLEAN’S INTELLECT
PGE with trumpeter Jon Britt after the premiere of Antillean’s Intellect.
Antillean’s Intellect is a work for trumpet in C and chamber ensemble (flute, bass clarinet, piano, three percussionists, and string quintet). The title makes reference to a quote from Dominican Studies scholar, Silvio Torres-Saillant from “An Intellectual History of the Caribbean” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006):
"The Caribbean experience does not lend itself to treatment as a linear narrative. It would seem better advised to approach this subject by focusing on the survival and resilience of the Antillean person, the way she emerged from a checkered history of glory, disappointment, aggression, hope, betrayal, and joy since 1492..."
This piece is an abstract approach to tracing the path of an idea coming from this Antillean person. It aims to portray the inception of an intellectual seed: to build great dreams and to choose joy in the face of unfortunate challenges. In formal terms, the macrostructure comes conceptually from Federico Fellini’s La Città delle Donne (1980) where Snaporaz goes on a dream-like journey walking through a long sequence of rooms and spaces, drastically changing emotional tones and dramatic situations.
The work consists of five sections which seamlessly transition from one to another. The first movement is written in a ternary form, and it presents tumbao patterns from salsa and chachachá in a deconstructed manner. The harmonies are palindromic and they tend to move in intervals of major thirds. Every time the thematic material appears, it is presented with reharmonizations. The middle section is very nostalgic and flexible, also with palindromic harmonies, which at times may evoke (unintentionally) John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.
The second movement is written in binary form. The harmony combines Bergian melodic and harmonic contours with jazz-infused harmonies. The third movement takes the rhythm of chachachá tumbaos and presents it in a compound melody in the bass and piano. It employs the same theme from the second movement with variations and in a new tempo accompanied by chachachá textures. The ostinato goes through rhythmic and tempo modulations, and a tumbao in the piano is introduced towards the end. When the ensemble arrives and holds the last note of this movement, this tumbao becomes slower and it is the basis for the fourth movement.
The fourth movement continues to be a deconstruction of chachachá, taking the theme from the middle section of the first movement, but now combined with the chachachá. This movement carries the dance qualities of the genre. After a mambo section, it drastically changes to a slower, dream-like section, (again from the concept of Fellini’s film), and then returns to the mambo section with a trumpet solo. This solo develops into a new tempo, and we hear a “false pulse” – the background layer makes an emphasis on the upbeats which may give the impression of downbeats. In this ambiguous texture, the trumpet brings back the theme from the first movement, reharmonized once again. The quick tempo gives the impression that the dream sequence is about to end, and the necessity of the theme to be presented once more for this intellectual seed to “stick.” The piece ends in a similar fashion as its opening, making one last reference to the film.