When composer Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez was growing up in Mexico, he started a rock band. He wrote the music and told his band members to go home and practice so they could show up prepared for rehearsals. “I ran my band like one would run a chamber ensemble,” he says. “I didn’t know that at the time, but that’s what I was intuitively doing.”
It was just the beginning of a career writing music for Sanchez-Gutierrez, who first came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Peabody Conservatory, “not even knowing where Baltimore was on the map,” he says, and who retires at the end of the academic year after 20 years teaching at the Eastman School of Music.
Sanchez-Gutierrez is one of the two composition faculty members retiring at the end of the academic year. His music will be featured on a joint Faculty Artists Series concert with Robert Morris, who is also retiring, on Thursday, March 28 at 7:30 p.m. in Hatch Recital Hall. To read more about Morris, visit this link.
Sanchez-Gutierrez doesn’t write music with stereotypical Mexican tropes, but his upbringing there inspired not only his music but his teaching.
“I have this background where I did all kinds of things—such as popular music—and come from a culture very much in tune with the visual arts,” he says.” I grew up among artists and hung out with artists. My sister ran an art gallery. … Mexico is also a very literary country, so I have that in my personal DNA.”
When he was hired at Eastman to teach composition in 2003, he and others wondered if he would fit into a straight-ahead American conservatory culture.
“I hope precisely what made me different is what constituted my greatest contribution to the culture of the school,” he says.
Sanchez-Gutierrez was invited to run the Warren Benson Forum on Creativity, which was established in 2008 to encourage cross-pollination between artistic disciplines. Through that program, he brought artists of several disciplines both in and outside of music to Eastman to interact with the composers. More than just working with and talking to the artists, composers would write music inspired by the art of the visiting artist.
“I tried to bring that kind of aspect of my own upbringing into the experience that my students would have at Eastman: being in contact with artists, poets, dramaturges, and doing it in a creative forum, not just learning about them, but actually interacting with living artists who really think very differently, and actually in most cases don’t know much about this thing we’d call contemporary music.”
Similarly to literature, his music is about narrative and gesture, even within the abstract ways he works with sound. “I always think of some kind of drama that unfolds the way that speech unfolds or the way a story unfolds. It’s not like film music at all—it has its own internal life, it’s not responding directly to the images, but it is reflecting on it through music. My music is a paraphrase, I take what I see in the world, and I turn it into something that can only be expressed in musical sound.”
The big gestures he attributes to progressive rock bands like Genesis, as well as the music of Bartok and Stravinsky. And whenever he touches a piano, all he can do is channel Chick Corea. “I don’t know any other kind of attack, just Chick Corea’s sharp Yamaha overtones on the piano.” But art and literature are always behind his works; he even revisits artist Paul Klee’s notebooks regularly for inspiration.
His music has been featured at Eastman in several ways, but one of the most memorable is through the Eastman Broadband ensemble, an ensemble he and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, another Eastman composition faculty member, created as a laboratory for their own compositions. The ensemble functioned as a bridge for students to experience the professional world through touring. They performed in Mexico, Italy, and Spain.
Once Broadband ended, Sanchez-Gutierrez created another ensemble out of already-professional graduates from Eastman called Alla Balena, which has also toured the United States and Mexico. The name means “Into the Whale,” as a nod to the second life of whales. After whales die, their bodies provide nourishment and shelter for other marine life. “The whale is like classical music,” he says, “for many a dead tradition, but the carcass of that large whale is still there nourishing us.”
Alla Balena members—all alumni—will return to Eastman to play three works by Sanchez-Gutierrez Winik/Te’ is for solo marimba, which is so virtuosic that the first marimba player to try it asked if it was actually written for two marimbas. Quintet Variations is inspired by a Paul Klee painting called “Twittering Machine” that features a little bird sitting on a contraction with a crank and “we don’t know what the crank will do … all this suspended action built into this very simple painting.” They’ll end with Luciérnagas, a highly gestural piece originally written for the contemporary music sextet Eighth Blackbird.
His works will be a contrast to Robert Morris’ music. As Morris puts it: “Carlos has an orientation that is much more political and reflective of society. My solution to things might be peaceful, and his solutions might be to examine them clearly and get rid of what’s not necessary.”
It’s also a concert that comes full circle for Sanchez-Gutierrez: his very first student will perform in it, Eastman’s newest professor of composition, Daniel Pesca ’05E, ’16E (DMA). “He was this 17-year-old kid with incredible chops who read Rilke and Goethe and was writing this phenomenal music and playing it on my beat-up little studio piano very well. That stayed with me.”
But, Sanchez-Gutierrez says, his career at Eastman has always been about his students. “Having been in contact with so many ways of approaching music, they’ve surprised me about how music can exist in ways I could never imagine.”
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Faculty Artist Series: Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez & Robert Morris, composition
Thursday, March 28 at 7:30 p.m. | Kilbourn Hall