On October 17 (2023), I will have the pleasure of conducting the work Páramo, by Mexican-American composer Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon with the Slee Sinfonietta in Buffalo, New York. Below is a short interview with Ricardo about his music.
Christian Baldini: Ricardo, welcome, I am very happy to be performing your piece “Páramo”. Your music has long been inspired by literature, and in this case, by the great Mexican writer Juan Rulfo. Can you tell us a little bit about how the music intersects with the text here, particularly in a work with no text?
Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon: Páramo is a scene from an evening-long scenic cantata titled Comala, a musicalization of fragments selected from Juan Rulfo’s wonderful novel Pedro Páramo. In the novel, the borders between past, present, life, and afterlife are dissolved. This is reflected in the fractured narrative technique, which unfolds in a village where the spirits, voices, and memories of the dead interact with the living in multi-layered narrative planes. My work Páramo aims to evoke this derailment of temporal planes by recasting a recurring set of harmonic and melodic archetypes in different contrapuntal “gear boxes”. The timbral design of the work was probably suggested by the text too, since it seems to tick, toll, and even cuckoo with the urgency of a deranged musical clock.
CB: How would you describe your music to someone who is not familiar with it?
RZM: I would say that my music is woven from precisely sculpted motives, purposeful lines, crystallized sonorities, and similar types of clearly defined structures that, to my mind, invite “dialogue” rather than “manipulation”. That my compositions come into being as I follow and develop the implications of such ideas. This will explain why “musical architecture” in my compositions has more in common with the harmonious array of structures of a village, which grows into organic form as the needs, aspirations, and sensibilities of its inhabitants are expressed into architectonic space, than with the blueprint of a singular edifice, that springs from the drafting table of an architect. It is also for this reason that many of my works continue to evolve and grow through the years, or interconnect with succeeding works as part of larger cycles.
CB: Which composer(s) -alive or dead- have inspired you, and why?
RZM: Well, I am most inspired by music that touches me, so if I think of dead composers, I could mention Beethoven, Brahms, Bartók , Crumb, Stravinsky, Revueltas, among many others. I love the expressive clarity and astounding imagination of their music. I also admire the detailed sculpting, the boldness, the contrapuntal potency, the rhetorical drama, and so on. But I feel that I learn from music in so many different ways. Often I have learned very important insights from music by composers whose music may not touch me in the same way, but is still important to me, such as Webern, Davidovsky, Berio, Boulez, Donatoni, Takemitsu.
CB: Your cantata “Comala”, also based on Juan Rulfo’s literature, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2011. The Pulitzer Committee, in their announcement praised your work as “an ambitious cantata that translates into music an influential work of Latin American literature, giving voice to two cultures that intersect within the term “America.” – can you tell us what it means to you to be a Mexican-American composer? Does that come across in your music? What does it mean, or how does it translate musically to be American, and Latin-American?
RZM: I don’t concern myself very much with expressing an “indentity”. Composition is for me a way of being that allows me to discover meaningful threads within the irreducible constellation of my ideas, feelings, questions, and the art, literature, and music I love. So, from my point of view, composition is a completely individual quest. How others might perceive my music, in relation to my origin, or whatever group they think I am part of, is their own construct.
CB: What is your advice for young composers?
RZM: Be grateful that you feel this joy in composing. Life is much better when you have a sense of purpose. Understand that you deceive yourself at your own peril: write music that really matters to you. The opinion of others is just that, their opinion. Understand also that you cannot please everybody. Find people that you want to make a life in music with, people that care for you and your music in the same way that you care for them. Write for and with them. Everything else will fall into place.
BIOGRAPHY
Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon was born in Guadalajara, México, in 1962. Literature inspires many of his compositions, such as the extended song cycle Songtree, on poetry by Raúl Aceves and William Shakespeare, the miniature opera NiñoPolilla, on a libretto by Juan Trigos senior, and the scenic cantata Comala, based on the novel Pedro Páramo, by the great Mexican author Juan Rulfo. Comala was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011.
Ricardo’s compositional voice is also shaped by a steady collaboration with the particular group of musicians for whom he writes, including Tony Arnold, Molly Barth, Stuart Gerber, Dieter Hennings, Hanna Hurwitz, Daniel Pesca, Paul Vaillancourt, Colin Stokes, and Tim Weiss, among others. This artistic affinity brought many of these musicians together to co-found with Ricardo the ensemble Zohn Collective in 2017. Ricardo has also collaborated across artistic disciplines, with cartoonist José Ignacio Solórzano (Jis), writer / performer Deidre Huckabay. songwriter Alfredo Sánchez, PUSH Physical Theater, Garth Fagan Dance, and puppet company La Coperacha.
His works have been performed internationally, and supported by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Koussevitzky Foundation, Fromm Foundation, Barlow Endowment, Guggenheim Foundation, and México’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, among other institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Recordings of his music have been released on the Bridge, Oberlin Music, Verso, CRI, Quindecim, Innova, Ravello, New Focus, and Tempus labels. He studied at the University of California, San Diego (BA, 1986), and at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 1993), where his principal teacher was George Crumb. He is currently Professor of Composition at the Eastman School of Music, having previously taught at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati, and the Escuela de Música, Universidad de Guanajuato.
Christian Baldini's Interviews 