“Lamento Criollo,” the first movement of Atiliano Auza León’s six dances for violin and piano, begins with an inward melancholy that quickly swells, pushing, however meekly, to be heard. The violin seems to beg as it rises and falls, repeating the opening motif until it crowds the piano out, crying briefly before settling into gently rolling chords once more. The piece ends with the violin climbing to a soft but high scream that lingers before the piano allows it to fade away.
When I arranged the piece for cello I realized how much the opening dance demands despite its repetitive motion and short length. Launching my arm to play the same melody on another string, touching harmonics with the right wistfulness, breathing with the closing bawl without betraying the tightness in my own chest. Auza León wrote the movement—in his first published composition—upon hearing a chapaco[1] pass by on the street beneath the composer’s window, singing the tune. This happenstance mirrors my own discovery of Auza León, when I’d pulled out a stained, torn copy of the piano score to the six dances from within an aunt’s piano bench, poking around as a teenager eager to practise some first-year exercises despite the out-of-tune keys.
Fifteen years after composing the dances, Auza León published the second edition of his history of Bolivian music, which became the object of my undergraduate dissertation research. The book vacillates between simplicity and romanticism, even as it attempts to be encompassing and definitive. From an opening chapter that addresses some pre-Columbian Indigenous music to a set of short biographies of contemporary composers, Auza León wrote primarily of burgeoning classical music in the country. Fascinated by one of the only books by a Bolivian composer held at a handful of libraries in the United States, I set about analysing the composer’s work, only to realise there was much more than I could access from the northern hemisphere.
After telling my family in Tarija about my woes, another aunt surprised me by finding Auza León and helping me acquire twenty-one scores and books directly from the composer. I spoke to him on a video call during the transaction. Among his supportive comments about taking Bolivian music abroad and light humor about my long hair, he noted important milestones in his work, which helped me put his book of music history into personal context. That text had its basis in Auza León’s first book: a treatise on the so-called dynamics of Bolivian music, where he consciously attempted to break with the established dance-music tradition in the country.
It makes sense that Auza León’s musicological work began immediately after his studies at the prestigious Latin American Center for Advanced Musical Studies (CLAEM) at the Torcuato di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1965. Despite his musical conservatism (he essentially told me Ginastera didn’t know what he was doing when he wrote Bomarzo), he was exposed to a community where Latin Americanist discourses of regional art music would have instilled the importance of articulating national approaches to classical music. Reportedly the first CLAEM fellow to write such a book and share it with those at the institute, Auza León’s books and music derive from his skepticism for modernist composition and intellectual vision of Bolivian music as culturally hybrid.
Though he worked at the national conservatory in La Paz and had lived around Bolivia, Auza León eventually returned to Tarija, where he had taught my own grandmother and great aunt during their childhood. Committed to education, he wrote a book introducing music theory and also composed for children, including choral works for a festival celebration. These texts are special in my collection, not only because I know they are the fruit of a teaching career that included my family members, but because they represent the breadth of a work of a composer truly committed to art music in Bolivia, from historical treatises to music for school kids to the country’s first national opera.
I met Atiliano Auza León for the first time nearly three years after my aunt sent me the majority of the materials that make up my collection. He lives in a humble house just a couple of turns away from my grandmother’s. He was accompanied by his daughter-in-law, though completely lucid at ninety-three years old. Dressed in formal attire fitting for a man of his generation, he was kind and encouraging, reminding me how little Bolivian music is played abroad as he shared his excitement for my work, telling me to press on. Our embrace at the end of the short meeting was moving. Even as I knew I was unlikely to see him again, I felt comfort knowing that every time I’d play through a score or share a lecture on his books, I’d be reminded of this encounter, where my legacy work on twentieth-century Bolivian art music was so significantly abetted.
I am grateful to the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music for the financial support that made my collection possible. My deep thanks to the Bodleian Libraries for their support of my collection work with the Colin Franklin Prize.
Full essay available to download: Chávez Collection Essay for Colin Franklin Prize
Notes:
[1]“Chapaco” is a colloquial term for a person from Tarija, and may be used specifically to refer to a campesino, or farmer. A person from Tarija can also be referred to more generally as “Tarijeño,” or in English, “Tarijan.” Though Auza León and his contemporaries thought of themselves as Bolivian, their cultural and creative ties to their local communities meant that using specific terms was important in their work.
References:
Auza León, Atiliano. 6 Danzas Bolivianas del ciclo “Runas” para violín y piano. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Impresores Ricordi Americana, 1960.
—. Dinámica musical en Bolivia. La Paz, Bolivia: Cooperativa de Artes Gráficas E. Burillo, 1967.
—. Historia de la Música Boliviana, 2nd ed. Cochabamba, Bolivia: Editorial Los Amigos Del Libro, 1985.
—. La Fiesta del Lugar: Concierto Coral de Niños. Tarija, Bolivia: Escuela de Música Mario Estenssoro, 2013.
—. Introducción a la teoría musical. Oruro, Bolivia: Latinas Editores, 2019.
Flores Meruvia, Ernesto. “El joven centenario (III).” La Opinión. 2 July 2023. https://www.opinion.com.bo/articulo/ramona/joven-centenario-iii/20230701202613912444.html
Herrera, Eduardo. Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latin Americanism, and Avant-garde Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.