The BBC Music Magazine Interview
Odaline de la Martinez
Conductor Odaline de la Martinez with James Naughtie
The Cuban conductor and composer is on a mission to bring neglected modern American music to new audiences. BBC Radio 4’s James Naughtie meets her.
I’ve been in some odd situations while writing for this magazine, but getting involved in a Cuban salsa at Smithfield Market early on a winter’s morning is a first for me. I’m here to meet Odaline de la Martinez, known to everyone as Chachi, and of course she dances. She always does.
We meet in a Cuban restaurant right by the market – surrounded by colour and bustle, Chachi seems utterly at home. She’s irrepressible, funny and warm and has an energy that easily lets you forget she’ll be turning 70 this year. Her emotions are always near the surface – a couple of times during our conversation, tears come to her eyes. They often do, usually prompted by a happy memory.
Chachi, a conductor and composer, has been settled here for many years, famously becoming, in 1984, the first woman to conduct a BBC Prom. her pulse, however, still beats to the rhythm of her Cuban home. We talk about her youth in the
1950s before the Castro revolution – in those days, the music that would shape her own artistic endeavours was part of a sub-culture, almost hidden away. ‘You got the drummers playing in the night,’ she says. ‘I could hear them. I remember going to sleep with the drums going on through the night, and waking up when they stopped. That’s because they can be very hypnotic. Like nothing.’ It was that sound that has become, so many years later, the soundtrack to Imoinda.
Imoinda is Chachi’s opera that is being staged in February at the seventh biennial London Festival of American Music, an event she founded in 2006 as a showcase for unknown and more established contemporary composers. It’s a tale of slavery and the roots of African-caribbean culture in the 16th century and will feature Chachi’s own nine-piece ensemble, Lontano, which she established in 1976.
‘The use of Cuban drumming goes right through the trilogy. Some people
would call it fusion. I call it my Afrocuban music, because that’s what it is. And it’s very complicated. You talk about counterpoint being complex in JS Bach – well this is sometimes even more complicated than that. In places, I’ve created six contrapuntal lines, including a layer of choir. I have them talking to one another, many lines moving very slowly. When they come together it’s really amazing.’
In the Castro years there was plenty of political repression (woe betide anyone who thought of putting together an opposition movement), but musically it was a liberation. The night-time drummers were out in the open, and the sound was everywhere. ‘When I was growing up I had it all around me. It was part of my memory. My life. But I almost lost it when I went to the States.’ When she was in her early teens, her parents sent her across the water in 1961 (after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when an anti-castro revolution flopped) and she took her first degree in New Orleans. Curiously, it was when she came to Britain first in the 1970s that she felt closer to the culture of home.
‘In a way, I’m blessed to be here and not in the States. As children, we were sent there but the idea in America is that you don’t have your own culture. You should be immersed in Americanism. When I studied here I tried to fit, but I was able to say I’m Cuban. That’s who I am. And now I can do my own thing. Sometimes I’ve felt like an outsider; sometimes felt part of it. But I’ve found myself’. At this point there’s a tearful moment.
Part of Imoinda’s theme is the birth of the Cuban culture that she has come to embrace. Two slaves fall in love. They’re separated on the ship that brings them to Cuba, but find each other again on the plantation. The woman becomes pregnant to her slave master, and her fellow-slave is gripped by anger and jealousy. He rebels and is brutally punished. The girl doesn’t want to accept the baby at first – because of who the father is – but eventually the child is taken by the whole community, and passed around.
The refrain at the end is ‘the girl in red will not forget/the girl in red will not forget’, and she is, Chachi says, the very beginning of Afro-cuban culture. She’s the child who looks ahead. She’ll bring this culture to the world.
An important part in the opera is played by the Santera, the priestess in the Santería religion (the word means ‘worships of saints’) brought to the Caribbean by West African slaves. These slaves had a culture distinct from those from Central Africa who made up the bulk of the slaves who were later taken straight to America. The Santera, who appears in Part 1 of Imoinda and reappears in Part 3 to summon up the gods at the birth of the child, is half black, half white – a figure who epitomises the strange mix of the rigid Catholicism brought to the Caribbean by the Spanish and the panoply of pagan gods imported by West African slaves.
It’s the very essence of the culture from which Chachi draws her inspiration. ‘I came to Europe because I was looking for the avant-garde. Anything avant-garde. And eventually it occurred to me that I had nothing to do with it, even if I love it and play it, which I do. So I stopped writing in that way. Then after ten years of not writing I at last discovered my own voice. In this trilogy my voice is there. It’s the voice of home. I’m sorry, I’m going to cry again.’
So a conductor and composer who was inspired by radical contemporary styles found that where she was most content as a creative artist was in the sound-world that she had first absorbed as a child, listening to those drums in the night.
‘Cuban music will become classical music – it’s just a matter of time’
And Afro-cuban culture is bound to become better known, because the island is opening up. As a result of the deals struck under Barack Obama there are now many more people coming and going between Havana and Miami. No one can be certain how that process will prosper through the Donald Trump era, but a process has begun which most people believe is irreversible.
‘I know a lot of composers who fly back and forth. When it’s going to get wider, who knows? But Cuban composers are allowed to come out, and outsiders are getting in. They called it folk music in the old days, but Cuban music will become classical music. It’s just a matter of time.’
This commitment to broadening public awareness of neglected music has always been the inspiration of Chachi’s festival. ‘The original idea was to bring music here by American composers who nobody knew. And by the third festival
– in 2012 – I started deliberately adding more women. Now I want to make it
50-50, because there are so many women composers who’ve been neglected over the years. Some of them are beginning to be much better known.’ Names like Ruth Crawford Seeger and Florence Price (who both feature in this year’s festival) are increasingly becoming part of the mix.
One of the examples Chachi points to is Dame Ethel Smyth, the suffragette and composer who was very well known in the early years of the 20th century – her operas The Wreckers (1906) and
The Boatswain’s Mate (1916) were highly popular, and then slipped from view.
But now, more than 70 years after her death, there is a recovery of interest in this remarkable woman. For Chachi, it’s an example of how the balance of interest in women composers and musicians is being redressed at long last.
‘I remember a certain European orchestra where a cellist refused to play because he was being conducted by a woman. Can you imagine? But it happened. And of course the other thing is that our classical music has become so stylised – Mozart and Brahms all the time. And when you talk about contemporary composers, there are so many obstacles. For example, in parts of Europe they just won’t play any contemporary music if it’s tonal. That’s just ridiculous. Fortunately, in this country we’ve got away from that.’
She’s convinced that much of the music recorded by Lontano in the last few years is going to find an enthusiastic audience. And her own music is very much part of that story. ‘I’ve discovered myself and that’s what matters to me. I’ve found my voice and I’m sticking with it.’
And how would she describe that voice? ‘It’s tonal. A lot of rhythm, a lot of life.
And just like me it has a lot of extremes – very loud and very quiet. And there’s a lot of crying!’
The London Festival of American Music runs 24 Feb – 2 March at The Warehouse, London