Juan Pedro Blanco Rodríguez

===BODY===
Composer. One of the pioneers of electroacoustic music in Cuba.

He was born in El Mariel, Pinar del Río. He studied music at the Peyrellade Conservatory and the Municipal Music Conservatory of La Habana, with José Ardévol and Harold Gramatges.

It was Alejo Carpentier who put him in contact, in 1959, in París, with the musical tendencies of the European avant-garde, in the works of Pierre Boulez, Pierre Schaeffer, Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen, at a time when these composers had set out to create a new sound world. Carpentier incited, through his reports, the imagination of the artist, who was already seeking, by his own means, changes in his musical language.

The compositions of Juan Blanco –and also those of Leo Brouwer and Carlos Fariñas- were the first to express the desire for renewal of the musical avant-garde. This is shown in about a hundred instrumental works, for choirs and soloists; in pure electroacoustic music and mixed electroacoustic, which includes pieces for symphonic orchestra and magnetic tape, symphonic orchestra with actors and several magnetic tape tracks; in cycles of works or stimuli to sound in which he uses film materials, geometric figures, dramatic situations, and other resources; in his music for theater, film, television, dance and gymnastics parades, and in music designed to enhance exhibitions, monuments, hospitals, urban and rural areas and multimedia shows, where he articulated diverse expressive and technological forms. Music for Dance (1961), a ballet in three movements for magnetic tape, constituted his first electronic creation, which he created with a radio oscillator; this, and Study I and Study II (1961-1962) were the works premiered at the first public audition of concrete and electronic music held in Cuba, on February 5, 1964. In Textures (1964), he incorporated for the first time into symphonic music aleatory and serial procedures and sonorities in the magnetic tape. Octogonales (1971) began the composition of a series called by Juan Blanco Stimuli to Sound, which constituted a new way of working, as in it he worked not only with the score, but with plastic elements and stimuli that provided another alternative for music.

The work of Juan Blanco can be divided into several stages. In the first, from 1944 to 1948 –which he considered non-professional– he developed a spontaneous expression, although his songs had the form of a lied and the works for piano were treated like those of Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms and Federico Chopin. From that stage are his preludes for piano, the Hymn to the Virgin (for voice and piano), choral pieces, songs with love texts, the street vendor's cry Vendo frutas de mi tierra, whose melodic line he would take up again in a work of his second stage, and some very simple sones, although these were not part of his aesthetic aspirations, as his main aspiration was to make concert music.

The instrument that served as a guide to Blanco in that stage was the piano, as he did not yet have sufficient knowledge of instrumentation and orchestration. In that formative period he was nourished by elements of popular music, which provided him with the necessary auditory experience and allowed him to move, between 1948 and 1959, toward his second stage, called nationalist.

National language appeared in the fifteen works of this stage, which include choral music, music for instrumental groups, for voice and piano, and for solo piano. Blanco also created incidental music during the period for puppet theater and children's theater, for symphonic orchestra and string orchestra, all with relevant Cuban character.

Thus, he stripped solemnity –not in the expression, but in the handling of the means– from the Quintet no. 1 (for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and cello), by introducing in the theme of its second movement a street vendor's cry that he had worked on in his first stage, and by bringing to the foreground, in the third movement, the timbre of the Aragón orchestra, using the cello in a function different from what it usually performs, which highlighted the rhythmic role above the melodic one.

Likewise, he conceived The Elegy, for symphonic orchestra, based on a microstructure of the Cuban cinquillo, despite being an eminently dramatic work. Choral Triptych, Cantata of Peace, Son for Tourists and Divertimento, were other compositions in which he found a new way of expressing himself.

The music that Juan Blanco created during that second period was only meant to be performed in concert halls. It presented a diversity of forms, while in them one could perceive the need to structure them freely, rather than cling to preestablished structures or academic norms.

The composer appeared committed, on the one hand, to the principles of a certain school of composition and, on the other, to extramusicala elements. This constituted the typical way of working in his third creative stage, from 1959 to 1989, in which his aesthetic concerns reached their maximum expression. After beginnings of slow exploration and maturation of the new sound universe, his mastery of new technical resources emerged, which allowed him to innovate ad infinitum.

Juan Blanco ventured with equal interest, in this last stage, both in instrumental and in electroacoustic music, employing multiple techniques and sound media, to adopt in each work those he believed necessary for his purposes: aleatoric, in Spatial Counterpoints and the series of Stimuli to Sound; the mixture of aleatory elements with serial, in Textures. Programmatic, minimalist or very free serialist works of the stage are Erotic Suite, She and Music for a Young Martyr.

As in the previous period, and from the formal point of view, Blanco was interested in the constant search for the structuring of the work; always ready to find new ways of organizing the sound discourse. That is why there is no dominant form in him, as what he sought from very early on was to maintain balance and unity, although not fulfilling a preconceived form, as he was not fond of architectural structures.

On the other hand, features appeared in his compositions that differentiated them from the previous period in the harmonic work, as when using the serial technique he had to maintain strict control of all parameters and be careful not to repeat the sounds that made up the series.

This orientation was not maintained when he subsequently employed other composition techniques, among which a very free serialism stood out, where he did not take into account whether the series was being fulfilled or not.

Before each work, Juan Blanco adopted an attitude that made him seem like a different composer, although he remained the same, as every creation represented for him a new universe to discover, penetrate and master, as much as possible, without constraints from previous criteria.

He obtained, for Computer Music, the Cubadisco Prize 2002 in the category of Electroacoustic Music; and with Edesio Alejandro, for Technotronic, the Cubadisco Prize 2003, in the same category.

Main Works

Ballet

Liberation

Dance Music, ballet in three movements, magnetic tape

Magnetic tape

She

Ensemble V

Episodes, tribute to the Second Declaration of La Habana

Spaces

Stimuli to Sound

Study I and II

Filmphony

Hydrophone

Magnetic tape and orchestra

Music for a Young Martyr, tribute to Conrado Benítez

Octagonal

January First

Pyrophone

Spatial Poem The Hills

Son for Tourists (text by Nicolás Guillén)

Sonophony

Erotic Suite

Texture

-Mixed Choir-

Song of Peace, for soloist, mixed choir and orchestra (with text by Nicolás Guillén)

Tridimensional

Choral Triptych, for mixed choir, soloists, trumpet, two double basses and percussion (with text by Nicolás Guillén)

Instrumental Group

Spatial Counterpoint I

Spatial Counterpoint V, for three instrumental groups, nine actors, six actresses and two children

Incidental Music

El Mégano, incidental music for the film of the same name

Impression of the Crime of Son My

The Goring, incidental music for theater

The Twelve Chairs, incidental music for the film of the same name

String Orchestra

Che Says to His Children and All the Children of the World Respond

Chile Will Prevail

From His Beloved Voice, tribute to Lenin

Divertimento

Symphonic Orchestra

Electrophone

Elegy

Quintet

Quintet no. 1

Quintet, for woodwinds and cello

Quintet, for winds, timpani and percussion

Voice and piano

Hymn to the Virgin

He dies on November 5, 2008 from respiratory failure, while hospitalized treating kidney problems and high blood pressure.