Premiere of Loja Symphonic Variations, by José Loyola

July 10, 2023

Next Sunday, July 16, at 11:00 am in the Covarrubias Hall of the National Theater, a concert will take place where works by important Cuban composers Roberto Valera, José Loyola and Alejandro Falcón will premiere, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra with Maestro Roberto Valera, National Music Prize winner, as guest conductor.

I had the opportunity to speak with Maestro José Loyola about this. There are several aspects of his creative work, so I propose to take a tour through the symphonic work of the Doctor in Music Theory, composer, flutist, pedagogue and researcher, and in this way get closer to the inner workings of the creative process of the piece that will be presented on stage, as a premiere.

José Loyola: "I really had a very intense period of composition when I returned, after graduating in Poland, and I integrated myself into sociocultural practice. The first thing I did was in Cienfuegos and that is little known. In 1973, when Cienfuegos was not yet an independent province, the Hungarian director Lazlo Barbaczy came to the Drama Center of Las Villas to teach theater workshops. Someone told this man about me, as a composer who had graduated from Poland. He asked to see me and told me that the workshop would end with the presentation of a didactic work by German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, called The Exception and the Rule, in which the actors also sang and danced. He asked me to compose the music and gave me the opportunity to have that experience, having just come out of the academy.

"I had to compose according to the version he had made, create some songs according to the script and teach them to the actors so they would sing. The work was performed by Virgilio Reguera, Carlos de la Paz, Alberto Durán, Aida Conde and Gabriel López. I put together a kind of small chamber orchestra with popular musicians from Cienfuegos, for which I called upon Ernesto Alzuri, Juan Albelo and other very good musicians from that time. With them I created the live accompaniment. The orchestra was there, while the actors performed on stage and sang in the work. That was recorded at the Tomás Terry Theater, where the presentation took place. I was never able to recover the recording. It was my first experience working with concert music and theater.

"Then I came to Havana and here Manuel Duchesne Cuzán called me because he was interested in my symphonic works, he premiered all the ones I made during that period. I have a series called Música viva, for which I wrote one for percussion ensemble, one for symphony orchestra, another for flute and percussion, and another was a commission that Duchesne made for me for the Conjunto Nuestro Tiempo, created by him with musicians from the symphony, a somewhat smaller format. It was then that I made Música viva Number 4. Leo Brouwer, Roberto Valera and Jorge López Marín also collaborated for Nuestro Tiempo.

"From the series called Tropicalia, there is Tropicalia 1 for symphony orchestra and Tropicalia 2 for piano and orchestra, which Duchesne premiered, with Jorge Gómez Labraña at the piano, in the Covarrubias Hall of the National Theater. Later, that same work was performed by Huberal Herrera, under the direction of Eduardo Ramos Saavedra in Santa Clara and Camagüey, with the orchestras of the respective provinces. Years later it was performed by pianist Rebeca Lluveras, under the direction of Enrique Pérez Mesa, at the Amadeo Roldán Theater. It was a very intense period. It was also presented in Cienfuegos with the Symphony Orchestra of Villa Clara and in Santiago de Cuba, with the Symphony of Oriente.

"At this moment, without abandoning what I do with my orchestra Charanga de Oro and my books, I have resumed symphonic composition. This work that will premiere now, Loja Symphonic Variations, arose by chance and is my tribute as a composer to that city in Ecuador where I taught doctoral workshops with Dr. Roberto Hernández Bioska. We went to the city of Loja because there are 6 musicians who are members of the Philharmonic Orchestra, who are doing their doctorate here. I am the tutor of two of them (flutists) and there are four others (French horn player, oboist, bass player and viola player from the Philharmonic of Loja). Rafael Guzmán, who graduated from us in composition, was there, and Bioska, who handled all the methodological part.

"While in Loja preparing a workshop, I heard a musician playing a melody with a trumpet. The first time I didn't pay much attention to it, but the next day the musician came back with the same melody over and over again and I asked Bioska why that musician would play the same melody so repetitively every day. He answered me that it was the sound that characterized the garbage trucks in that place. Loja is among those considered by UNESCO as Musical Cities of the World and the identification of the garbage trucks is with that melody. Since it was the first time I had been in Loja, I was surprised, as he had been there before. I came back to Cuba and shortly after I started composing some symphonic variations based on that melody. At first I thought of it for the six musicians from Loja, but later I decided to make it for orchestra.

"The concert on July 16 includes in its program 3 world premieres: La vida diaria (Habanera fantasiosa), by Roberto Valera; Loja Symphonic Variations, by my authorship and Rapsodia afrocubana, by Alejandro Falcón. Previously we had held a concert at the Amadeo Roldán, where we premiered a piano work by Valera, one by Falcón and one by me. It has been very difficult work to organize the concert, we have been planning it for approximately a year and a half.

"Based on Loja Symphonic Variations I began to think about various musical cities. Since I had already made the Música viva series, which consists of four works, and Tropicalia, which are 2, I decided to make a series called Musical Cities of the World. After Loja Symphonic Variations, the second work emerged, which will premiere at another time and is called Cracovia Transformatic Variations. Paying off a debt of mine to Poland, I dedicate it to the city of Cracovia. There exists a legend there that is about 700 years old and is related to a trumpeter who played a fanfare. Currently, every day that fanfare is heard from the Cathedral Church of Cracovia, every hour a trumpeter goes up and plays it through the four windows of the tower.

"The fanfare emerged seven centuries ago and was the warning they made to alert about invasions. That trumpeter, keeping watch up there, would play the fanfare and they would close the city's gates. On one occasion when he was playing, a Tartar archer aimed upward and shot an arrow into his neck, at that moment the performance was interrupted by the arrow. From then on, when the fanfare is played, it is interrupted at the same moment when that trumpeter's interpretation was cut off. Following the legend, it occurred to me to create a work based on it. I had already written Loja Symphonic Variations and Cracovia Transformatic Variations emerged, I knew the city and the legend well because I lived there for 10 years. It is finished and awaiting premiere. These are the last works I have composed for the symphonic world".

I thank Maestro José Eulalio Loyola Fernández, for sharing with me about his creative process within the symphonic musical world. There are many anecdotes behind musical works. It will always be a privilege to be able to speak with their creators about how they were inspired and what the stories are from which these pieces that today enrich our culture are born. We long for this type of concert to be recorded by national television and reach all places on the island. Cienfuegos, the birthplace of José Loyola, has an immense debt to the symphonic work of this important southern composer, Cuban and also universal.