ZARABANDA VARIATIONS
Zarabanda Variations
Run AMOC* Festival, Lincoln Center Summer for the City
July 2, 2025: 2:00pm and 7:30pm
David Rubenstein Atrium
Note: the 2:00pm performance will be followed by a 20-minute talk back and Q+A with the artists.
Chapter 1: Baroque Concerto
Zarabanda Variations: Program
“Baroque Concerto” (2025) by Keir GoGwilt
Chapter 2: Ortiz the Musician
“Ortiz Sobre la Folia” (2023) by Keir GoGwilt
“La Chacona Huayna” (2023) improvisation by Wilfrido Terrazas
Chapter 3: “to live in collage”
“Wednesday, November 28,” by Edgar Garcia, from Skins of Columbus (2019)
“La Llorona” (2024) by Vicente Atria
Chapter 4: La Petenera
“La Petenera” (2025) by Natalia Arroyo
“Wednesday, October 17,” by Garcia, from Skins of Columbus (2019)
Chapter 5: Humiliation of the Victors
Improvisations by Kyle Motl and Wilfrido Terrazas “Sor Juana Song” (2025) by Keir GoGwilt
Chapter 6: “wet with eyes in the world of dreams”
“Friday, November 23,” by Edgar Garcia, from Skins of Columbus (2019) “Metamatachin” (2024) by Keir GoGwilt
“Friday, January 11,” by Edgar Garcia, from Skins of Columbus (2019)
Chapter 7: Plegaria
“Plegaria” (2025) music and text by Wilfrido Terrazas
Chapter 8: “tolerance and equality in all things”
“Sunday, December 30,” by Edgar Garcia, from Skins of Columbus (2019) “Tonada Americana” (2023) by Vicente Atria
Zarabanda Variations Company, 2025
Natalia Arroyo, composition
Vicente Atria, composition
Jonny Allen*, percussion
Mariana Flores Bucio, voice
Miranda Cuckson*, violin
Carrie Frey, viola
Edgar Garcia, poetry
Christopher Gilmore, lighting design
Keir GoGwilt*, violin and composition
Alec Goldfarb, guitars
Shira Kagan-Shafman, producer
Kyle Motl, contrabass and composition
John Popham, cello
Wilfrido Terrazas, flutes and composition
Program Note
by Keir GoGwilt
“That’s how it happened that in 1539, the year before the word drum made its first appearance in English history, Bantu musical culture appears in the New World, with a mention in Panama of the zarabanda, a high-energy dance with a sung text and refrain. For centuries music historians speculated on the origin of the name zarabanda, proposing all kinds of theories without any concrete evidence, without ever suggesting where the name actually came from: the Congo. Nsala-banda” (Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music).
Nowadays classical music lovers are familiar with the Sarabandes of Baroque composers like Bach, Lully, or Handel. But the zarabanda was a dance with origin stories in pre-Columbian, Arab, and African traditions, which via the Caribbean became wildly popular in the streets of Spain before being assimilated into the European Baroque. The “Baroque” refers to a period of art-making on the heels of the colonization of the Americas and its corresponding knowledge of another humanity. European Baroque music, art, and architecture were often displays of power meant to shock and awe, to build resonant connections between the power of God and the power of the monarchy. Given this, it might seem surprising that Baroque dances – like the sarabanda, the chacona, the matachin, the pasacalle – originated through encounters with African and Indigenous music-making. As Edgar Garcia writes, “the baroque derives its rhythms from such horizons looking back with their own conceptions of split sight, of having two eyes instead of one” (Cantares).
Zarabanda Variations plays on this prehistory of the sarabande/zarabanda. This collection of songs, dances, and poems has been composed in the spirit of collage: layering vestiges of the zarabanda in contemporary folkloric and improvised traditions across Baroque forms and harmonies. The idea here is not simply to recycle elements of Baroque music, but to trace the aftershocks of its power in our present time and place. How do Baroque sensibilities guide the music we hear, our sense of consonance and resolution, or the discipline of our performing bodies? Given that the colonial music archive is dominated by the victors, Zarabanda Variations is an exercise in “split sight”: one eye on the projected unity of the Baroque, and another on the fractured, migratory reality of its past and future.
Zarabanda Variations: Themes & Inspirations
The Zarabanda
“So imagine that Zarabanda, the Congo god of iron—the cutting edge, if you will—traveled on a slave ship with his magic, his mambo, and his machete as soon as the New world was open for business. Then he went back through Havana, across the ocean again, where he got all of Spain dancing, then covertly crept upward through Europe—through the servant’s entrance, of course— and became part of what we now call classical music. In the process, his name was frenchified, he lost his drum and his voice, and his tempo slowed way down. All that remained was the distillation of his dance onto the lute and the guitar, with only the barest trace of the original flavor remaining. Today we call that process going mainstream” (Sublette, Cuba and Its Music).
“During the 17th and 18th centuries many dances of African influence appeared almost simultaneously in different points of the so-called Atlantic triangle, a region that comprised coastal cities of the Congo-Angola, Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. As these contacts took place across the sea, sailors and dockworkers played an important role in this cross-fertilization between the sounds and rhythms of three continents” (Rogério Budasz, “Guitar-players and early African-Iberian music in Portugal and Brazil”).
“The matrix of musical forms with similar rhythmic cells even includes Iberian folk genres such as the Spanish petenera, jota, seguidilla, manchega, aragonesa, and guajira, and Renaissance and early Baroque guitar genres such as zarabanda, chacona, folía, and pasacalle. The genres of the zarabanda matrix, then, comprised a cosmopolitan form of music-making—cosmopolitan not in the specific sense I’ve been discussing it, but in its usual sense of being universal and prestigious” (Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Rites, Rights and Rhythms).
The Baroque
“The baroque […] is a mirroring process between the violence of the world and the art of dancing that it necessitates. When the source of power is no longer palpably singular and unified, the negotiations of power alongside lateral competing sources of its authority serve to summon the baroque” (Garcia, Cantares).
“Counter Reformation begins when those Southern Europeans set foot on the sun-waking coasts of the Western Hemisphere, when they came upon an overfull world truly new and alien to them. If you can see then that the baroque derives its rhythms from such horizons, and that those horizons are not inert but indeed agential and looking back with their own sightlines and conceptions of split sight, of having two eyes instead of one, indeed who gave the new nervous system a sense of its body, you will see why I say that the baroque is indigenous” (Garcia, Cantares)
“So too, Carpentier argues, one can see the Baroque in early texts such as the Popol vuh where the mayan cosmology clearly anticipates the Baroque geometric forms of concentric circles with no center, beginning or end” (Shelly Jarrett Bromberg, “Identity, Culture, and Nature in Alejo Carpentier’s Concierto Barroco”).
Trembling Thinking and Paired Opposites
“For me, that’s what trembling thinking is. An instinct, an intuition of the world that we can’t achieve with imperial thoughts, with thoughts of domination, thoughts of a systematic path toward a truth that we’ve posited in advance” (Édouard Glissant, Archipelago).
“The relation between poetic parallelism and divine speech hinges on a Mesoamerican idea that the cosmos is dialectical, but it is a special kind of dialectic, in that it never resolves into synthesis. In their constant self-differencing, Mesoamerican paired items never settle into a stable identity or essence, but rather remain conditioned and animated by their disidentification in some other thing […] meanings are always changing in the inescapable pull of multiplicity, discontinuity, and misidentification” (Garcia, Emergency).
“I am not the person being got at; rather I am the disembodied face-presence calmly peering in and watching this other and unimportant me. I watch my other self, safely now. But then this second me, this objective and detached observer, succumbs too, and I have to dissociate into a third and then a fourth as the relation between my-selves breaks, creating an almost infinite series of fluttering mirrors of watching selves and feeling others” (Taussig, Shamanism).
Beating / Oscillation / Microtonality
“Marimba-makers consistently tune octaves flat by about 70 cents. These “vibrato octaves” or “friction octaves” vibrate at an almost, but not quite, complementary rate, producing the acoustic phenomenon of beats, a rapid, shimmering oscillation in volume. The overtones produced by the marimba and the other instruments enhance, feedback, and cancel one another out as they radiate out-ward and resonate off the surrounding surfaces, creating a timbral environment of density and plenitude” (Quintero, Rites, Rights and Rhythms).
“When a slight difference in pitch has been thus produced, the beats are heard at first as long drawn out fluctuations alternately swelling and vanishing. In executing music containing long sustained chords, they may even produce a solemn effect, or else give a more lively, tremulous or agitating expression. Hence we find in modern organs and harmoniums, a stop with two pipes or tongues, adjusted to beat. This imitates the trembling of the human voice and of violins” (Hermann von Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone).
The Immanence of Past and Present
“I think that the poet of the Americas must have similar considerations. Such a poet must ingest the poison of colonial historicity and, compositionally blurring the distinction between historical worlds and physiological
worlds, transform that poison into a kind of self-possession that is historical redemption. They must eat lead and sweat orichalcum; they must breathe pollution and speak poetry. They must reckon with these hard histories and make of such crisis efforts of creativity and world creation. There is simply no other way, because, if there is an attempt to get around it, the artist fails to be grounded in
the lands in which they make their art, and the art is subsequently groundless, watery, or even airy in its formation. Either it is underworlds all the way through or it is without its world thoroughly. Our poetic allotment is inescapably thick with aesthetic poison.” (Garcia, Cantares).
“The past is never behind you or buried beneath you; rather, it is in front of you and around you, even now, crowding the space with its needs, desires, motivations, influences, horizons, alignments, and orientations” (Garcia, Cantares).
“For the old-time people, time was round–like a tortilla; time had specific moments and specific locations, so that the beloved ancestors who had passed on were not annihilated by death, but only relocated to the place called Cliff House. At Cliff House, people continued as they had always been, although only spirits and not living humans can travel freely over this tortilla of time. All times go on existing side by side for all eternity. No moment is lost or destroyed. There are no future times or past times; there are always all the times, which differ slightly as the locations on the tortilla differ slightly” (Leslie Marmon Silko, “Notes on Almanac of the Dead”).
Translations
Translations by JULIA BULLOCK and MYRNA DIAZ.
With Spanish Language Biblical text from the Reina-Valera Bible. Special thanks to ELENA PULGAR LONZACO and JOSE MANUEL CRUZ VELAZQUEZ.
The libretto you hear presented on the stage is in bold, with its translation to the right (or below on mobile). Or read a PDF version here.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank several people whose early input on the project guided and encouraged me in invaluable ways: Amy Cimini, Juan David Rubio Restrepo, M Leslie Santana and Ileana Perez Velazquez.
Edgar Garcia’s writing has been an inspiring model for hybrid scholarship and creative work. His accounts of the Baroque, the dream world, the unconscious channeling of historical consciousness, and his translations and explanations of various pre-Columbian texts and concepts, have challenged and remade my understanding of musical identities I thought I was familiar with.
I undertook the earliest workshops of this material with my long-time collaborator Kyle Motl. Wilfrido Terrazas has also generously shared his deep understanding of Mexican folk & contemporary music and singular approach to flute-playing and improvisation in Zarabanda Variations. Together with Alec Goldfarb, the Zarabanda Quartet has played early iterations of the music for the project. Thanks to the many artists who have likewise added their expertise, including those who performed in previous iterations: KASA quartet, Conrad Harris, Coleman Itzkoff, Iva Casian-Lakos, and Christopher Otto.
Zarabanda Variations has been produced and supported by The American Modern Opera Company. Further support has come from YellowBarn, Carnegie Hill Concert Series, YoungArts, the Frequency Festival, the Clark Art Museum, and the Peabody Essex Museum.
I collaged together the supertitle projections for this performance. The images and documents appearing in these projections come from a variety of sources: personal manuscripts, public domain editions of old scores, and images printed in the quoted texts: Edgar Garcia’s Skins of Columbus and Signs of the Americas, A Sor Juana Anthology translated by Alan S. Trueblood, and Alejo Carpentier’s Music in Cuba and Baroque Concerto (translated by Alan West-Durán and Asa Zatz).
-Keir GoGwilt
A collection of Rosario Castellanos poems, El rescate del mundo (The Ransom of the World), was published in 1952; these are short, spare poems that provide rare descriptive tributes to indigenous women and their work. Learn More.
“…elevated an already-revisionist work into something much more powerful”
Upcoming tour performances:
December 21, 2023 at Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY. Learn More