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ARTURO MÁRQUEZ: When I compose, I have to have something that pushes me into finding the music that I want to say. I just have to, to have some meaning. So the theme of this symphony is very important for me. I wanted to do something very special with the concert band. I thought about it for some months, I would say, and I came out with this idea of doing a work about migration. I myself was a migrant. I was in California back in the 60s. I wanted to expand this idea.
HELEN LYONS: The Hopkins center brings a world premiere by preeminent Mexican composer Arturo Márquez to the stage this Saturday, part of Dartmouth College and the Hopkins Center for the Art’s Mexican Repertoire Initiative. The Nomad Symphony for winds was commissioned by a consortium of universities and institutions from across the country. It is a timely work, in which Márquez explores themes of migration. Maestro Márquez takes us now, movement by movement, through the inspirations for this work.
MÁRQUEZ: When I work on a work in these dimensions, I always have to go into investigation. I saw this video about migration that is called The Human [Flow], the tide of humanity. It's a wonderful video by Ai Weiwei. And he did this video about migration in the whole world. The first movement, Marcha Natura - nature march - is centered on migration in nature. The first idea that I had is about this bird that is called the Arctic tern. It's this bird that goes from pole to pole. He has no frontiers. The natural migration, the living creatures in the earth, they all have it. We can see the whales, we can see the birds, we can see the salmons…
HELEN: Márquez shifts his focus to human migration, finding inspiration in contemporary poetry for the middle movement.
MÁRQUEZ: The second movement I was speaking about the migrants in Sonora, I read this beautiful poem of Javier Zamora that is called Saguaros. Javier Zamora, he crossed the border when he was about 11 years old because his parents were in California. So the parents paid a coyote and this boy, he passed the border in Sonora, and Sonora in in Arizona is full of this wonderful cactus that is called saguaro. And in this particular cactus, it has water, has food, you know, the people can eat the fruit of the cactus. So it's, it's a cactus that aids, that helps the migrants to to survive.
HELEN: For the Symphony’s third movement, Márquez found inspiration in an unfinished play by Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Moore, and the impassioned monologue known as “The Strangers’ Case,” in which Moore, attempting to quell an anti-immigrant riot, argues that persecuting refugees is both morally wrong and a betrayal of our own shared humanity.
MÁRQUEZ: Now the final movement Looking South, which I personally call ‘inhumanity,’ that came directly from Shakespeare's text, The Strangers’ Case, and in this text he talks directly about the human needs of having to move to other places. When I started to compose this movement, I needed something to pull, you know, to open. And I remember the Colombian batucada, and I say, I have to do something with this spirit. I take the text. It is not sung, it is not said, it is in the music by itself, OK? The rhythm, the movement, the melodic movement of the text. I try to put directly in the music. It's the force: the force of the rhythm, force of the percussion, and that’s what I find in The Strangers’ Case, the emotional part.
HELEN: Conducting the world premiere of the Nomad Symphony will be Dr. Brian Messier, Director of Bands at Dartmouth and founder of the college’s Mexican Repertoire Initiative. Messier was the driving force behind commissioning the piece and bringing Maestro Márquez to Dartmouth to work with the students who will perform it.
BRIAN MESSIER: We are all incredibly honored and excited. We feel a lot of responsibility to honor this work and to elevate it and bring it to the world and to light in the, you know, in respect of not just the time that he took to write a piece for us, but the depth of thought and meaning that is that this piece is really saturated in, and that is such a timely message and a kind of profound work of art. So it's absolutely a personal highlight and honor of my career.
HELEN: And your students, are they feeling that same sense of momentousness?
BRIAN: My students are very excited. I don't think they could be excited enough, in that I wish I could explain to them how big of an impact, and how great of an opportunity this is for them to be in this ensemble at this moment in time, and to have this opportunity to to meet with the maestro and and bring this work of art to life. I'm so grateful and appreciative to Maestro Márquez for working with us and for writing this piece for us.
HELEN: Maestro Márquez, what do you want people to understand in the hearing of this piece?
MÁRQUEZ: I can understand there are laws about migration, but the needs of the people - not only the people that come from outside - the needs are very different from those laws. The laws of the countries are just laws, but they're not the natural laws that the humans need, and that's not the way humans behave. I understand we have to have discipline, we have to have order, but laws about many things, not only migration, only affect the needs of certain groups, but not as a whole.
HELEN: Arturo Márquez’s Nomad Symphony will receive its world premiere Saturday, May 23 at 7:30 p.m. in Spaulding Auditorium of the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College. It is the centerpiece of a program entitled, A Portrait of Arturo Márquez. For more information and tickets head to hop.dartmouth.edu
