DARÍO PRIETO
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Updated Saturday,10June2023-14:21
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At the beginning of 2022, Santiago Auserón's latest album (Zaragoza, 1954), entitled 'Libertad' (La huella sonora), and his essay 'Arte sonora' (Anagrama), based on his doctoral thesis on the relations between music and philosophy in classical Greece, were released, almost simultaneously. Now, after leaving behind his stage as Juan Perro, the leader of Radio Futura (1979-1992) recovers his symphonic project 'Vagamundo' with the Kingdom of Aragon Orchestra in a unique concert that will take place this Saturday at the National Auditorium in Madrid.
It returns to the symphonic format after a few years. I would like to consider that 'Vagamundo', already an erratic name, is a 'work in progress', an open work. From there, we decided with the Orquesta Reino de Aragón that if we did any more concerts we had to rearrange and orchestrate new material and reconfigure the repertoire a little. Suppressing the things with which I felt less comfortable, in the sense that they contributed less to the symphonic vision of my repertoire, and adding what is in the line of work defined by the repertoire that I have been building so far. I wrote to Amparo, who is in a senior position at Berklee College of Music in Boston. I like his approach to my songs a lot. She is very lucid and understands my work very well. She comes from the world of bands in Valencia, she is an excellent composer of contemporary work, apart from an excellent instrumentalist, and, being in America, she understands very well this duplicity of my repertoire as heir to rock and its derivatives, but also with the branch of the traditional Cuban son that I wanted to print to Juan Perro. For example, the treatment he has made of 'Annabel Lee' is beautiful, because he got into the romantic spirit of Poe's poetry and helped a lot to read the lyrics from a musical point of view.
And how does it feel? The opportunity to join once again with the Kingdom of Aragon Orchestra, with its director, Ricardo Casero, and its musicians, is an enormous honor. These people are seriously squeezing. There are things by Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn or recent pieces that sound spectacular and cause me a lot of emotion and my legs also tremble a little at the possibility of having to get back together with them. To endure the size of a symphony orchestra in the National Auditorium requires sufficient firmness, without believing that they are more than what I am. That is, a humble popular singer.
Now that you mention the word, what's it like to make popular music in a symphony auditorium? If one sticks exclusively to the original purism of what determines the authenticity of a genre, things last for a while, they are subject to the conditions of production of the time in which they are born and spread for the first time. But the problem with music is that it never stops. It is a mobile, expansive medium and does not even need electronic media and telecommunications to move. Music never ceases to transform, although there is an Academy in the conservatories, in old Europe, which tries to fix the canon of interpretation of classical scores. And that is one of the reasons that makes music an enormously beautiful universe, which is something completely in motion, always in a continuous evolution. Despite this, the intuition, not only of the musicians but also of the public, lends itself to reconstructing a sound palace, a small bank of the turbulent river. It is a soundscape, a magical fieldHe has always been reluctant to a 'revival' of Radio Futura for economic reasons. Why the inclusion in the recital of songs like 'La negra flor' and 'Annabel Lee'? On the one hand, I want to get rid of the market obligation that responds to the enormous popularity of Radio Futura's songs. I believe that the public sector that follows me - which is relatively minority, but it is quite a minority - andA understands that my roll is about continuing to search and continue creating, but it is also about the fact that the new composition allows one to acquire a retrospective perspective and reinterpret the themes of the past in an enriched way. And I like, when I have clear ideas in that sense, to take up some themes of Radio Futura that I still feel alive and that help me to contemplate with more perspective all the evolution of my work as a song writer. Although the themes of the beginning of Radio Futura were simpler, since I worked with soneros, I evolved later with Juan Perro towards a more enriched harmony a little more elaborate poetics. However, I also like to preserve some of the simplicity that originated in those years when I was learning to make songs. The public appreciates it because they already know that I do not feel obliged to do it and that if I do it is for reasons that are both aesthetic and because it is not difficult to please people, I want them to have a good time. A few years ago he performed in the same space of the National Auditorium Bob Dylan -who, by the way, has just passed through Madrid- and that was a sound disaster. These people come with their equipment, with their rules, with their computers, with the sound fully assembled. And, wherever they go, they go with the same script. They arrive, they charge, they and goodbye very good. They don't care. There are nights when Dylan is still lucid and offers memorable things. And there are others in which it carries a roll of turn, twist and turn ... He doesn't want to go home, he doesn't want to sit up in case he falls asleep. I have had the opportunity to play three or four times in the chamber hall of the Auditorium, letting myself be carried away by the experience of not amplifying almost on stage, leaving everything almost natural, not raising the natural volume, but extending it wherever the nuances of an instrument require it.
Last year 'Arte sonora' was published. How is Antiquity still present in us? We are closer to the ancients than we think. There is such a mirage of speed and evolution of technology during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that it gives the impression that everything has been cancelled. But no, what goes: the basic supports of the human tribe are still the language, music and means of transmission of both. And based on that comes calculus, which builds computer science and so on. It seems that without gadgets we can no longer live. But it is not true: the basic functions of the human brain are still the fundamental ones, even if they are neglected. And a few months ago he published, this time with his brother Luis, a report-manifesto on the situation of the digital distribution of music, which provoked a somewhat aggressive response from the industry. We did not want to answer because the facts speak for themselves. Let everyone value them. There will be more and more people, analysts and even private public, researching these issues. It is a very serious issue, an issue of civilization touching a very dangerous extreme for the formation of new generations and for the preservation of culture. If the human species wants to go towards the apocalypse, great. I can't help it. What I'm going to do is try to preserve the clues that really feed me as a human being and try to convince those I can talk to of the advisability of doing so. And if then the robots of artificial intelligence take over the majority market of music, then let them go. Not bad. If they're like humans, I wish them the best of luck [laughs]. Is your attitude a form of resistance? Rockers have the honor of becoming minority artists as poets, classical and contemporary musicians, dance and theater people, and so on have always been. And if the creators have to become specialized, refined and that to survive they have to work art for art... Well, great. All minority artists and that's it, nothing happens. But before these minorities we are going to try to communicate, to do efficient things. Let every fiction, every article or every little song be efficient, well-done little works. The same with the internet: if the internet is all garbage and we have no other means to communicate, we will try to make each intervention visually beautiful, well written and not an insult. You have to keep doing interesting, beautiful, believable, sincere things at ease... And even if they want to kick us out of the market, they don't get it.
In his latest album there is a song, 'La libertad', which says: "There are those who your sacred name in vain dare to repeat / and have frozen lips from so much lying". Where do those verses come from? Of the insistence with which some faces appear on television telling deliberate lies to attract attention and take the minutes of the news. The use of the word "freedom" in that manipulative, gimmicky, lying context... It hurts. But that's not why I'm going to go to the bullseye or play the victim. I reply to it, on my small scale, but I have the right of reply. A part of the left has fallen asleep a little on the theoretical elaboration and ideologies of the nineteenth century and has been content with the mediatization of the twenty-first. And there is little elaborate thinking coming from the spectrum of the left. However, right-wing think tanks have been very active. And one of the things they've done has been to seize the enemy's language and turn it around. The perverted use of the word "freedom" responds to a strategy to which 'Trumpism' has been affiliated, which consists of saying barbarities daily knowing that the lie attracts more publicity and more audience than the humble attempt to get closer to the truth as much as one can. Because no one can hold the truth, neither the right nor the left.
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