| Description |
El Canto Repartido (The Shared Out Song) takes its title from a poem in the collection Las Uvas y el Viento (The Grapes and the Wind) by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Many of the poems in this collection have a communist political tone, and critics often describe the poems in this book as among the weakest that the Nobel laureate ever wrote. Nevertheless, El Canto Repartido, while being no less political than most of the poems in the rest of the collection, is a gem. The poet presents an ecstatic vision of a united world community ("I slept under all the gathered flags"). His travels bring him close to all peoples ("I found that a dove was sewing my heart, in its flight, with other hearts"). As he arrives in Chile he brings these experiences as an offering to the people of Chile, and is "reborn, in the blood of my people." This transnational patriotic idealism is one of the few aspects of the socialist movement, as I experienced it as a child in Chile, which I truly miss today. The three movements of the work take their titles from lines in the poem. In the first movement Que sea repartido todo canto en la tierra ("May all singing be shared on earth"), the instruments are treated in a somewhat spasmodic way, with extensive use of hocket and percussion, denoting the sharing of a common fraternal purpose and resolve against tyranny, represented by the militaristic percussion. The second movement Que el amor nos defienda ("May love defend us") is a quiet communal prayer or litany, with some surprises along the way. It leads, via an accelerating, pleading transition, to the fast last movement, Que suban los racimos ("May the boughs rise"). This movement portrays the ecstasy at the end of the poem, represented by fast quasi-diatonic scales that gather up everything in their path and deliriously send it forth. Given the generally assertive tone of this music, it seemed appropriate to end the work quietly, like the poem's last lonely line: Así sea ("So be it"). El Canto Repartido was commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University. |
