Los Norteños Writers Group has taken to advertising Latino-friendly arts events on their Facebook feed. This caught my eye.
My grandmother had a childhood filled with mandatory piano lessons in a tiny house in the cedars heated by a wood stove across the Sound from Seattle. She and her two siblings formed a swing trio in the late 1930s that played in dances all over the Olympic peninsula.
As an adult, she couldn’t afford a piano, and often didn’t have room for one, but did keep a second-hand Lowry organ that she paid $1,800 for in the 1960s by working as a secretary and saving up for it. It was one of the two fineries in that otherwise very frugal house, the other being her gorgeous wedding ring.
So we kids were scolded into music from the time we could be sat down at the organ and taught “Silent Night.”
Being Latino, my father was not in favor of me training in Anglo classical music if it meant buying a piano for a child with no track record of practicing, but he did entertain the idea of the classical guitar. My first teacher, George Llanes, was located by having a sign in his apartment window on the major Houston thoroughfare Lawndale Street that read “Guitar Lessons.” When he was discovered to be a Latino, my father was pleased and laid out the funds for the lessons. The family later moved to a rural area, and I did not bond with the new guitar teacher, who wasn’t that interested in the Spanish classical repertoire but in country music, which didn’t set me on fire, so I laid it aside until better arrangements could be made.
In my twenties, after finishing college and the early years of the first jobs, I paid for classical guitar lessons myself, and spent a few years with that before turning to opera, evolving into a playwright and opera librettist, eventually writing several pieces that were produced by some formidable opera companies, including the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program.
So it was with delight that I found Orquesta Northwest and have sworn to become a devotee and supporter.
The two-hour program had the quality of being somewhere between a classical garage band and jonesing for a tour, all the while developing the audience into turning up next time and telling their friends.
While there was one Mozart piece played in memoriam of the local Latino classical musician Rafael Howell-Flores, almost the entirety of the program was of Latino composition, and comprised composers I have encountered piecemeal over the years, like Carlos Gardel, Astor Piazzolla, and Manuel Ponce. The inclusion of Mesoamerican-influenced folk music adapted for classical instruments was a welcome aspect of the program.
The event was “Pay What You Can,” so there is no real impediment for anyone to show up. Come one, come all, and maybe the group will someday attract a classical guitarist to play those inimitable gems of Latino art music.
