This is day 19 in my 2007 Advent Calendar. This year, I’m giving the
story behind some of the music that I’ve collected for ballet classes.
All the pieces are on Studio Series Vol. 4 published by RAD.
Tentação by F.L. da Silveira is one of many terrific musical discoveries that happened through force of circumstance. The circumstance here was that I originally wanted to record one of my favourite tangos ever, El Firulete, by Jose Basso in the place now occupied by Tentação. I first heard El Firulete on the The Story of Tango (it’s fantastic – still one of my favourite tango CDs), and spent a long time, as always, taking it down by dictation from the CD ( in Prague, summer of 2004 – mid-dictation I noticed the sun setting on the church outside my window, and took the picture you see on the left) and working out a version on the piano, trying it out in class, until I was happy. It works brilliantly for the kind of batterie that needs what Chris calls ‘hot potato’ music – in other words, everything just off the beat, or barely touching it; edge of the beat, edge of your chair.
When it comes to a recording, although there are variations according to genre, you need a score, otherwise you run into problems of potential copyright infringement. Weeks before the recording, I located a shop in Buenos Aires that had the sheet music, and ordered it over the internet. It didn’t come. I emailed them, they apologised, said they’d send it again, it still didn’t come. Tragic – one of the only internet transactions I’ve ever known that didn’t work out.
So only days before the recording, I needed to replace this wonderful piece with something similar. But where from? The whole point about El Firulete is that it’s got a tempo and a character all of its own, and I’d chosen it out of hundreds. But then, as I described under Herminia, I found this book of Brazilian Tangos, and a whole world opened up that I didn’t know existed. As it happened, it was a world full of pieces like El Firulete to the point where it was difficult to choose at first, though Tentação soon became a favourite.
I’d never quite got the connection between ragtime, tango & quadrilles until I saw this book, and nor had I (to my shame) encountered the terms cinquillo & tresillo until I read them in the introduction; and that opened up yet another wonderful avenue of research. I still love El Firulete to bits, and will keep trying to get the score in time for the next recording, but I have to be grateful to the postal service for failing to deliver this time, because Brazilian Tangos was such a fantastic find.
