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Transcendent Tones, Wondrous Words New Yori
Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Metropolitan Museum of Arts
11/07/2025 -
Gabriela Ortiz: Canta la Piedra Tetluikan – Kauyumaria (World Premieres)
Arrangements of Cardenche music: The Swallows Take Flight – I’m leaving now to die in the Desert – Prisoners
Traditional melodies: Rain – One who is departing –Het na cha chat
Roomful of Teeth: Esteli Gomez, Mingjia Chen, Martha Cluver, Virginia Kelsey, Jodie Landau, Steven Bradshaw, Thann Scoggin (Singers), Cameron Beauchamp (Artistic Director); Coro Acardenchado – 7 Espinas Ensemble: Lucia Torres, Andrea Villela, Alex Daniels, Juan Carlos Tudón (Singers), Juan Pablo Villa (Founding Executive Director & Artistic Director), Raquel Acevedo Klein (Conductor and Music Director)
Arturo López Pío (CINEMANO Live hand-drawn animations), Mercedes Aquí & Paula La Madrid (Video Design)
Canto Acardenchado (© Courtesy of the Artists)
“El que come y canta, su mal espanta.” (“He who eats and sings scares away his woes.”)
Mexican proverb
“While composing Kauyumari, I noted once again how music has the power to grant us access to the intangible, healing our wounds and binding us to what can only be expressed through sound.”
Gabriela Ortiz
As the great composer Gabriela Ortiz intimated above, sound can become magical. And in this extraordinary hour of discovery, words, even words with no literal meaning can have the same effect.
To celebrate the re-opening of the Met’s Michael D. Rockefeller Wing and the intrepid amateur anthropologist himself, the Met had ensembled diverse groups and individuals who seemed to have taken ancient Mexican tales and poems inside themselves.
A Roomful of Teeth is no stranger to new composers and new sounds. Gabriela Ortiz is an eclectic composer who can create the sounds of Mexico City’s music halls, and the syllabic magic of Mexico’s ancient people.
Mexico’s Canto Acardenchado is dedicated to re‑create that ancient music before it disappears. Arturo López Pío is more than an animator: his quick animated line‑drawings form the black-and-white landscapes of Mexico’s most desiccated desolate areas. And conductor Raquel Acevedo Klein, herself of Colombian-Puerto Rican heritage, brought both American and Latin American cultures as animated as the drawings.
Because the words of Ms. Ortiz’ opening Canta la Piedra–Tetluikan is near impossible to translate, dealing with the natural elements of the earth. A Roomful of Teeth had to give the syllabic readings in exciting near‑chanting. Yet the sounds of the Nahua words themselves–“Titl, titl” (“Fire, fire”), “Zoktil, zoktil” (Clay, clay)–were repeated over themselves, because of the Nahua poem Mardonio Carbello’s poetry is so enigmatic, only the song‑chant and rhythms made them come alive.
After this came the ancient Caradenche music, from the Durango area, in northwest Mexico Originally sung by only three or four people, and now limited to one village in Durango, they were re‑created by seven singers of Canto Acardenchado. Their ensemble rhythm and clapping, the haunting solo by Leika Mochán the colorful robes of all the female singers and the Medieval harmonies might have transformed the original songs. But the effects were still transcendent.
On the stage to the side, with desk and pens, was Arturo López Pío. His animations–black/brown and white silhouettes of mountains and valleys, tiny people dwarfed by the scenery–were reproduced on the giant screen. And then–like Picasso’s sand drawings in the Ray Bradbury story–were erased (alas) giving way to more wondrous drawings.
For the final piece, the line-drawings were shunted aside for photographs on the large screen. Not of people or cities, but of the cacti, the flowers, the vistas over desert and grassland.
The landscape was the sacred Wirikuta desert in northern Mexico. Of the two shooters, Mercedes Aquí has made herself resident of Wirikuta, and her visions were mesmeric.
In front were the two choirs, and in front of them was Raquel Acevedo Klein, the electrifying conductor, painter, dancer, master of music from Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. Her choirs here, though, translated Ms. Ortiz notes into a 14‑voice (and 28‑hand) musical spectacle.
G. Ortiz/R. Acevedo Klein (© Mara Arteaga/Frank Impelluso)
Kauyumari, in a few minutes, started with a simple Amerindian song about the eponymous “Blue Deer.” The composer wrote (one is tempted to say “writ”) notes for both choruses with exuberant, fiercely rhythmic, pounding, with bodily movements, clapping that was syncopated, contrapuntal by both choirs.
The Blue Deer, like the music, is thought by the people to gallop through the forest, appearing and disappearing, pursued yet never captured. Those were Ms. Ortiz’ sounds, transformed, metamorphed, peeking through the voices and melting away.
And if one wasn’t satisfied with that, one was transformed both by the arid, sparse, tantalizing photos of the desolate desert and by conductor Ms. Klein almost hurtling across the podium, leading both choirs simultaneously.
That “blue deer”, by the way, represents a “spiritual guide”, a mythical animal created by the hallucinogenic peyote seeds consumed by the people here.
Yet I thought of the mystical bird related by the great Sergei Eisenstein while making his unfinished film about Mexico. That bird was the spirit of the deceased and appeared–again in peyote dreams–only when fervently desired.
CODA: This concert (“Singing Stones: Celebrating the Ancient Americas”) was produced by Met Arts and the re‑opening of Michael D. Rockefeller Wing of the Met. The latter celebrates the arts of Mexico, Asia and other parts of the world. The effects, one would hope, reflected the ineffable images of the concert last night.
Harry Rolnick
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