Songs About Buildings and Moods
Ex Teresa Arte Actual and George Peabody Library
Season 2 Episode 1 | 28m 28sVideo has Closed Captions
Discover Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City and the George Peabody Library in Baltimore.
Ex Teresa Arte Actual is a former 17th century convent in Mexico City's historic Zocalo neighborhood that has been reimagined as a vital center for contemporary art and music. The George Peabody Library in Baltimore is one of the most beautiful library spaces in the world with a historic collection to match.
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Songs About Buildings and Moods
Ex Teresa Arte Actual and George Peabody Library
Season 2 Episode 1 | 28m 28sVideo has Closed Captions
Ex Teresa Arte Actual is a former 17th century convent in Mexico City's historic Zocalo neighborhood that has been reimagined as a vital center for contemporary art and music. The George Peabody Library in Baltimore is one of the most beautiful library spaces in the world with a historic collection to match.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipArchitecture is often referred to as frozen music, and the link between them has long been recognized.
What do the buildings we make say about us?
How does our perception of them change when filtered through music?
I'm Seth Boustead, and this is Songs About Buildings and Moods.
Talked away on a one-way street in Mexico City's historic Zócalo, next to the Aztec Holy Site, the Templo Mayor, is a gem of a building called Ex Teresa Arte Actual, that today hosts a wide variety of cultural events.
I stumbled across it in 2022, when they had an exhibit of stunning video work by artist Bill Viola, and I was enchanted by the exhibition, by the Mission, History, and Architecture of this special place, which, as I'm sure you can tell, didn't begin life as a place for art exhibits.
Valeria Macías Rodriguez was kind enough to talk with me about the history and mission of Ex Teresa Arte Actual.
Originalmente, este lugar fue construido por idea de dos monjas que querían establecer un convento religioso femenino dedicado a la Orden de Carmelitas Descalzas, y en honor de Santa Teresa de Jesús, o Santa Teresa deÁvila, que es una poeta mística española.
Y las monjas la conocían, habían leído algunas de sus obras, y, pues, querían hacer un convento fundado en su honor.
La Orden de Carmelitas Descalzas es una orden muy severa, muy estricta.
Los votos que las mujeres hacen para pertenecer, o para ser parte de las Carmelitas Descalzas, las obligan a pasar una vida de meditación y de rezo, De hecho hay una anécdota por ejemplo, interesante, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, que es una de las poetas más famosas de México estuvo aquí en este convento, pero no aguantó, porque las reglas son muy fuertes, y decidió ir a otro convento en lugar de quedarse aquí a rezar nada más.
Cuando cerraron este lugar al culto, o sea, ya no era iglesia ni tampoco era convento, pasó a ser un espacio un poco descuidado, y en 1993, un grupo de artistas que vivían aquí en frente, y que veían este lugar y se les hacía muy importante y muy interesante en su arquitectura, decidieron hacer una propuesta, al gobierno, de ocuparlo, para que pueda ser un espacio de arte no tradicional, sino más bien un espacio de arte contemporáneo, dedicado a prácticas artísticas como el performance, como el arte sonoro, diferentes prácticas experimentales.
Cuénteme, por favor, sobre la arquitectura porque hay una mezcla de estilos y es muy interesante.
Sí, claro que sí.
La arquitectura que conviven en este espacio es de diferentes épocas y corrientes arquitectónicas, porque se construyó a lo largo de muchos años.
Entonces, por ejemplo, la fachada, que es muy famosa, es una fachada de roca que es muy famosa en México porque tiene en el acceso unas columnas retorcidas que se llaman columnas salomónicas, eso la hace muy destacable.
Y el resto de la primera fase de su construcción es neo clásica, muy sobria, aunque durante el tiempo en el que fue convento fue realmente una iglesia rica, estaba muy ricamente ornamentada.
Y luego tenemos una capilla que se llama la Capilla del Señor de Santa Teresa, que es la más rica en su ornamentación, porque tiene una decoración mural, de pinturas murales, realizadas por un pintor que se llama Juan Cordero que es muy particular, con una paleta de colores muy contrastante, muy llamativa.
Entonces sí, los estilos que conviven en este lugar son diversos, es muy ecléctico.
Tú me dijiste sobre los artistas aquí, que este lugar es muy importante para artistas al principio de sus carreras, cuéntame sobre esto.
Sí.
Ex Teresa ha sido desde siempre un lugar que ha acogido le ha dado la bienvenida a artistas de trayectorias jóvenes, artistas emergentes en estas disciplinas, en performance, arte sonoro, o instalación video-arte, y muchos artistas que el día de hoy tienen una trayectoria bastante reconocida y que están integrados al circuito mainstream comenzaron aquí sus carreras, fueron aquí las primeras veces que expusieron.
Y bueno, claro, con el paso de los años Ex Teresa tiene exposiciones con artistas que ya tienen una trayectoria establecida, pero siempre es también un lugar que busca que los jóvenes y que las nuevas generaciones de artistas trabajen aquí.
My good friend, composer Felipe Perez Santiago, is one of the many people who have benefited from Ex Teresa Arte Actual's welcoming embrace of artists.
Felipe is a wonderful composer, and is also the director de Vórtice Ensemble, who performed all the pieces we commissioned in Mexico, for Songs about Buildings and Moods.
Felipe has performed in this place numerous times, and he had an interesting take on how to interpret it musically.
Tu has tocado aquí muchas veces en el pasado, por supuesto, pero para escribir una pieza de música, especialmente inspirada por este lugar es diferente, sí?
Sí, pues tuve la oportunidad de venir un par de veces a caminar por el lugar, y simplemente sentir la energía, sentir la historia del lugar y la maravillosa arquitectura.
Y además Valeria, la directora, que es una historiadora y es una mujer que sabe muchísimo sobre la historia de este lugar y la historia de México, además Valeria es una buena amiga mía, entonces tuve la fortuna de tener un tour privado con ella donde además me explicó toda la historia del lugar.
Me dio prácticamente una clase de historia sobre Ex Teresa sobre el templo, sobre el convento y sobre lo que es actualmente el museo entonces eso fue increíblemente inspirador.
Y cuando me puse a escribir la pieza, lo que yo quería era ver cuáles eran los elementos que más me habían inspirado, entonces sí me inspiró mucho el hecho de que es un lugar de culto, un lugar religioso, entonces es una pieza muy lenta y es como si fuera una procesión religiosa, como si la gente estuviera caminando en las calles en una procesión religiosa, lo cual es algo muy común aquí en México.
Pero es una procesión, digamos, torcida.
Porque el tiempo, los compases que usé están como si se estuvieran equivocando, como si los músicos se estuvieran equivocando todo el tiempo.
Y esto tiene que ver con un pequeño detalle: que la fachada del templo está torcida también, y está torcida tanto por la antiüedad del templo como por los temblores aquí en México, es una ciudad donde tiembla muchísimo.
Y ha habido temblores muy fuertes en el '47, si estoy en lo correcto, en el '85 y en el 2017.
Temblores que destruyeron gran parte de la ciudad.
Este templo sobrevivió.
Sin embargo, está completamente torcido.
Y yo quería reflejar esa parte torcida con una marcha religiosa, pero como errónea, como equivocada.
Me gusta mucho, es una idea muy interesante.
Y para mí funciona perfectamente también.
El saxofón y la percusión pertenecen a estas bandas.
Bandas de viento que son muy comunes aquí en México.
Algo muy parecido a las marching bands norteamericanas.
Que justo van caminando en procesión.
Entonces, yo quería ese sonido.
Pero las cuerdas para mí representan este sonido muy europeo.
Porque al fin y al cabo este es un convento construido durante la colonia, durante la conquista española.
Pero las cuerdas también representan esta espiritualidad y religiosidad.
Entonces yo lo que quería era combinar esa parte del México local con el saxofón y la percusión, pero combinado con esa parte europea que son la viola y el chelo.
Y hacer esta obra por un lado muy religiosa, pero por otro lado completamente torcida, completamente equivocada.
Sí, es interesante también porque el material, la música en las cuerdas, al principio de la pieza, es el glockenspiel.
Ah, claro.
Sí, exactamente, el glockenspiel que es como una marimba pequeña pero de metal, también toma la figura de las cuerdas.
Y eso es un momento como de calma, de meditación en una pieza que es completamente como una procesión pero muy neurótica.
En algún momento yo también quería este momento de calma que también tiene este lugar.
The George Peabody Library in Baltimore is widly recognized as one of the most beautiful library spaces in the world.
The collection at houses is impressive, to say the least with more than 300,000 volumes, including a wealth of first editions.
It seriously gives me goosebumps to walk into this special place, as Paul Espinosa, curator of the George Peabody Library, has the good fortune to do nearly every day of the week.
I have a real reverence for this old fashioned idea of providing knowledge for free, you know, without forcing you to watch an ad first.
And so I was curious about Peabody's thoughts for this grand space.
Well, he did it as a gesture of goodwill to the citizens of Baltimore, because he got his business start here in Baltimore, 1810s, 1820s.
He spends most of his adult career in London.
But towards the end of his life, in 1857 he endows this institute to the city of Baltimore and he writes towards the diffusion of the fine arts.
So he wants people to be able to partake in music, and art and literature, you name it.
But yeah, this library opened its doors in 1878, looked much then as it does now.
Very little has changed in this space.
They would have somewhere upwards of 200 visitors every day.
And it was open to the citizens of Baltimore.
So really anybody could come in and use these resources.
So it starts with the Peabody Library.
It's now housed within the Peabody institution.
Talk about that, what was the evolution of the Peabody Conservatory, the library, and what has its role been over time?
Well, it has a long history, of course.
And when it was originally founded, it had four parts, a public art gallery, a public lecture series, a music conservatory and a free public library.
The conservatory was part of the library from the very beginning?
Well, these different departments functioned within the institute.
So there was an art gallery with statues, paintings and that sort of thing.
But what happened is that the music school really kept growing and kept educating young musicians, and the library kept going, and kept growing in terms of its collection size.
And so really those two became the focus, right?
And then it didn't become all these things, didn't become part of Johns Hopkins until 1978.
There's six floors here.
Is there any rhyme and reason to the books?
Tell me about the collections.
The collection includes lots of important American authors.
We've got first editions of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Hawthorne.
We have first editions of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, first edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species, early editions of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, lots of firsts, as they say.
And a wonderful History of Science collection.
We have a wonderful collection called the Hinkus Collection of Scientific Books, first editions of Galileo, Copernicus, Newton.
These are quite rare and quite important works.
We have a wonderful H. L. Mankin collection.
Mankin was a local Baltimore newspaper man and literary figure in the 1920s and 30s.
We have a wonderful Don Quixote collection, over 400 editions of Don Quixote.
The Peabody Library is housed in the same building as the Peabody Conservatory, a renowned music school.
We had the great fortune to work with Lida Fink, a composer and violinist who studied there, as did her ensemble, the Bergamot Quartet.
I got to come and speak with Paul, the curator, over the summer, and hear a little bit of his thoughts on the space, learn a little bit more about the history of the library.
And one of the things Paul talked to me about was, A, how the six floors are arranged by subject, which I thought was really interesting.
And that's a big part of the structure of my piece, is six kind of tiers of writing.
You'll hear them blend pretty seamlessly from one to the next in most cases.
This, for me, in the piece was coupled with a conversation Paul and I had about the evolution of the use of the library, which has gone from a very lofty, more elite space to now being more open to the public.
There's a lot of different events that happen here.
So I wanted to convey this sense of just kind of opening in scope of the use of the library for the piece.
Very nice.
Walk me through the piece musically.
I mean, how did you derive your musical materials?
How does it develop?
Five minutes is an interesting kind of length for a piece, isn't it?
I mean, it's enough time, but then it's not quite enough time.
So tell me kind of how you dealt with all of that.
Exactly.
I did, right away, find that I kept having to kind of curb the urge to write a much longer piece.
But I wanted to write something really rich musically, just to start to convey the idea of so much knowledge encapsulated within this library.
So I started with the violins playing material that's quite sparse, quite close to each other in range.
And I basically just expanded on that throughout the piece over the course of these six kind of micro sections of the piece.
So it's a very straight kind of small range at the beginning, It begins to broaden, goes from 16th notes to triplets for a more expansive feeling.
And by the end, there's almost a dancey feeling in the music.
Yeah, definitely.
That's something that interested me because this is not our first time commissioning the piece for a library.
And people oftentimes with the library, they write more broad, expansive music to kind of symbolize the nobility of the library and knowledge.
And your piece is very rhythmic and, you know, fun.
Which not to say that like a broad, noble piece isn't fun.
But can you talk about that a little bit?
Because there's definitely this rhythmic vitality and pulse most of the way through your piece.
Well, part of that, I think is just I know Bergamot very well.
And it's a lot of fun for us to play together.
So I wanted to write something that I knew we would have fun with as well.
I see this space as a vessel for so many things.
I wanted to explore its ability to hold a more celebratory atmosphere.
You feel such reverence being in this space.
It's really amazing.
And part of my nod to that aspect of the library's character was I actually took a Bach chorale and kind of sprinkled that throughout in very messed-with ways, especially in really rhythmic ways.
It's always extremely nostalgic for me to be back in this neighborhood.
I spent five years living in Mount Vernon where we are.
And it was just so many formative memories from that time.
I feel like being back here, in this building, those all just flood back.
And it's a really special experience to get to come back here and engage with this space in which I've spent so much time in a pretty new way, writing music about the space and bringing my band back here, getting to come back here and just do an artistic project within these walls.
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