The Latin American Music Center held the “Julián Carrillo 150th Anniversary Concert” on Thursday. Held in Auer Hall, the concert featured nine works composed by Julián Carrillo and was the final event for the LAMC’s lecture series on the composer. The concert honored the 150th anniversary of Carrillo’s birthday.
Julián Carrillo was a Mexican composer and violinist most known for developing microtonal music theory and introducing it to the public. Microtonal music expands on the idea behind semitonal music — which is when notes a half-step apart are played at the same time, like an E and F or a C to C♯.
Carrillo theorized there could be even smaller intervals between tones, such as thirds or fourths, and he experimented with instruments until he proved he was right and there could be subdivisions up to 16ths. He called his microtonal discovery “El Sonido Trece” or “The Thirteenth Sound.”
Microtonal music is atypical for traditional Western music, which usually features semitones as its most dissonant tones. Playing music that features microtones can be challenging for musicians with a predominantly Western music education because of this. For senior Josh Flores, performed with “Tepepan, Op. 3” as a part of Cosmos Quartet, rehearsal was key.
“The more that we rehearsed it, the more I got to understand the music, the more that I enjoyed playing it,” Flores said in an interview shared in the concert program’s supplemental notes. “It really makes a lot of sense, even if at first it seems like a lot of quarter tones, kind of hard to digest, but once you realize there are conversations going on between the voices, it’s cool.”
While Carrillo specialized in microtonal music, his repertoire is very diverse and is not limited to only microtonal music. The concert’s program was developed to highlight all of Carrillo’s music, not just his most known works, LAMC director Javier León said.
“We’re going to kind of offer a mix of all kinds of the music that he wrote so you can get a bigger sense of who he was,” León said.
Most of the concert’s performers were related to Jacobs in some way, either as students or staff, except for the four members of the choir for the first piece, which were local students at Fairview Elementary School. After the four elementary singers sang “Canto a la bandera,” they quickly exited the stage and joined their applauding families sitting in the first few rows of the hall.
Jacobs even constructed a new instrument, a microtonal harp, for the concert with the assistance of Eskenazi School Wood and Metal Shop Academic Lab Specialist Gabriel Mo. The harp was constructed under León’s supervision and plans from Carrillo’s own microtonal harp were used to create a replica. The harp was used in two of the songs performed.
Graduate student Jason Van Zeeland, also a member of the Cosmos Quartet, performed alongside the unique harp during the concert.
“It’s a really neat texture that we wouldn’t have been able to play with otherwise,” Van Zeeland said.
At the conclusion of each piece, the audience never failed to give robust applause, though no applause was as grand as the one that occurred at the concert’s end. As audience members stood to make their exit, they talked amongst themselves.
“What did you think of the concert?” León asked an audience member.
“I’ve never heard anything like it,” the audience member said in response.
