Silvestre Revueltas - "Sensemayá"
Sensemayá
Silvestre Revueltas
Born: December 31, 1899, Santiago Papasquiaro, Mexico
Died: October 5, 1940, Mexico City, Mexico
Original Instrumentation: Symphony Orchestra
Composed: 1949
Arranged: 1980, by Frank Bencriscutto
Duration: 7 minutes
University of Maryland Wind Orchestra
Saturday, November 5, 2016, 8:00 pm
Elsie & Marvin Dekelboum Concert Hall
Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
The University of Maryland at College Park
Sensemayá is based on the Afro-Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén’s poem about a ceremony for the sacrifice of a serpent. Revueltas’s thumping ostinato is the musical echo of Guillén’s refrain: “mayombé, bombe, mayombé.” With its thrilling, obsessive rhythmic thrust—it is written throughout in 7/8 or 7/16—and powerfully dissonant harmonies, this extraordinary little score is as original as anything in European music of the time, but it owes nothing to those distant schools or celebrated composers. It represents one of the signal moments when American music unmistakably came into its own.
“All his music seems preceded by something that is not joy and exhilaration, as some believe, or satire and irony, as other believe,” the Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote of Revueltas’s output. “That element, better and more pure . . . is his deep-felt but also joyful concern for man, animal, and things. It is the profound empathy with his surrounding which makes the works of this man, so naked, so defenseless, so hurt by the heavens and the people, more significant than those of many of his contemporaries.”
Sensemayá, Nicolás Guillén:
Canto para matar una culebra
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!
La culebra tiene los ojos de vidrio
la culebra viene y se enreda en un palo
Con sus ojos de vidrio, en un palo
Con sus ojos de vidrio
La culebra camina sin patas
La culebra se esconde en la yerba
Caminando se esconde en la yerba
Caminando sin patas
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé…
Additional Resources:
Silvestre Revueltas, Sensemayá, arr. Frank Bencriscutto
University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music Wind Orchestra, Glenn Price, conductor
Silvestre Revueltas, Sensemayá
Orquesta Sinfónica de la Juventud Venezolana Simón Bolívar, Gustavo Dudamel, conductor