Interview, Sean Shibe on Profesión - Barrios, Villa-Lobos and Ginastera

A thoughtful, exploratory programme from Sean Shibe should by now be no surprise. The guitarist has made a reputation as someone with a knack for assembling 'concept' albums that draw together disparate strands from the four corners of the musical globe, and weave them as if by magic into a cogent whole.

In Profesión, Shibe focuses his attention on the Latin American school of guitar playing, with works by Barrios, Villa-Lobos and Ginastera. Not just a heady mix of Romantic colour and expression, they also represent a selection of different approaches towards the musical heritage of Old Europe and the South American context. From Barrios's adoption of an indigenous alter ego to Villa-Lobos's evocation of the sounds and landscapes of Brazil, it's a complex and ever-shifting relationship that resists a simple summing-up.

As on his recent Grammy-nominated collaboration with tenor Karim Sulayman, Broken Branches, Shibe doesn't try to offer anything so straightforward as a clear answer, but rather revels in exploring the twists and turns of how music responded to that tension over the first decades of the last century.

I spoke to Sean Shibe about the works on this album, and some of the seemingly paradoxical questions they raise about musical and personal identity.

And don't miss our special offer on Sean Shibe's albums on Delphian and Pentatone, running until 25th December 2023!

Personal friendships and meetings between musicians seem to have been the direct inspiration for several of the works on this album, even if some of those friendships later cooled. How much of a role has this kind of serendipity played in your own career?

Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? Of course, luck plays a part, but in terms of these kind of meetings where we're bumping into one another... obviously Villa-Lobos and Segovia knew of each other before. And that's kind of why they were already in that setting.

I guess there are a lot of forces around such people which plan to get them together in one way or another. It's just the way society works, isn't it? But obviously in the digital age and the social media and that kind of thing, I guess there are two sides. It's easier to be able to directly reach out to somebody, but at the same time, we're also flooded with people reaching out. And actually, I'm not sure it gets through that much more.

It's almost too easy, in a sense - even though that sounds like a very gatekeeperish thing to say...

But it kind of is like that! We're just behind lots of extra middlemen.

In terms of my own career - I've had lucky streaks and I've had some unfortunate things happen as well, and that's just the way it goes. You take advantage as best you can of the positives that come your way.

Why did Segovia pay such (relatively) little attention to Latin American guitar music? Is there a sense of him being put off by its brush-strokes sometimes being, as Julian Bream said, “large and vigorous” compared to the style he was used to?

He obviously had a big ego; when he complimented John Williams he called him the prince of the guitar, implying that he himself was the king! Probably a lot of the places you'd look, even outside South America, you'd find a similar kind of power dynamic, just because of who he was.

I don't think he was actually against Latin American guitar music, and obviously he was really fond of Manuel Maria Ponce's guitar music as well. It's very, very different to the other stuff.

The Barrios is quite elegant, but certainly with the Villa-Lobos and Ginastera there's an element of earthiness, and a rawness, I'd say. 'Unrefined', but in the sense of unrefined sugar being so rich and full of colour.

Or in the sense that everything's still there - things are left in, which some other composers might 'refine' out of their music?

Yes. Like skimmed milk, rather than like distillation! So in that sense the Latin American music is very full-fat.

Although Barrios had some Guaraní ancestry, the period where he adopted the stage persona of an indigenous chieftain when performing still raises some eyebrows. How much do you think this was cynical marketing - 'Othering' himself as a selling-point - and how much a genuine exploration of his roots?

It's almost definitely both. There certainly was a marketing angle to it, but there's more than that.

In 1929 Barrios arrives in Brazil, and he'd given a performance in Buenos Aires in 1928 which had been so badly attended that he'd been forced to cancel the second planned concert. So he essentially did a runner - and this damaging reception had happened in what was at that time the most cosmopolitan of Latin American countries. It was demoralising and he simply vowed to abandon Argentina after its audiences had rejected him. So he was searching for an alternative aesthetic with which to counter these reactions.

Even before he took on this persona, of course, he was playing his own compositions and they had this deep rootedness in that identity, but in terms of the visual element and the theatrics, this was when that began. As Andrew Ward says in his Masters thesis on the subject: "When Barrios ventured into the remote regions of Brazil [...] he began to adopt the persona of Mangoré, an identity taken from a Guaraní chief who had died resisting the Spanish invaders [...] This was a notion which had played in Barrios's imagination for 20 years, [now] augmented by theatrical effects of makeup and costume."

So it sounds like not only did he need a 'gimmick' in a hurry, but he'd also been musing on this question of identity for a while?

Yes, I'd say so. There's a concert in Guatemala in 1933 where the newspaper critic comments that the audience had expected "a disaster, a fatal musical calamity", but after hearing some of his compositions they became more enthusiastic. So it definitely worked!

In later years, he would perform the first half of his concerts in conventional attire and the second half in Indian dress, which is rather fun. And I think that sense of his personality extends into the music; dividing his concerts between arrangements of (say) Paganini, and Classical and Romantic-sounding things like that, and his own music.

So in one sense it does feel a bit like appropriative dressing-up, but to me it's more like how pop stars use different outfits to emphasise different musical things. And obviously he's backed up slightly in that he actually is part Guaraní in his heritage.

You allude to a “deference to Europe” persisting among Latin American composers; but is there a sense of the Spanish guitar virtuoso tradition crossing the Atlantic and being inherited by the New World?

Overall, what I'm trying to do with the album is set out that there is a trajectory, or an ascent, towards a kind of South American destiny. Beginning with some of the most conservative South American language that really does use the most revered Western names as a genesis, and then towards using them as hallucinatory, ghostly aspects as in the Ginastera.

Or the twelve Villa-Lobos études; what's amazing about them is not so much what they do individually - Villa-Lobos wrote about two thousand pieces, and some of them are a bit hit and miss! But it's the way they move from these very homage-like pieces into these evocations of the rainforest and distant drums. It's as if he's marking this change himself. And so these pieces, although they're maybe not as perfectly-formed as his five preludes, they take us from Barrios into the sort of musical territory where Ginastera was operating.

Almost like a microcosm of the whole journey?

Yes - and of that historical change. What I also really like is that when the Ginastera finally arrives - and he's probably the person that most sums up that kind of terrifying, phantasmagorical aspect - this open chord of the guitar strings has been tolling his whole life. He's used it in the harp concerto, he's used it in his piano music as an ostinato or a harmonic basis, and finally it's come home to this instrument: Now the guitar has its own space, this is what the instrument was meant to do.

One thing that’s odd in a sense about all these expressions of South American identity is how late they are. History records plenty of political/military self-determination efforts throughout the nineteenth century (likewise in Europe), yet these works are mostly from the early twentieth century - why did those sentiments take so long to take musical form?

It's an interesting point.

Certainly Ginastera, for instance, divided his own career into three stages: "objective nationalism", "subjective nationalism" and "neo-expressionism" - and by the end of his career of course he's realised that these are not distinct stages but a slowly-evolving continuum (and to a lot of academics and to Ginastera himself that late sonata for guitar went beyond these distinct stages and took elements from each).

There's maybe an element of these composers setting themselves up as national 'bards', the way we think of Dvořák and people like that in Europe during that era of Romantic nationalism - but actually Ginastera talks about himself being overlooked by the people who were in that bard-like role in his time, and that this was why it took him a long time to become known.

He never makes that kind of definite statement, as in "I am the voice of Argentina in the twentieth century", and I'm not sure how much he felt that on a personal level, but what I wanted to do by including his music was to draw attention to the details in each of the movements that touch on things that are very Argentinian.

There's also, let's face it, a deep debt to Europe - and Ginastera did eventually settle in Switzerland.

And the same for the other composers - they're not so interested in providing a musical rallying-cry?

No - except insofar as the guitar is a much more essentially Latin American instrument. So the use of it says something in itself. And the instrument's presence - down to things like the sound of its open strings - occupies a place in these composers' formative musical compositions that even predates their use of the guitar itself.

One of the central planks of the album is that it's not like an album of, say, English guitar music where the guitar is used as a vehicle for Englishness; this is all repertoire where the guitar simply is the national identity, to an extent. The work of "making it one's own" doesn't need to be done in the same way as it would in that English context.