Challenges and perspectives of performative analysis in contemporary music: the case of Andrés Alén’s Theme and Variations (on a Silvio Rodríguez’s theme)
From incipient theoretical works to developed proposals, with a focus on transdisciplinarity, musical analysis has proven effective in addressing the concerns of performers, composers, and musicologists regarding how to acoustically realize a work of written-tradition music, particularly when comprehending the notated text in the score is problematic and intuition alone is insufficient.This research draws upon the 20th-century heritage of music performance studies, encompassing both the earlier focus on the score and the more recent emphasis on sound documents and the recognition of the plurality of musical interpretation. Under the category of “performative analysis,” the study adopts a methodological approach that involves interpreting both types of documents related to the execution of a piece of contemporary Cuban music repertoire: Andrés Alén’s “Tema con variaciones (sobre un tema de Silvio Rodríguez)” , Theme and Variations (on a Silvio Rodríguez’s theme), 1999. Alén is one of the most versatile and accomplished contemporary Cuban musicians, having worked as a concert pianist, jazzman, arranger, composer, and pedagogue. His compositional language demonstrates an integration of cultured, popular, and jazz elements, reflecting his involvement in both the oral and written traditions of the Cuban musical scene. The pandiatonic writing and the evident “polystilism” in this work of analysis, demonstrated to the extent that the theme is transformed towards its aesthetic horizon of destiny (sometimes quite distant one from the other, since jazz, baroque music, contradanza, popular dance music, or song converge curiously) present numerous challenges for the researcher regarding which methodologies and analytical tools to apply with this type of postmodern creation. The paper begins with a theoretical exegesis of the terms “execution,” “interpretation,” and “performance.” Subsequently, the limitations imposed by the work’s structure and inherent factors (examined through an evaluation of pitch and duration) are analyzed, and performance solutions are proposed and compared with the individual proposals of four performers, including the composer himself. The theoretical models of Eugene Narmour (1988) and Wallace Berry (1989) are applied, along with observations of sound recordings using Sonic Visualiser software. This exercise assumes that a musical work is subject to constant codification and interpretation by the actors involved in its life cycle: the composer, the performer, and the listener. The identification and analysis of different performances allow us to trace the path of the work’s young interpretative history (Interpretationsgeschichte). This, together with the history of reception (Wirkungsgeschichte), are emerging fields of study in musicology that find fertile ground in contemporary music due to the availability of information.In its pragmatic aim to offer performative solutions to the diverse problems arising from the notated text, the research highlights the work’s connections to historical memory, popular tradition, and the folklore of Cuban musical identity.
Keywords: performance, performative analysis, Andrés Alén, Theme and Variations
Biography
Adrian Alvarez Gálvez (1997) is a Cuban musicologist, researcher, and communicator. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in Social Communication (2021) and a Master’s in Management of Historical-Documentary Heritage of Music (2023) both from the Universidad de La Habana/University of Havana. He also earned a Master’s in Hispanic Music (2024) from the Universidad de Valladolid/University of Valladolid (UVa). Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Musicology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid/ Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). He was awarded a Santander Bank Ibero-America + Asia Student Scholarship for pursuing his Master studies at UVa and the Santander-UCM Predoctoral Contract (CT25/24) for the 2024-2025 academic year, enabling him to continue his official PhD studies in Musicology, as a Predoctoral Researcher in Training in the Department of Musicology at UCM. Additionally, he received a DAAD scholarship for a short research stay at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/Humboldt University (Germany, 2025).
Complutense University of Madrid, Spain – adrianpiano88@gmail.com