Biography
Ernesto García de León
Ernesto García de León (born in 1952 in Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico) is a comptemporary Mexican Composer who specializes in guitar music, and whose works are becoming increasingly known internationally. His music evokes the town of his birth, Jáltipan, found in the south of the state of Veracruz. Jáltipan is located in the narrowest part of the country, no more than a three-hour drive from the Pacific Ocean and at the same time very close to the Gulf of Mexico, a region of verdant jungle and hot, humid climate. During the composer’s early childhood Jáltipan was a village of colonial architecture with tiled houses adjoining wide corridors lined with arches that covered sidewalks. These arched galleries ran alongside the street and protected pedestrians from the hot sun or frequent rains. It is this place that the composer recalls, that time, and the mood of rare melancholy that he felt in his first five years as he improvised music on a small marimba in the steamy, equatorial atmosphere.
The composer’s home in Jáltipan (before 1959.)
In August 1959 an earthquake entirely destroyed Jáltipan and during the 1960s a new village grew in its place devoid of the rich architectural flavor it had once had. During these years Ernesto García de León spent much of his time singing, composing popular music, and playing a variety of percussion instruments. He also played the Jarana, the four– or five–course Mexican folk guitar which in both physical form and musical function derives from the baroque guitar. One of his musical comrades was his older brother Antonio who is now an anthropologists. Antonio is also one of the most famous exponents of the Veracruz music, a renowned singer of the characteristic Jarocho song/dance son.
Encouraged by his father, a physician, national chess champion, and music-lover, Ernesto García de León added guitar to his instruments he was playing. In this time he also first heard a recording of Andrés Segovia. This happened in the house of David Haro, the now-renowned Veracruz troubadour who is the composer of the “Interludio” of Ni lo Pienses. Listening to Segovia and to the Beatles, immersing himself in Mexican folk music, pop songs and rhythms, jazz, bossa nova, and European classics, Ernesto García de León came to feel that music was infinite.
In these years he liked to go to the rivers to swim and fish, and he delighted in picking the abundant tropical fruits right off their trees, getting lost in the jungle, and going to the ocean where he and his friends would walk for two or three days on a deserted beach, alone with nothing but the sea on one side and the jungle on the other. On occasion he and his brother Antonio hiked to aboriginal communities in the middle of the jungle that had no communication with the outside world and stayed there for days.
The young composer.
Around the age of twelve, Ernesto García de León found a wooden plank in the patio of his home, a piece of timber with some nails in it. He tied rubber bands to the nails, and with his ear against the wood he plucked the rubber bands. On his homemade instrument he produced sounds unconnected to any music he knew and his imagination soared. He realized that sound was capable of being molded and that music was not restricted to the popular songs he had been writing and singing, that there was more. He decided to devote himself to composing, to studying in depth and learning how music speaks and expresses feelings that words cannot reach. From that moment to the present he has spent a large part of his time to improvisation, or rather, on a game of improvisation, and he feels that the freshness and spontaneity of his childhood self are the heart of his creativity.
When Ernesto García de León was fourteen years old his father died, but in his final days he restated his conviction to Ernesto’s mother that Ernesto should seriously study music, and he requested his two older sons to set their brother on that path. Three years later, in 1970, Ernesto García de León moved to Mexico City to study at the Music School of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). During his first two years there, he and David Haro worked together playing popular music in a group called “Las Almas” (“The Souls”), but from 1972 to 1978 he devoted himself entirely to classical guitar and composition and all they entail. As part of his training, he analyzed a considerable repertoire, and continues to do so; he played guitar music ranging from the renaissance to the contemporary; and he composed his first works, some which are represented in Collected Works, Volume One.
In 1977, the Cuban guitarist/composer Leo Brouwer visited Mexico City, and gave a concert and a series of classes in which he demonstrated the beauties of a repertoire beyond the Segovia canon. He encouraged people to compose, and by his own example showed the Mexican guitar community exciting new artistic possibilities. He advised García de León about composition and promoted his first appearance in Cuba (1979); in Cuba he introduced him to many Cuban composers, including the elderly José Ardevol whose Sonata García de León had played for Brouwer in their first encounter; and he gave a tremendous push to García de León’s realizing his own artistic potential. Before Brouwer, those who most influenced García de León’s music were Mexicans Manuel Ponce and Silvestre Revueltas and the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos, composers from the first half of the twentieth century. Most recently, García de León has much admired the ideas of the Brazilian Egberto Gismonti and the North American expatriate living in Mexico Conlon Nancarrow, both of whom he esteems for developing powerful personal styles informed by European, Oriental and African currents, but absolutely true to their American roots. Similarly García de León enriches his own music with foreign influences but identifies himself as a Mexican musician who imagines art as a Mexican.
The composer today.
During the 1980s Ernesto García de León participated in numerous conferences of Hispano-American composers; he became a founding member of “Nova Guitarra Música,” a group of Mexican guitarists and composers dedicated to disseminating contemporary guitar music; in 1988, he recorded Del Crepúsculo, the first disc solely dedicated to his music; and he gained an increasing renown for his music through performances by himself, Michael Lorimer, and by other guitarists in Mexico, North and South America, Europe and Asia.
Today Ernesto García de León lives in Mexico City; he teaches guitar at the UNAM and the Music School of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA), composes, and plays concerts exclusively of his own music. A typical García de León recital expresses what he is feeling at the moment and is made up on the spot; it consists of composed works (for example a sonata, a fantasia, or solo pieces) and improvisations. He has many friends, likes to read, draw (which he does very well), take walks, see films, and read poetry. He believes that everything that he feels and has experienced can be expressed through music and that music can directly take a person to places that words cannot. In 2009, García de León’s fifty seventh year, his catalogue has more than sixty opuses.
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Editor's Note: Article and images taken from Ernesto García de León, Collected Works, Volume One by Michael Lorimer, ed. Used by permission © 2009 by Adela Publishing (ASCAP).