ESTELLE SMITH
Copy Editor
The Gore Recital Hall was filled with applause as Alejandro Lobo walked back on stage with his Latin guitar to play an encore.
As he strummed out his final song, one of many he self-composed on a music program in Germany, family, friends and advisors hushed — only to enthusiastically applaud once more after the last note was played.
This was the last of a 10-piece concert that Lobo, a senior music composition major, wrote entirely himself to fulfill the ultimate graduation requirement for the major: Composing 50 minutes of music. Lobo’s concert amounted to about 65 minutes of music.
A total of 34 musicians performed, including 28 students, two faculty members and four guest professionals, one of whom is Lobo’s childhood friend Eloise Fox. She attends The Juilliard School.
The concert covered a wide range of music styles, mostly contemporary. Some pieces were inspired by bird songs, some took motifs from Latin music — honoring his dad’s homeland of Costa Rica — and one piece was entirely based on distinct rhythms in the Vietnamese language.
No piece was alike, but many had a theme inspired by sounds and processes outside traditional music composition.
“Differently to popular music or stuff like that, it’s sometimes beneficial to create your own style,” Lobo said. “You never want to write the same piece twice in the concert music world.”
Lobo explained that the strategy that he and many other composers use is to adjust the pre-compositional phase for each piece before the writing even begins.
His first piece, “The Burning Man,” was inspired by the 1963 self-immolation protest of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức during the leadup to the Vietnam War. Over four weeks, Lobo studied the Vietnamese language — not by knowing the meaning, but by listening to it — noticing recurring patterns and inflections and “transcribing” the language into music material for what became a six-person percussion piece.
Lobo focused on whether a pattern ended on an upward or downward inflection. In the piece, this materialized in distinct breathing patterns of the musicians in the beginning and the end. The last breath is only an inhale, leaving the audience waiting for the exhale without satisfaction.
“Processes similar to that are applied to other pieces here,” Lobo said. “Whether it be the transcribed bird song or trying to use something to help inform the material, so that every note and everything is intentional.”
There were two pieces that Lobo did this with, taking inspiration from bird movements and songs. The first, “Homenaje a Costa Rica,” a three-movement marimba piece he wrote in honor of his grandfather, pays homage to the capital city San José, the cloud forests of Monteverde and his family’s beach house in Tivives.
In the cloud forest movement, Lobo encapsulates the native Costa Rican bird, the resplendent quetzal, by having the marimba player sweep his mallets quickly up and down the instrument, creating a whooshing effect. This is in reference to the bird’s long, colorful tail feather that flicks about when it flies from tree to tree in the jungle.
The other piece he does this in is called “Parrot Food,” written for his family’s 45-year-old parrot named Pelé. The song was a flute solo played by his friend Robbie Strauss who traveled from Baltimore, where he attends the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University.
Strauss learned the piece in about a week and a half, communicating with Lobo via text message and recording to ensure he encapsulated the imagery of the bird’s various shenanigans; scaring unsuspecting contractors and making Zoom classes during the pandemic very interesting, to name a few.
“It was so bad because all four of us were in the house doing Zooms from different rooms,” Lobo said. “He was having so much fun that everyone was home, and he just started screaming and yelling and singing in the other room.”
Other pieces took on more serious tones than that but had the same theme of transcription from real life. “Callous Pages Turned By A Tortured Friend” explores the various aspects of decay, particularly aging buildings and machinery.
Lobo took inspiration from the ancient Aztec civilization, Pompeii and fossils that are no longer useful to society. Using what he called “amoral” and “textural” elements — like groaning, creaking and breathing effects — Lobo compared the process to a painter using different materials. The non-traditional uses of the instruments, like the cellist dragging his bow across the wood and the pianist sliding a card across the keys, gave the piece a cinematic quality.
“I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter, but it matters very little what pitch you play,” Lobo said. “You could play the wrong note in a lot of points of that piece, and it still worked completely fine because it relied on an atmosphere.”
To make this all happen, Lobo credits the university’s Honors College as well as his two composition teachers Yoshiaki Onishi and Rachael Smith for their support throughout the process.
Looking forward, Lobo thinks concert music will become his focus in the long run, meant to be listened to on streaming platforms. He is beginning to write for larger groups like chamber orchestras, symphonic bands, wind bands, full choirs and large orchestras, for which he will blend similar elements to those used in this concert.
Next spring, a big project for a 15-person sinfonietta — chamber orchestra — will premiere.
“I hope to make even more moving and multilayered music with the use of more instruments and possibilities at my disposal,” Lobo said.
