Child's Cantata makes plea for Nicaragua

Peter Child says he composed his new cantata "Estrella" as his personal response "to the history of Central America, particularly the history of Nicaragua. I have been moved by the pathos of the story of this poor, small country's effort to shake off appalling tyranny, an effor systematically undermined by a huge, rich powerful nation to the north."

Child wrote "Estrella" for the Cantata Singers through a commission from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities; the first performance, a major event of American Music Week, will be Saturday in Jordan Hall. The soloists will be mezzo-soprano Gloria Raymond and baritone John Osborn.

Child says he began to think about writing such a work a long time ago when he made the discovery that Nicaragua was a land of poets. "I was studying this poetry two years ago in a leisurely way. Then, when Congress restored military aid to the contras, I was so enraged, so furious, and impotent, that I determined to write something about it. I called the Cantata Singers' music director, David Hoose, and asked if he would be interested in a work on this subject, and he immediately said 'yes.' I had been afraid he might balk at the potentially tendentious nature of such a project. Instead, the Cantata Singers prepared a proposal for the Mass. Council."

Child is particularly happy to be working with an ensemble he admires. "The concerts I go to are mostly of new work, but I have followed the Cantata Singers for years, and I love their concerts, which I find enriching and informative. I have always wanted to write a piece for them."

The composer drew the texts for "Estrella" from an anthology that depicts the history of Nicaragua through its poetry, "Nicaragua in Revolution"; he settled on poems by Ernesto Cardenal and Pablo Antonio Cuadra, which he supplements with passages from the Chilean Pablo Neruda. "It is a high language of almost biblical grandeur; I wanted to emphasize that quality of the poetry through the way I set it to music." the cantata is in two parts: The first part depicts the background to the guerrila war against the Marines by Augusto Cesar Sandino, and the second part concerns the events leanding up tot he assassination of Sandino in 1934. The image of a star ("estrella") is repeatedly prominent in the texts and generates an important motive in the music.

The composer says he has made no attempt to sound Latin-American in his cantata, and he was anxious to avoid the tendentiousness that is the principal drawback of political art. "The philosophical content is taken care of by the texts. Once I had selected them, I then just tried to write the best music I possibly could, hoping to universalize the themes of courage and sacrifice, of good and evil. THat's what the music of Back and Handel does. I am a nonreligious person, but if I were ever converted, that music would do it."

In fact, although "Estrella" is stylistically consistent with Child's other music, the formal model is Bach; the rest of the Cantata Singers program, in fact, consists of Bach's Cantatas 21 ("Ich hatte viel Bekuemmernis"; "I had so much distress and woe") and 39 ("Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot"; "Break with hungry men thy bread"). Child's instrumental ensemble is Bach-like, and there is a chorale melody that figures in the same way the cantus firmus does in a chorale cantata. At intervals, the poem by Cardenal cites the Mexican revolutionary love sone "La Adelita." "I looked it up," said Child, "but found that I would have to adapt it so that it would be consistent with the rest of the music. I kept the rhythms and the contours of the melody, but I recomposed the pitches."

There is a certain kind of arts-council, national-endowment art in which more energy seems to have gone into making a politically effective grant application than into the work itself, but it is unlikely that "Estrella" will fall into that category. Child's passionate commitments to causes are palpable, and their diversity can be traced in the course of his career.

Child was born in England, in Lowestoft, the same town in Suffolk where Benjamin Britten was born. " When I was a child," the composer recalls, "Britten would come to our school, and we met him. I'm now 35, but I'm sure those visits had some influence on my present-day attitudes."

Child began to compose early. "I was learning the violin, and the will to compose came as an instinctive reaction to learning to play; immediately, I wanted to make my own tunes. My parents encouraged me, and I began composition lessons right away so I could learn the technical aspects of music that one has to learn in order to be a composer. And I wanted to be a composer right away; it's just as well I didn't want to be a violinist.

In 1973, Child came to America to attend Reed College as a transfer student; he had no idea that he would make the United States his home. After he graduated from Reed in 1975, he traveled to India to study South Indian music. "This nurtured my respect for world music; I learned the sophistication and depth of music different from our own. But there's no direct influence on my own music." Then he came to Brandeis as a graduate student. "My adviser at Reed had been at Brandeis, and I knew they had a very strong composition department in Arther Berger, Seymour Shifrin and Harold Shapiro." For the last three years, he has taught at MIT.

Child says that competitions and the interest of performers in his work have been instrumental in shaping his career as a composer. "In 1979, I won a competition sponsored by WGBH, and the Boston Musica Viva performed my Duo for Flute and Percussion. Richard Pittman, director of BMV, liked it, and asked me for something else. John Heiss at the New England Conservatory liked that, and commissioned a piece for them, "Clare Cycle." Then Collage played it, and Frank Epstein, it's director, asked me to write something for them.

Currently, Child is working on a second string quartet, a piece for Collage, and he has begun discussions with John Oliver Chorale about writing a choral work addressing the AIDS crisis. "I keep thinking about Britten's 'War Requiem,' and his wonderful idea of combining modern poetry with the ancient liturgical texts."