How to go
What: The Springfield Symphony Orchestra with composer Alejandro Rutty
Where: Kuss Auditorium
When: 8 p.m. Saturday, with Rutty speaking about his music at 7:15 p.m. in Turner Studio Theatre
Tickets: $24 to $48 adults and $12 to $36 students, with a limited number of $15 adult tickets and $10 student tickets; visit springfieldsym.org or call (937) 328-3874.
SPRINGFIELD — Alejandro Rutty grew up like most any other 42-year-old, listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.
It hardly mattered that he grew up in Argentina.
But a funny thing happened when he moved to the U.S. for grad school in 1993 — he suddenly found himself longing for the music from back home.
The home-brewed stuff.
“It’s very weird,” said Rutty, the latest in a series of contemporary composers to visit town for a residency with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra. “There’s this expat thing. At some point, I started playing tango. I grew up listening to rock. Mostly British rock like Led Zeppelin and Yes and Pink Floyd. But in the air, there was Argentine tango and folk.
“As an expat, I somehow connected to that. It somehow found its way into my music.”
Did it ever.
When the SSO performs his 2008 piece, “The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops,” on Saturday, March 13, with Rutty himself in attendance, get ready for the ride of the season.
A rhythmic thrill ride, it’s like holding onto the tail feathers of a condor and praying to the ghost of Eva Peron that you can hang on for all 12 minutes as it swoops down out of the Andes and soars across the plains, smacking you in the face with pampas grass along the way.
Actually, Rutty was a city kid, having grown up in Buenos Aires, so scratch all that — it’s more like 1 a.m. at the discoteca.
“Yes, there’s a lot of energy,” he said. “It has so much stuff going on, you can’t get bored.”
If you get bored at this concert, please, check your pulse.
The entire program is culled from composers south of the border — from a Mexican and a Brazilian to, counting Rutty, three Argentineans.
One of them, the late Astor Piazzolla, is regarded as the master of the modern tango. Rutty’s piece even quotes Piazzolla’s piece, “Otono Portena.”
Of the contemporary composers on this season’s schedule, Rutty might very well be the edgiest, “and purposefully so,” said SSO music director Peter Stafford Wilson.
“We’ve had some rather conservative statements up to this point,” Wilson said. “I know we’re pushing the envelope here and some people won’t like it, but a lot of other people will be intrigued by it.”
The thing that will make it — not to mention the whole concert — palatable is the rhythm.
You never like to quote from a Miami Sound Machine song, but in this case, it just works.
The rhythm is, yes, gonna get you.
Rutty’s piece, Wilson said, has some dreamlike sequences, but it’s “extremely rhythmic.”
And experimental.
Citing Stockhausen as an influence, Rutty has set out to imitate the procedures of “artificial music-making” without the machines.
It’s all orchestra, baby, even when he once set out to orchestrate the effect known as reverb.
“There are many hours I spend doing that when I should be doing what’s important,” Rutty said, “which is hanging out with my family.”
True to the title, Rutty is taking his cues in this piece from the looping of samples in electronica.
“I don’t know how I did it,” he confessed, “but it’s an experience.”
As you’ll hear Saturday, South American composers in the 20th century found themselves doing what Aaron Copland was doing here in North America — bringing homegrown folk elements into the classical tradition.
“What I want to bring is the modern mix,” Rutty said. “I come from South America, but urban South America. In the same room, you’ve got old-timers playing Argentine music, plus the latest in electronica and international pop. That’s who I am. I’m a mixture of that.”
Now an assistant professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Rutty only truly discovered his homeland’s most cherished music, tango, in the late ’90s.
Now he plays tango regularly as the pianist with a sax quartet. His wife is the singer.
Playing tango was a revelation, he said, revealing a music filled with “subtlety and elegance.”
“I didn’t know that was in that music,” he said. “There were elements of that I wanted to put in my music. But it was already in my ears.”
He likened it to an American kid growing up in the ’70s and ’80s and not being fully aware of Duke Ellington or jazz.
“You know who he is and you know how it goes but you don’t care,” he said. “And suddenly you live in China and you start playing some of those charts.
“You realize how good it is.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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