Wilfrido Terrazas: Trilogía del Dolor—An Investigation of Human Pain in Three Parts. Wilfrido Terrazas, narrator and flutes; Miguel Zazueta, tenor; Madison Greenstone, clarinet; rocio sánchez [sic], cello; Mariana Flores Bucio, soprano; Camilo Zamudio, percussion. New Focus Recordings. $18.99.
It is a curiosity of the human spirit that extended dwelling on pleasure tends to come across as unseemly, while prolonged meditation on pain appears profound. Certainly Wilfrido Terrazas (born 1974) is seeking depth, both musical and verbal, in his hour-plus-long, three-part meditation, Trilogía del Dolor. Whether the material will resonate with listeners will be a highly personal matter: other long-drawn-out music focused on pain – Mahler’s and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphonies come to mind – tends to search for context and moments of lightness (or at least wryness) for purposes of contrast, but Terrazas stays relentlessly on target from start to finish, relying on alterations of instrumentation and the use of words from numerous sources to provide some differences of perspective among the work’s 11 pain-focused movements.
Terrazas’ work is entirely in Spanish, as are the titles of its first two sections, Llevarás el nombre (“You will bear the name”) and Pequeña familia (“Small family”). The third section, however. has an English-language title, Ten Thousand Regrets, even though all its verbiage is in Spanish. The sources of the words are poems by Nuria Manzur-Wirth in the three elements of the first section; texts by Terrazas himself in the three parts of the second; and poems by Ricardo Cázares, Tania Favela, Mónica Morales Rocha, and Nadia Mondragón in the five portions of the third. On the face of it, Trilogía de Dolor would seem to be an extended expression of ego and self-importance by the composer, given his participation as text provider, narrator and instrumentalist; but the words themselves are intended to convey a sense of the universality of pain as a human experience rather than to delve into and duplicate Terrazas’ own experiences of it (except insofar as he is himself a member of the human family).
The music underlying and underlining the words is rather less intense, less dramatic and less pain-pervaded than the words themselves: there is nothing here akin to the finales of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth or Mahler’s. The instrumentation is sparse: flutes alone in the first section, clarinet and cello in the second, and a small ensemble in the third consisting of flutes, clarinet, cello and percussion. There is something theatrical in the construction of Trilogía del Dolor, which in fact is designed to include a visual artist in live performance. The theatricality comes through well enough, however, without any overt visual element: it is the expressive nature of the verbal delivery that projects sincerity and intended engagement with the audience.
The nature of the music also contributes to the sense of a stage performance. Less off-putting than much avant-garde material, although certainly existing within the common contemporary musical space of blended forms, aural experimentation, improvisation and extended performance practice, Trilogía del Dolor is in effect a chamber opera of the besieged soul, an exploration of the sadness of everyday life, of memory, of relationships, of intersections and interactions with the external world – all with a perhaps-inevitable conclusion, intended to be comforting, that combines resignation with a certain degree of healing and gratitude. Terrazas takes listeners on this journey with a number of less-than-unusual harmonic forays and a few moves into the aurally unexpected: a breath of bolero here, note flurries there, fragile wind/string interaction in one place, cacophony in another, thinness of sound in several places, lusher harmonies in a few.
Trilogía del Dolor is most effective when it is most restrained both verbally and musically: it does go on for quite a long time with its unerring focus on matters more melancholic than depressive, but it works best when it does not overdo the dolorousness or try to turn elements of everyday existence into some sort of deep existential tragedy. Indeed, Terrazas shows through his choice of texts and arrangements of accompanying music that he regards pain as an inescapable and perpetual element of human existence, an experience shared by all in the human condition and one that, indeed, cements the interconnectedness of humanity. This is a valid if scarcely original conceit that has the advantage of removing some of pain’s sting by subsuming personal experience into the communal. Trilogía del Dolor does somewhat “protest too much” in its variations, verbal and textual, upon its single focus, and as a result is not entirely convincing throughout . But Terrazas’ skill at weaving differing combinations of vocal and instrumental material together helps keep this extended self-meditation effective, if not exactly enjoyable, and prevents it from coming across as simply self-referential navel gazing. It is less deep than it wants to be, but does touch with sensitivity on an essential element of what makes us human.
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