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NOTAS MAGAZINE
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Semblanzas
Hugo Blanco |
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 Born in Caracas and a plainsman of heart, this man has succeeded in the world not only because the musical quality of his work, but also because of that personal conviction that makes him conceive the composer as a public server.
"History has demonstrated that the great artists do not become famous in history because of their best pieces, but because of those that the public accepts”. So smart are the words that sometimes Hugo Blanco uses to explain the reason of his compositions success.
And as he himself describes it, the composer must be a public server whose main objective is to compose for the people who are going to listen to, dance with and sing his music. According to what he recommends, “you should never compose for yourself or for the traditionalist critics who try to explain music".
This honesty flows much more when he insists that he has always done what he likes even though it might not be the best to some other people. “It happened to me once, after having listened the sound that the clavichord produces, I felt like including it into a rhythm that I had created – the Orquidea rhythm. Even though it was the fusion of many other Caribbean melodies, the musicians who were with me thought that I was crazy for having included a Cuban style sound in Creole music. At the end I did it because I liked it and the rhythm became the Venezuelan melody best known in the world".
As he points it out, the Orquidea rhythm was the result of the influence he received when he was young, the time when he used to listen to opera, merengue, ranchera, Perez Prado’s mambos and Billo or Luis Alfonzo Larrain’s dance music.
Notas Magazine. – Then, was that your first success?
Hugo Blanco.- The best period of my artistic life started with the Orquidea rhythm. Before inventing it, I composed other pieces, some of which were included in the record Calle Alborada that we, the members of the Liceo Aplicación musical group, recorded. But they never went too far.
N.M.- Which was the top composition in the Orquidea rhythm?
H.B.- With the birth of Orquidea the very famous Moliendo Café which was, at the beginning, an instrumental piece. Part of the history of this piece is in its name: What happens is that the sound engineer I worked with took the phrase ground coffee from a shopping list that he had handy to identify the piece that he had just recorded. I did not dislike this title. The only change that I made was to give it some more movement until we got to Moliendo Café.
N.M.- Your musical activity after Orquidea and, of course, after Moliendo Café, has been famous. But what about your first composition?
H.B.- My beginnings as a composer were at a Venezuelan music university contest. Those days, I was starting to study engineering. The idea of taking part in the contest made me write a song for the cuatro that I called Tú. The result was terrible. My song was eliminated because the jury considered it to be too modern to be Venezuelan.
N.M.- This jury’s argument made me think of how difficult it is for a Creole music composer to make that his pieces get to all types of public.
H.B.- As you precisely say, it is very difficult for Creole music to be accepted in all the markets. Differently from other Latin American rhythms, Venezuelan music is not easy to export because its composition is to three beats which makes it difficult for the public to understand it. To make it more popular, its important to change it to four beats because it is what sounds the most in the world. Even though he does not have an exact number of record and work pieces that he has composed, his ability to compose musical rhythms that are so different among themselves such as merengue (María Morena, Leche Condensada), Creole music (La Vecina) and children’s songs (El Burrito de Belén) is astonishing.
"My secret is listening to what the public wants and adding an extra and innovative ingredient to what already exists".
To Hugo Blanco, the pirate activity that has grown so much in the country is not new |
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Editorial
