Sunday, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller declared October 26 Nicolás Lell Benavides Day. It was at the New Mexico premier of the composer’s new opera Dolores, about his cousin, Dolores Huerta.
Now Benavides has released an album titled Canto Caló. It’s a two part work in Spanish and accompanied by a four string quartet that he calls a love letter to New Mexico and his heritage. He spoke with KUNM’s Mia Casas.
NICOLÁS LELL BENAVIDES: It was one of those projects that sort of grew and grew out of something smaller. I wasn't originally working on this album. I got commissioned to write a song inspired by my grandfather, who had recently passed away, maybe in 2018. He was really amazing. He was like one of a dozen kids, and he hitchhiked from Albuquerque to Oakland when he was 14, and he worked as the mambo dance teacher in the ballrooms because he didn't have, like, a formal education. Then his life got upended when he got drafted into the Korean War. On the boat ride, he wrote a poem, which became Canción de guerra, that he recited to himself over and over again to placate himself, because he was getting nerves, he was getting a little scared on the boat ride over to be in the army. In hospice he was like, dancing until his like, last month of life, right? He was just like, so pumped for us all to be visiting him in his room. He was like throwing parties. The nurses were like, what's going on in there? Like, and then he had recited this to me before, but he's like, ‘Come here, I want to tell you something.’ And he recited this poem for me. And he's like, ‘you know, I wrote this to myself, and I think it's really cool.’ I was like, actually, it is really cool. And I went home, and after he passed, I kept mulling it over. So I wrote this song, the third song in the set Canción de guerra is one of those things that people just enjoyed the first little few minutes of it, and then it just kept growing.
KUNM: Tell me about one of your favorite pieces from this work.
BENAVIDES: For each one, there's two different pieces, right? El Correcaminos was commissioned a few years ago by a string quartet, friction quartet. I actually love the third movement, which is the hardest one for the string quartet, which is called Tadi, and in the piece, I go backwards through time what the symbol of the roadrunner meant to each, basically, group of people who arrived in this land, and to them, the roadrunner had a symmetrical feet, and it was sort of a spirit of warding off bad spirits. It was seen as a protector, and it's because it's hard to track. It's got these symmetrical, I'm doing for you, like these two toes and two toes kind of situation, you know, and you can't see, if you're not trained, if it's going forward or backward in the dirt. And I wrote these sort of four-note groupings, and it's really slow and really difficult because the strings are so exposed, and it sounds kind of ancient, but it's so hard for the strings to do because it's just an intonation nightmare. But when they pull it off, it's very meditative and it's very hypnotizing, I think. In Canto Caló, I really love Canción de guerra, the one that my grandfather wrote, and I set this very slow song for it to honor his words, and he was a very brave man, but I wanted to show the fear that I would have felt if I was in a boat on my way to war. I mean, only a fool would not feel fearful, right? So it's very hesitant. It has the throwback, I think, folksy melody, but it's also very eerie, because war is very eerie.
KUNM: What is the overall message you'd want people to receive while listening to Canto Caló?
BENAVIDES: Well, there's two messages I could think of. One of them is for New Mexicans, which is, we should be so proud of who we are. And I know we are like we always say we are. But I think there is this idea that so much of American history happened in Boston, in New York and DC, and we're constantly passed over. They see us as like, ‘Oh, I like to go there so I could see the outdoors.’ You know, they don't think about what we've contributed as people, as culture. Great people have come from here. Great artistic movements have come from here and have settled here, right? It's one of the great states in the union, I think. And so we should be proud as New Mexicans of what we've done to the national conversation and politics and in art and everything. But at the same time, for everybody else who's not New Mexican, who's maybe chuffed at me saying our state is better than yours, you know, I think this is actually a great project to think about, like, where do you come from? This whole project is me exploring where I come from. I'm not saying I have the answers. I'm not saying I know better than anybody else. I'm just saying, to make this album, I researched, when did people come to the state for El Correcaminos, for example, and what do the symbol of the roadrunner mean to them? All that research isn’t in the music, you can't hear that by listening to the music, but I couldn't have written the piece if I hadn't thought about those things.
