Pepe Gavilondo announced his departure from Síntesis after appearing as the band’s keyboardist for a decade. It is not the only news. He has also announced the completion of other projects that had tied his body and soul for years.
Although Gavilondo is today an established artist, it was not always like this, when the most contemporary and risky music did not swarm through the island’s sound universe. Creating would become a necessity for him. The same one that is making him escape from the security built for years to close the circle and launch himself into new, unknown waters.
Gavilondo feels privileged. None of those professional and emotional commitments even remotely loomed when he graduated from ISA at the end of 2013 and he didn’t know what to do with his life.
It is a similar feeling that leads him to make these changes and close a cycle in his career and his life. With Ensemble he has announced his first and last tour of Europe. According to his metaphor, he is the swan that before dying decides to give his last song. He wants to live outside of Cuba. He wants to know, feel, smell, see; experiences, people, places. Elements that contribute to his purest state, that of a composer.
What has it been like to say goodbye to Síntesis after ten years?
It wasn’t easy, like all goodbyes after so long. A decade of work, so much family, so many beautiful experiences… There comes a time when I thought it was time for someone else to take the baton.
This decision is not isolated, it has to do with how I feel at this moment in my life. I am ending not only with Síntesis, but with other projects and with a lifestyle, or at least with a chapter of my career as a musician that has lasted almost fifteen years.
I think that for me, it is also time to rest a little and see what I can explore beyond Cuba. Almost my entire career, although I have traveled and had a lot of experience abroad, has been consolidated and taken place in Cuba. Síntesis is a part of that; it hurt a lot to walk away, but I had, for a change, a lot of support from Carlos and Ele and from all my friends in the group. It makes me very happy to see them happy with the new person who stayed (Marlon Bordas), who is a tremendous musician. Life is like that, cycles. They begin, they end; we have to continue, we have to move forward.
You once mentioned that your contribution to Síntesis was, above all, commitment (Magazine AM:PM 2019). What was your legacy at Síntesis?
From a practical point of view, I did not creatively contribute as much as Lucía Huergo did in the beginning, or Esteban Puebla or X, who not only became keyboard legends in Cuba but also composed many songs, made many arrangements. They were musical directors together with Carlos. I really stayed in the role of performer, always making my contributions, developing ideas with Carlos, but I never composed a song or made arrangements.
It does make sense that my contribution has been that intensity and that physical and emotional commitment that I have put into that music, because it is my only way — at least that is how I have felt — to complete the cycle with what that music leaves me.
Síntesis’ music has taught me so much, it has purified my soul so much, that the least I can do is give it my 150% when I play.
I’m sure Ele and Carlos wouldn’t like me to think that, as if my only contribution to Síntesis had been jumping around on stage; not at all, and I’m aware of that too. At certain times I have served as a translator of Carlos’s ideas. At other times I have provided good energy and organization, something I am very good at.
Creatively it was not a group in which I exploded by any means; but I did contribute a new way of playing and conceiving the interpretation of those very anthological keyboards, consolidated by Esteban Puebla, Lucía Huergo, Ernán López-Nussa, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, José María Vitier. It really is a strong legacy, and it is strong to follow in the footsteps of all those people.
Knowing what my capabilities were, I took it where I could and enjoyed it very much.
I suppose your decision to leave had to do with those concerns about composing, and in Síntesis, as you mention, you had a more interpretive role.
It didn’t have much to do with it. As I said, the decision is part of a series of decisions I am making in my life at this point. I was never really uncomfortable with that role as an interpreter, quite the contrary. My creative side could be poured into other worlds, like in Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana.
In Síntesis I was always interested in mastering the interpretive part more because it is a world to which I arrived knowing absolutely nothing. Neither the music of Síntesis, nor jazz, nor Afro-Cuban music. In terms of interpretation and how I conceive playing the piano and keyboards, Síntesis gave me a lot.
I listened to that music a lot before joining the group; but until then, except for my experience as an arranger, musical director and pianist in trova groups — like with Ariel Díaz, for example, with whom I have had a very long collaboration over the years —, I had really focused on concert music, academic composition, sheet music.
The year I entered Síntesis, 2014, was very important. I co-created the Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana, and that whole part began to merge and I began to make music for dance and film more consistently at that time. They were processes that occurred more or less simultaneously, but definitely with Síntesis and the theme of working with keyboards, with synthesizers, the base, the bass, drum, percussions and electric guitar, influenced me a lot.
Nowadays, happily, whenever I’m composing I find myself using many concepts that I learned from Carlos and how he conceives Síntesis music in a general way. Those creative-aesthetic concepts of composition have influenced me greatly.
You’ve already mentioned it. 2014 is a crucial year in your career. You start with Síntesis, co-create EIH and later start composing for dance and film. How do you flow with all those artistic projects in your personal life and in your character as a composer?
I started composing in 2005 when I was studying composition with Juan Piñera. Then I entered ISA and graduated. I would say that until 2014-2015, when I recorded my album thanks to the Conmutaciones Scholarship that I obtained from the Hermanos Saíz Association and that I can record my symphonic chamber music album, Voces del subconsciente, I maintained a more stable role as a composer. The more I got into into Síntesis, into Ensemble, when I started working for Acosta Danza in 2017 and with other choreographers, and I started making more music for film and audiovisuals consistently, I found myself (it has a lot to do with why I am making these decisions) in a purely collective creative aspect, which was the best thing that could have happened to me in my life.
Learning to create in collaboration with other people or for other people has been my most vital experience as a musician and as an artist, but it meant expressly diving into those types of collaborations. Music for dance is not just you; you are collaborating with another creator; with film music, it is the same. You are making many commitments, you are modifying your way of conceiving an aesthetic, a style, a music, for the common good of the choreographic piece, the audiovisual piece, documentaries, short films, whatever. With Ensemble, it is also pure collective creation.
I would say that since 2017 what all of this did was distort that soul, or that ego necessary to be an individual creator, a composer. I distorted it so much that I really unlearned how to make music for myself. Now I find myself at a point where I have worked so much for other people and with other people — and I want to clarify that I am not tired of doing that at all — that for months I have had many ideas, many desires to do specific things, and I have no time.
I didn’t have the hours that one needs to compose a symphony, a concert. In 2020 it was like being reborn a little, but in 2021, when we began to recover from the pandemic, I once again stopped having time. I have learned so much to create music and create art with other people, that now I feel that I have many tools to translate what I have here in my head, which are my most private, most personal things, into music. But it has to be an individual process, at least at the beginning.
Looking back, I have had a privileged life in terms of music creation, because you couldn’t wish for better friends and better musicians, and learning from them has been a privilege.
Let’s talk about EIH. Regarding “Caracol nocturno,” how much composition and improvisation is there in that work and in what you do in EIH?
The Ensemble is the love of my life, it is like my baby; a project that a group of friends created in 2014 and that has continued to transform over almost ten years by many special people. Now we are four. We are preparing, probably almost on the verge of breaking up, our first international tour, in Europe, and we are very happy.
It has been a fabulous trip. It has been the greatest school I have ever had (I hope Carlos and Ele don’t get angry), but it has also been different in many ways. Thanks to the Ensemble I began to understand the purpose of being a musician and being a creator, not a composer. I have learned so much about music, about instruments, about how to take the act of musical interpretation towards the level of performance, scenic, interdisciplinary art… that I have been a photographer, composer, pianist, I have written. Art as a single thing. The Ensemble in that sense has been the greatest school I have ever had.
Speaking more precisely about “Caracol Nocturno,” a fairly old project (it’s about five years old), it was conceived by Yasel Muñoz, a member of the Ensemble, and by Alexander Diego Gil, an actor and collaborator, who is making spectacular films; a genius.
The project is one of our peaks, our opus magnum because it represented and brought together all the ways of creation that we had been exploring for years. Pure improvisation, plus the discipline that comes with having a person performing. Texts of literature, acting, music, performance. It all came together, and it really is an experience. I wanted to do it later, in 2021, 2022, but it was very difficult. It requires many rehearsals, a large group. There weren’t so many of us at that time. I’d say it’s one of the best things — if not the best thing — Ensemble has ever done.
Everything we do is based on improvisation. What happens is that in “Caracol Nocturno” we decided as of the creative process that the best thing was not to leave it to chance all the time, but rather to build a series of general structures for each of the three movements or the three poems. That helped us to have a clearer direction and to be able to flow better, because the texts are really very powerful. And also for Alex, the actor, it was good to have a structure to base himself on so he could give more of himself.
Another form of improvisation that we have enjoyed and that we don’t do much is soundpainting, which is where all the shows we call Soundfound fall into, where I direct based on that technique created by a U.S. artist in the 1960s, designed so that there was greater communication and understanding of the phenomenon of improvisation in experimental contemporary art.
Thanks to this technique, what we have done in each Soundfound is a kind of workshop and inviting musicians, students and even children sometimes, to enter the world of super experimental music, free music, but that it be easy for them, and that they enjoy it and have fun.
Tell us about the tour you’re promoting in Europe.
It will be from April 18 to May 20. Everything has been organized, we have had immense help that we don’t know how to thank from our friend Lea Jakob, German musician and promoter. We are going to play in cities in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Couldn’t be happier.
In one of your posts promoting the tour you say that this was the last of Ensemble….
In English there is a phrase; it’s like the Swan Song; the swans about to die give their last song and die. What happens with us at Ensemble is that naturally, we are all in moments in which we have to follow our own lives individually. In practice, it will be impossible for us to sustain the project. It’s not that the Ensemble is going to end; Ensemble is an eternal thing, because it is not a group that requires putting together music, much less rehearsing seven days a week, like other projects, and there is so much love and so much connection that it really transcends borders and transcends time.
The reality is that probably at the end of this year or next year most of the four of us left will be focused on our individual trips. This tour represents, on the one hand, something that we deserve, because we ourselves, from childhood to now as adults, with all the people who have passed and those who remain, have sustained the project, despite losing money, not becoming any richer, and making music that actually is not very appreciated or understood in this country.
We have done it precisely convinced that we know that we are doing a necessary artistic act, to balance a little the crisis that classical music and contemporary music are experiencing with respect to other music.
We have happily seen that, even on a small scale, we have had an impact due to the special and unique nature of our work. That tour is like, wow, it’s good that we’ve endured and that we’ve persevered, because look at the fruit of our labor.
We don’t know what’s going to happen. Wonderful things can happen, who knows, but overall we’re seeing it as our last big thing. We want to do one last concert in Havana, because it is what the people deserve, what we deserve too. Give them one last experience. It will be after the tour, July or August, our last official concert.
It is an eternal project, I have no doubt that wherever we see each other, Sara, Yasel, Mariana and I, Vivi and Lester who are already on the other side, Santiago Luna…wherever we see each other the Ensemble will be reborn naturally, because there were many years, and they are no longer friendships: we bond quantumly from the intense musical experience we have had in Ensemble.
You were talking about the crisis of classical music, and that it really is not very popular in Cuba. You, however, were in charge of sharing this genre at the Fábrica de Arte Cubano. Were you able to reach a wide audience?
It really hasn’t been my responsibility. I am part of that mega-living organism that is Fábrica, and the honor and responsibility of being in charge of those Nave 3 Thursdays was passed to me by Dayana García in 2015. It was she who began programming the space.
I think so, yes, we have done a good job incorporating that experience of classical music, experimental alternative music, old music, all those types of music that have fit within that space; it’s been fantastic. A challenge on the one hand, but it’s been fantastic to see the result of people who would never really go to a concert hall to see classical music, how they sit back and enjoy and take what they can, what resonates within them, what makes sense for them. That’s the magic of the Fábrica.
For me it has been a privilege — as you see, my life is full of privileges. I am a very lucky person, because, in addition, from there we are helping classical music, which is in a very difficult state right now in this country, due to the exodus of musicians we are experiencing, due to the lack of opportunities, due to the non-existent market, due to the concepts that govern this world from the upper strata. I would say that we are in a crisis and that there are people fighting it, and people who continue to move forward. Ensemble, groups, musicians who don’t get tired and continue doing what they can, swimming against the current.
Yes, there are institutions such as UNEAC, Casa de las Américas, the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, which have always given us support, and reflect precisely the most avant-garde, most up-to-date thinking on how to conceive classical music, experimental contemporary music, which are not those that are being executed in a greater way.
I will always profess enormous gratitude to those people and institutions because they helped a lot.
You are closing a cycle in your career. You conclude your stage with Síntesis, Ensemble. What’s next?
It is the end of a cycle. I’m finishing commitments, and I want them to be the last set of commitments in good time. But the best thing I have is that starting in September I don’t know what is going to happen to my life.
I’m half lost and half super happy to give space to my creative self. First of all, I need to rest, I’m creatively exhausted. I need motivation, inspiration, and unfortunately, this country is no longer giving me all that I need right now. I need to dive into the world and hear new sounds, new voices, meet new people, smell, taste, see everything. I need to group new experiences to realize what I want to do. Understanding what I want to get out of me and what are the best ways for me to do it.
This stage that comes as of the end of this year or next year, for me, is a mystery, it is like the Ensemble. You never know what’s going to happen. I’m creating opportunities and seeing what gives. For now, I am applying for a master’s degree in the United Kingdom. I have never lived a year away from my home, from my country, studying after almost ten years without formally studying.
It would be a challenge, but if it doesn’t happen, fortunately, there is a project called Ancestros Sinfónico, which is an extremely motivating thing and of which I will continue to be a part, it has nothing to do with it not being in Síntesis, because one has to follow people like X Alfonso or Carlos Acosta, because they are people who have a focus and are illuminating the right path.
What I want precisely is not to plan my future and let the universe show me the way and see what is best. The same thing happened to me in 2014. When I graduated from ISA I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. That year, in September 2013, I thought: “I don’t know what I’m going to do; I can’t make a living here as a composer, I’m not established, I don’t have a name… And suddenly, Síntesis appeared, and suddenly Fábrica appeared, and suddenly Ensemble appeared, and suddenly I had an amount of motivation and joy and desire to do impressive things. But I didn’t plan any of that. Now I feel like I have to start from scratch.
All that intensity that you see when I play with Síntesis or with Ensemble, behind it there’s a level of stress and focus so that everything goes well and to give my best. I can’t help it. Whatever I do in life, from now on, I will always give my 100%, because it is the way my parents taught me. And the music I listen to and the art I consume taught me that too. People who bled to death, died poor, but look at the paintings, the symphonies they left behind. Nobody loved them, depressed; but look at the art they left behind. For me, that is the greatest motivation, whatever I do.
Authors
Leonardo Ruiz Rivera,
Dagoberto Cobas Navarrete
