In fateful times, Alfredo Santa Ana's music draws on deeper meanings of day-to-day life
As part of Music on Main series, the Mexican Canadian composer’s luminous works respond to current chaos and ancient ties to the natural world
Alfredo Santa Ana.
Music on Main’s A Month of Tuesdays series presents One Night Stand: Alfredo Santa Ana at the Fox Cabaret on April 8 at 7:30 pm
IF, IN SOME DISTANT future, a curious human survivor finds a copy of Alfredo Santa Ana’s recently released CD, Before the World Sleeps, they’ll be granted a window into the present moment. (Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that they also have access to electronics and electricity.) It won’t be easy listening.
It’s not that the record is in any way unpleasant. Rather, it’s that Santa Ana’s decision to write an extended collection of works for piano based on fin du monde anxiety succeeds beautifully in its evocation of the present ambivalence. Do we deserve extinction? Can we learn from history? Is the end of the Anthropocene already in sight? How do we live, in the face of such ignorance and devastation?
Aided by a luminous performance from pianist Miranda Wong, Before the World Sleeps asks all of these questions without necessarily delivering any answers. But it is, at the very least, a quietly provocative soundscape for our own ruminations on what we can do, what we can’t do, and what is being done to us.
It is also only a small part of Santa Ana’s complex musical personality. Born and first exposed to European classical music in Mexico, trained in the American Midwest, and now residing in Vancouver, he’s written intimate art songs and evocative film scores, released an earlier album of spiky works for guitar, plays brutalist art rock with the composers’ collective Square, and has mastered multiple instruments as well as electronics. Naturally, a single evening won’t be able to contain all of these diverse talents—but One Night Stand, at the Fox Cabaret on April 8 as part of Music on Main’s A Month of Tuesdays series, will get close.
Alas, Santa Ana will not appear on-stage at the Fox, except perhaps to collect applause at the end of the night. But a rather glittering cast of local talent will be on hand to interpret his music, with one likely highlight being Wong performing the world premiere of the Little Ice Age suite from Before the World Sleeps.
Sonically, Little Ice Age offers a bridge between the French Impressionists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—Ravel and Debussy were formative influences in Santa Ana’s Mexican childhood—and the American modernism he was exposed to at college. But as is often the case with this composer, there’s also a literary dimension to Little Ice Age’s wordless narrative.
“Do you know Jonathan Franzen, the author?” Santa Ana asks. “He wrote an essay that was very impactful about what would happen if we just give in to this idea that ‘Yeah, there’s not going to be a future.’ And how, if we live in this kind of post-hope world, it doesn’t mean that we all descend into chaos; it actually means that the small things that we do kind of have more meaning. So I kind of wanted to live in that space, and just be like ‘Today I’m going to write a piece for piano, and that’s all I’m going to do. I’m not going to have any lofty aspirations; it’s just going to be what it is, and it’s worthwhile pursuing that. There’s meaning in that.’”
Santa Ana goes on to explain that immediacy was one of the values he explored in writing Before the World Sleeps. “The album was created with the intention of it being composed and then put to a recording right away,” he notes, adding that Before the World Sleeps “deals with all the ideas about where we’re at in terms of the climate catastrophe that we’re in, the political aspects, the technological aspects… And so Little Ice Age is saying that in climate studies they talk about two different little ice ages that happened because of volcanic eruptions and created upheaval all over the world. We’re talking about the year 700, so this was a very long time ago.”
Humanity survived both of those little ice ages, and the much larger ones that came before. Should that give us courage to face the possibility of extinction by fire? Santa Ana doesn’t say, but he does allow that, inspired by Franzen, “the whole purpose of the album was to focus on day-to-day goals, and not focus so much on trying to write a big piece that would commemorate humanity as we barrel towards destruction and political calamity.”
Cold comfort, perhaps, but comfort nonetheless.
Elsewhere in the hour-long program, the natural world has inspired another premiere, the 10-part suite Aves: The Four-Chambered Heart. It’s a collaboration between Santa Ana and poet Colin Browne, centred on the multifarious links between the avian and the human worlds. Browne’s texts will be split between their author, reading, and countertenor Daniel Cabena singing, with instrumental support supplied by Mark Takeshi McGregor on flute, Parmela Attariwala on viola, and Olivia Blander on cello.
“Aves means ‘bird’ in Spanish. And one link that Colin found is that both humans and birds share this unique quality in that we have a heart that has four chambers. But the idea was to do a piece about how birds have been part of human history from the very beginning. From the sacred to the profane, there are just so many legends in which we use birds as a way of communicating with the past and with the divine.
“We talked a lot about who Daniel is in this piece,” Santa Ana continues. “Is he a bird, or is he human? Is he a god? Is he a link between the two worlds, the animal world and the human world? We talked a lot about saints, and we talked a lot about Bede’s parable of the sparrow who comes into the king’s hall from the night and then goes away, as a metaphor for life… And then Colin has this very beautiful poem called ‘On early summer evenings’ where he talks about his neighbour, and the swallows that would come down into his garden, and his neighbour’s wife passing away.
“Music really has this power to go between the present and the past,” he adds. “The folding of time, the folding of experience, and the connecting of worlds that happens through music is perfect for some of the poetry that Colin brings.” 
