The Musical Adventures of John Donald Robb in New Mexico

♪♪♪ >>Briggs: Who is he, what is he doing here? Why does he like this music? >>Rivera: And he said, my dear, it's because it's the people's heart. >>Vigil: ♪♪♪I found a<i> caballo</i> standing, where my horse ought to be. >>Romero: We have wonderful recordings, that we would have never had otherwise. >>Briggs: He stands in a whole line of composers who found folk music as being a tremendous >> The late John Donald Robb loved and composed all kinds of music --but his passion for the songs of everyday folk is what he is remembered for most. Roaming the countryside of the Southwest during the 40's, 50's

and 60's Robb recorded and transcribed over 3000 Hispanic folk songs, the largest collection of its time. ♪♪♪ Today other folk music collectors refer to Robb's extensive archive found in his book Hispanic Folk Music of New >>Loeffler: Back in 1965, John Robb actually recorded you singing<i> Tecalote de Guandana</i> and he says of you, 'The singer Frank McCulloch is an Anglo. Like me he has been captivated

by the Hispanic folk music of the Southwest, and he sings songs with great gusto.' (laughter) Why don't we take 12 bars of something. ♪♪♪

>>Robb described folk music as being passed down the generations by ear, transposing stories, not of a single individual, but rather the thoughts and emotions of a Lyrical themes tumble over one another in a rich profusion - nature, murder, liquor, marriage, card games, and cowboys - nothing is too mundane >>Loeffler: To me one of the most important things, when I listen to a song, it's the song, but it's also giving an aural portrait of the moment in which the song happened, and it really contributes to the bigger understanding of the culture. >>Robb: I understand that you know the song<i> Tecolote de</i> <i>Guandana</i> ? >>Gallegos: Oh yes it is an ol d favorite of mine, but I don't know... >>Robb: It's an old folk song, yes? >>Gallegos:A very old folk song.

>>Robb: Let's hear it. ♪♪♪ >>McCulloch: As far as the <i>tecolote</i> songs,<i> tecolote</i> means owl. And of course the owl is great in the mythology of New Mexico. Sometimes an evil omen... >>Loeffler: Well I think it is a cancion, a love song, but also it alludes to the<i> tecolote</i> is a soldier in the Mexican American War missing his lover. And so if I could just have the wings of the owl to fly back to my girlfriend, I'd be a happy >>Robb's passion for music was a

life long pursuit. His older sister took him to the symphony when he was a young man, and years later -- he wrote in his memoirs of the experience - 'I never dreamed of anything so beautiful, and from that day on, I knew I wanted to be a composer.' So, I did what other composers do: I practiced law for 19 >>Despite his Harvard law degree and a lucrative practice as an international bonds lawyer, Robb managed to practice music on the side. He took up cello as teenager, composition in

college, and while working abroad, studied with musical greats like Nadia Boulanger who challenged Robb to leave law and >>Bratcher: He had been composing since his teen years but that was kind of, at one point a hobby, except that he took his hobby very seriously. If you knew much about him, and you knew his accomplishments, and where all he'd been and who all he knew, like Stokowski and all the big names, and worked with Hindemith and Horatio Parker and Nadia Boulanger who were greats in the music field. And then you realized he was a terribly successful lawyer in NY, he was a formidable man. >>McCulloch: He was such a distinguished gentleman, but he had this openness of a kid. >>Loeffler: What I liked about him was he was basically an adventurer, looking for a good time. (laughter) >>McCulloch: There's Robb the way we remember him. >>Loeffler: Yeah, that's the way

he used to look. >>McCulloch: And there's Mrs. Robb, who was a lot shorter than he was. It doesn't show in the photograph. >>Loeffler: She's probably sitting on a pillow. >>Briggs: I remember my grandfather as being ten feet tall. And I was fascinated by his passion, but also his tremendous seriousness. And he would look at all the grandchildren and say, “Would anyone like to go with me, I'm going North to record music.” And people would say - What are you kidding? I said, I always volunteered. I loved to go with him. ♪♪♪ >>Briggs: I mean if you can imagine after a hundred years of Anglo-American denigration of Native American and of Chicano cultural forms, of someone saying “Oh you have the most

wonderful folk music here! I just love your forms. Do you have any artists?” Often people felt perhaps this was something that they should hide from the Anglo world that was looking for modernity. So here was somebody who clearly appreciated what was very much appreciated and valued and treasured within communities. There was a great fascination -- Who is he? What is he doing here? Why does he like this >>Rivera: He and his wife would go up to Northern New Mexico, and he said - once and awhile I would get into a bar and I would listen to that beautiful guitar and those beautiful sounds. And I would ask him - why are you going up to the bars? And he

said - my dear it's because it's the people's heart. And he would put his hand on his heart. He said, That's the real music. >>After a successful run on Wall Street - Robb finally had an opportunity to turn his hobby of studying music into a profession. Robb accepted a position at the University of New Mexico, where he became Dean of Fine Arts. During his tenure in the 40's and 50's, he successfully expanded and transformed the University's music department. Now based in New Mexico, Robb could turn his attention to composing his own scores, as well as, taking interest in New Mexico's traditional folk music. >>Bonnell: He negotiated other ways to live his life and do his work. His curiosity about coming to New Mexico, being in a new setting, continuing going out into the hinterlands, his being

influenced by European composers of the day. All of this finds its way into his music and into his expression. >>Robb was an eclectic composer, writing well over 300 compositions. His body of work included everything from symphonies, sonatas, concerto and chamber music, a few operas >>Much of the Hispanic folk music he collected resonated in his own compositions. >>Oberg: To my knowledge there are no direct quotes from the folk songs he collected, but the

lilt, the inflections, the cadences, are similar to the songs, he would use the >>Briggs: He stands in the long line of composers who found folk music as being a tremendous inspiration for their own music. And didn't really care about the social-class standing or the ethnic group from which the other artists who performed and composed the music, came. ♪♪♪

>>Romero: We're here in Truchas, New Mexico playing the <i>guitarra</i> and a little bit of <i>musica boca</i> , the harmonica, a tradition that's been around for a lot of years here in northern >>Abeyta: I heard that song way back in the years when I was a boy you know. It's been around a long time. It's a<i> ranchera</i> , a song t hat you would sing in the ranch, more or less on a quiet day on a ranch and people gather round having just a friendly talk or whatever. >>Eichwald: Also heard in the dances, it was an old dance >>Romero: When I was growing up in the 50s, we didn't really sing these songs anymore. My mother would listen to Bing Crosby, they wanted to listen to

popular American music. And television of course started in the early 50s. I think we had the first TV set in our little village, and then once people >>Abeyta: A lot of music that we played back then - violins and guitars and go to people's homes, and play at the door, you know. And they would open you up and invite you into their houses. And everybody'd get together and have good time. It was just tradition round here. >>Eichwald: I remember old timers sitting at the front of the house, just like these houses that here. A little old rocking chair. And there'd be accordions, harmonicas, violins, guitars, sometimes a banjo or a mandolin. >>Romero: I'd like to see this stuff really preserved. Robb, I could imagine, back in those days, he probably had, there was people in every corner that he could record versus today. It's

even hard to find people that you can record. And so I really see this as very interesting, It's part of my culture, it's part of who I am, you know as a <i>Nuevo Mexicano</i> , as a New Mexican. ♪♪♪ >>Romero: You see, I am probably going to screw up the guitar. Usually I have to practice a little before I do it. I can try one more time. >>Romero: I felt grounded in my own culture much more as I heard those old voices, I think the crackling, old sort of breathy - because there's this New Mexican sound the old people always have this breathy, kind of crackly thing, and it might be because it is so dry. ♪♪♪

>>Romero: This history that went for a long time but that I hadn't really gotten to learn about in school, and I didn't really know it. And that's when I also began to sing these songs and tell a history of New Mexico through them. So I always felt that Robb had made a tremendous contribution to my culture. ♪♪♪

>> Hispano folk music spans centuries. This song, still popular today, is at least 500 years old, dating back to >>Loeffler: Folk music goes through permutations as it goes from one<i> musico</i> to the next. You know it'll never be played or sung by the same person exactly the same way, and that's the nature of folk music. >>Bratcher: Dean Robb obviously loved the folk songs. He didn't just use them as thematic material for other works, and he didn't just collect them and forget about them. And in the mid 1940s he came across a book that was written by an author up in northern New Mexico. He thought that would be a good vehicle to write an opera that would allow him to use folk >> Hispano folk music shaped Robb's work, once again but in

this case directly.<i> A La Ru</i> , a tradit ional lullaby is the opening aria in Robb's opera Little Jo, a tragic coming of age story set in Hispano New Mexico. ♪♪♪

>>While some genres of Hispano folk songs have persevered for centuries, other forms have disappeared. The<i> trovo,</i> derived from the word troubadour or poet, is a form Robb recorded This trovo is being resurrected here during a recording session with popular folk musician Cipriano Vigil and Professor Enrique Lamadrid from the University of New Mexico. >>Lamadrid: The<i> trovo</i> is a song that enacts an argument. Very famous poets would get together, and there would be famous encounters that people would remember and they would become inscribed into a<i> trovo</i> that people would learn and repeat.

>>Vigil: The young, aspiring man wanted to challenge the older man as being the singer or the poet of the community. >>Lamadrid: The upstart is café, he's the import. He's the new one. >>Vigil: Well the<i> atole</i> has been around for so long. It comes from corn, it nourishes people... >>Lamadrid: No, no coffee is more exciting. >>Romero: The old culture began to clash with everything new. There was a viable culture that lasted here for 400 years. And

suddenly it was undermined so by the 1950s a few people had their songbooks and there were a few old singers who were people that Robb recorded. I think Robb did a tremendous job in making sure >>Lamadrid: Coffee lost. Sorry >> Robb never retired from

music, and his most prolific work composing and conducting was later in life. When he was not traveling or working in places like El Salvador, Guatemala or Brazil, Robb's sense of discovery and adventure prevailed in his studio tinkering with a synthesizer and at the time a cutting edge computer. >>Loeffler: I remember one day my wife and I went to visit with him and as you say he was always meticulously dressed, and you know his hair was always combed and that sort of thing. Then all of a sudden he sat down at the MOOG synthesizer and his hair was no longer combed and he had this almost insane glint in his eye and a grin and he started playing the MOOG synthesizer. It >> We study music of the past - explained Rob- but now we are in the midst of a musical revolution, full of dissonance

and unfamiliar elements. >>And so began Robb's experiments with the world's first forms of electronic music, which resulted in some 60 or so compositions. >>Bonnell: John Robb stepped out of the box once again, to go to the Bell Labs, to study the technology, then come back and set up his own lab, which was unique certainly out here and probably in many places in the country. That's the kind of individual he was. ♪♪♪ >>Bratcher: 19th century is really my bag, but I really like that. >>Evers: Quite a distance from Little Jo, isn't it! >> Oberg: I respect everything else the Dean did, I loved him

as a man, I loved his music, but this just leaves me, it frosts me. >>Bratcher: And this is not based on a New Mexican folk tune! (laughter) >>With his wife at his side, Robb traveled the world and explored a diversity of musical expressions. And he always came back to the countryside of New Mexico, claiming that the rural areas are the storytelling reason of any country, and these fine folk songs of New Mexico should be part of our American >>Briggs: My grandfather had a wonderful role in the 40's and 50's in terms of the documentation of this music. But there were also other people who said, you know, he's a gringo, gringos come and take things from us, what's he doing? >>Romero: He wasn't going to get rich doing that. He must have gotten a lot out of just recording them and knowing he was collecting them for people like myself who would look at them and would be able to rediscover their own culture

through them. >>Briggs: That's one thing now that's wonderful about having made even digitally available these recordings is that of course people can interpret them in a variety of different sorts of ways, they can take them back to communities, they can change the documentation in terms of actually going back to the families and saying, well, tell us a little bit more about the social life of this song. >>Romero: I think music is cool. You know, music is something that we all share in common, everybody loves music. But it's this idea of being part of a musical culture. And I think that is what Robb was able to >>Robb lived to a full 97 years and left an impressive legacy. He wrote in his memoirs - Biographies are written about world famous people and I am not in that category. I have done some things that most never succeed in doing in that I have not been made a slave by any of my occupations but I have insisted on living the good life. The things that happen to all of us, like birth, death,

and children are more important than the doings of great men. It is humanity itself that counts. If it were not for that, I would have long ago given up collecting folk music.