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Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa |
| Program Notes for Ecos armónicos
by Craig Russell
Ecos armónicos is a thoroughly “modern” composition that explores the sounds from California’s past, drawing upon snippets of tunes that resonated in the various mission communities and presidio fortresses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In a sense, they are “echoes” of influences brought from Spain by the Franciscan friars that were then repeated as the Native communities learned them—and in some ways transformed them—adding their own levels of “harmony.”
The piece opens with an ethereal statement of the Introit “Gaudeamus” and an “Alleluia” found in the choirbooks of friar Narciso Durán; he used these themes in Mass for each day of the year, gently reshaping them to accommodate each day’s required text. These two themes, then, were “echoes” even in the early 1800s, since they were heard reverberating within the mission walls over and over, but always slightly modified and transformed. The “Alleluia” is then interrupted by Juan Sancho’s “Marcha Suiza.” Its jaunty dotted rhythms march about with the gruff sergeant calling out his commands while the soldiers step, turn, and march forward, sometimes missing an instruction—generating inadvertent collisions and minor mishaps. The violin then embarks on a spacious “Toccata,” an introspective reverie from Santa Barbara that precedes the devotional song “¡O que suave! (O how gentle!),” one of the most beloved songs in early California. The piece ends at dusk with the rowdy and passionate fandango, a dance that was open to all Californians—a perfect metaphor for the inclusive society that California was to become in a modern age. | 
