Given San Antonio’s confluence of cultures, the city is an appropriate setting for the intersection of different musical traditions involving local composers.
Friday evening in Plaza Guadalupe, the 7th annual Noche de Romance will pay tribute to San Antonio mariachi composers Pedro Moreno Jr. and Irma Aguilar amid a program of traditional Mexican love songs, boleros, baladas and rancheras.
Sunday afternoon at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower, the San Antonio Mastersingers will present a new choral work by local classical composer Ethan Wickman honoring the chorus’s music director emeritus, John Silantien, alongside water-themed works for its 18th annual Musical Shower of Roses program.
Noche de Romance
In past years, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center held its Noche de Romance event near Valentine’s Day. The coronavirus pandemic interrupted the tradition and necessitated a shift to April, according to Gino Rivera, the arts center’s traditional music program director, and organizers decided to keep the new timing.
Rivera will lead Mariachi Azteca de América through a program featuring classic songs by Mexican composers José Alfredo Jiménez, Juan Gabriel and Agustín Lara. Including songs by Moreno and Aguilar will “[pay] respect and homage to composers that people outside of San Antonio maybe aren’t aware of,” said Rivera.
As a mariachi songwriter himself, Rivera knows composers face a tough market, in part because the genre isn’t respected on popular music platforms. Spotify, for example, doesn’t have a separate category for the 150-year-old music form.
“It’s a shame we always have to fall into other categories,” Rivera said, “and that’s a disrespect when we’re one of the genres that has been around the longest.”
All the more reason to “pay homage to those people who have allowed us to follow their [songwriting] paths,” he said.
Rivera chose “No Tengo Nada” by Moreno, which tells of a poor man in love with a woman he can never reach, and “Amor Pasajero” by Aguilar, about a woman in love with a traveler who is just passing through.
Mariachi Azteca de América will also play several of Rivera’s songs throughout the evening to add new flavors to an old tradition carried by pioneers such as Mariachi Vargas, considered the oldest and best-known mariachi group in the world.
“We still strive to be ambassadors and representatives of [that] quality and [those] expectations,” Rivera said, while “also adding our own flavor, our own style, and our own compositions.”
Noche de Romance takes place Friday at 8 p.m. at Plaza Guadalupe. Tickets are available through the Guadalupe Center website or by calling 210-271-3151.
Into the Water
San Antonio composer and teacher Ethan Wickman is a contemporary representative of the classical musical tradition. Locally, his works have been performed most recently by the SOLI chamber ensemble, which commissioned “Ballads of the Borderland” in 2018, and by the San Antonio Philharmonic, which opened its inaugural season with the aptly-titled “Emergent” in 2022.
When the Mastersingers wanted to pay homage to their outgoing musical director, Silantien, who led the choral group for 38 of its 78 years until retiring last year, they approached Wickman.
Wickman said he had long admired his University of Texas at San Antonio faculty colleague, who served as director of choral activities and is now professor emeritus.
The two worked together for years and became friends, having offices next door to each other. Wickman said he could sometimes hear Silantien’s accordion sounding through the wall.
To honor his friend, Wickman included accordion in the instrumentation for “Two Sea Songs,” a work that recognizes Silantien’s birthplace of Rhode Island and his frequent trips to Corpus Christi, the closest the avid fisherman could come to seeing an ocean-like body of water from his adopted, landlocked San Antonio home.
Wickman was born in coastal California, sharing an enduring love for the ocean. “There’s a part of that vastness of what it feels like to be at the edge of the continent that stays with you wherever you go,” Wickman said.
He chose verses by early 20th-century poet Sara Teasdale to provide lyrics for “Two Sea Songs,” in particular two poems about the lure of and longing for the ocean.
Teasdale’s “The Sea Wind” recalls “The far-off, beautiful sound of the sea,” and her single-stanza “Sea Longing” speaks of the ocean’s hold on her:
Tho’ I am inland far, I hear and know,
For I was born the sea’s eternal thrall
Wickman said of himself and Silantien, “This is something that we share, both from different coasts and have found ourselves in the middle of a place that maybe neither one of us would have predicted as children, here deep in the heart of Texas.”
The Mastersingers, now led by Yoojin Muhn, will perform other water-themed works by European Haydn, Bruckner and Rachmaninoff, as well as spirituals and folk songs including the Korean folk song Arirang.
Into the Water takes place Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Little Flower Basilica. Tickets are available through the Mastersingers website or at the door.
