Born into an aristocratic family in Santiago, Chile, Carmela Mackenna Subercaseaux (1879-1962) showed an early inclination towards creative expression, including painting, writing and music. In 1917, for example, after a piano recital presented by Bindo Paoli’s students, she was lauded in the press for having the “soul of an artist.” Nevertheless, years earlier she had determined that pursuing a career in the arts was inappropriate for someone of her social standing. After brief periods in Great Britain and Uruguay, in 1926 she and her husband settled in Berlin where they lived for a number of years. In addition to her duties as a diplomatic official, while in Berlin Carmela also continued studying the piano with Conrad Ansorge (1862-1930) and began studying composition with Hans Mersmann (1891-1971). While in Europe, the couple separated. Carmela continued in her role as cultural attaché until 1939; later, she visited Paris, Brussels, Cairo and New York. Returning to Santiago, she did not join the active musical life of that city; rather, she fell into an isolation that lasted until her death.
In Mackenna’s Serenade for flute, violin, and viola, composed in Europe in January, 1932, one sees influence from Beethoven’s similarly titled and instrumented work from late 1801, the Serenade, Op. 25, for flute, violin, and viola. Although Mackenna’s work is one movement shorter than Beethoven’s piece, the shared titles of each composition’s first movement reinforces that the link between these two pieces is not coincidental. Like Beethoven, Mackenna does not relegate the low register of the viola to a primarily harmonic role, instead she offers it a shared and sometimes dominating voice in the melodic interplay between the three instruments.
Despite Mackenna’s neoclassical leanings, she leaves few clues for the untrained listener that there is any connection to Beethoven’s early 19th century work. Unlike Beethoven, each movement is episodic and bears no resemblance to traditional classical structures. In the serenade’s first movement Mackenna uses short melodic motives or phrases of varying lengths from which five sections are built, and with the exception of the second and the fifth, these bear no thematic relationship one to the other. Although its harmonic language is clearly tonal, it is loosely realized. Not only does the movement vacillate between G minor and G major, but the frequently autonomous voice-leading produces unresolved dissonances as well as non-functional chordal progressions.
By the 1930s, many Latin American composers had begun to incorporate local, indigenous, or other identifying elements into their music, such as natural sounds, popular folk melodies, or musical characteristics representative of pre-Conquest civilizations. In 1933, Carlos Chávez composed the orchestral Cantos de México, inspired by motives taken from Mexican folkloric dances. That same year, Ecuadorean composer Luis H. Salgado composed a three-movement eponymous work for symphonic band, Atahualpa. In contrast, Mackenna either eschews, or subtly references identifiably Latin American elements in her music; her Serenade represents the latter category. For example, in the third movement, “Tanz,” she uses a habanera-like ostinato pattern that appears mainly in the viola. This use of the term “habanera-like” refers to the manner in which Mackenna’s pattern begins with the habanera’s characteristically long-short-long-long rhythm (as in “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” from Bizet’s Carmen). However, while the habanera is always in duple meter, “Tanz” is written in triple meter, which adds an extra beat after each of the viola’s repetitions of the habanera rhythm (See example 1). This pattern is typical of other Latin American rhythms such as the creole waltz, the Colombo-Venezuelan joropo, and the Chilean zamacueca.
The first documented performance of Mackenna’s Serenade occurred on April 13, 1943, on a program sponsored by the League of Composers held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.1)Howard Taubman, ”New Music Heard in 4th Serenade,” New York Times, 14 April, 1943, 27. The concert consisted of five compositions, some vocal and some instrumental, but all with the same title. Although performed by accomplished instrumentalists (René Le Roy, flute; Yvonne de Casa Fuerte, violin; and Frank Brieff, viola), Mackenna’s Serenade was not well-received. Music critic Howard Taubman writes, “her work was the weak sister of the program; it was overlong and meandering.” This opinion is perhaps due to two reasons. First, in his review Taubman is specifically comparing Mackenna’s work to the first piece on the program, Virgil Thomson’s Serenade for flute and violin. Characterized nine years later by Norman Cazden as “inoffensive,”2)Norman Cazden, Notes, Second Series, 10/1 (Dec. 1952), 144. Thomson’s Nadia Boulanger-influenced compositional style was in vogue at that time. Secondly and more important, because Carmela Mackenna felt almost no attachment to mid 20th century musical nationalism—nor to any other contemporaneous style—her Serenade did not meet the expectations of a New York audience that by that time had become accustomed to the music brought to American stages by many other Latin American composers for a decade or more. As an iconoclast, many of Carmela Mackenna’s compositions are not only significant, but like her Serenade, are best evaluated on their own merit.
John L. Walker