One Breath at a Time
by Thomas May

“What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness”: when considered from a post-2020 perspective, Rainer Maria Rilke’s words of advice to an aspiring young poet can sound like cruel mockery. In this era of sudden lock-downs and quarantine restrictions, enforced isolation has become the prosaic default whose recurrence we dread. But to cultivate “the expanse of your own solitude,” as Rilke counsels, can set the stage for creative liberation—to the breakthrough that otherwise lies beyond reach, jealously guarded by the fear of rejection.

In September 2020, in the midst of the corona pandemic, the Russian mezzo-soprano Yana Mann decided to take a major career leap by releasing her first studio album, this world premiere recording of the Poemas de Bar cycle by the Brooklyn-based composer Julián De La Chica. Also a professional producer and obsessed with detail in her interpretive art, Mann is devoted to working with contemporary composers and had been searching for a connection with one whom she could trust in such an important undertaking.

Poemas de Bar is at the same time a cycle of deceptive simplicity. Each song suggests the bare outlines of a complex scenario of relationships, layers of memory filtered through the straightforward poetry. “I would imagine a voice from someone from the past,” explains Mann. Musically, De La Chica knows how to use space and the weight of silence to load the most commonplace chords with aching resonance. Preconceived musical entities like “dissonance” or a jazz riff become sealed in a kind of sonic amber—objects in themselves.

Key elements of this language were catalyzed during De La Chica’s first months in New York City in 2010. Living temporarily in a tiny Harlem apartment, he spent time performing part-time jobs around the city, armed with his laptop for those periods when he could step back and contemplate the breathlessly flowing pace of contemporary urban life. De La Chica became fascinated by the solitary act of observing people living their lives in various contexts of his newly adopted city: watching them from a hotel terrace in the Meatpacking District, within the labyrinth of the subway, or at a neighborhood bar during the grey zone between the dead of night and reluctant dawn.

“New York City is so crowded full of people, but at same time it is a very lonely place,” observes De La Chica. “I just wrote down all the stories I imagined as I watched.” This meant refining the stories he came up with into simple, elegant Spanish verse and sketching out the corresponding musical ideas, which he could elaborate as needed when the appropriate time had arrived.

11 Poemas de Bar, Op. 12, emerged as part of a cycle—De La Chica uses the term loosely—of related works including Four Short Stories at the Standard Hotel, Op. 6, for string quartet, piano, and singer; Voyeuristic Images, Op. 10, for solo piano; and a film inspired by the Op. 10 pieces, Agatha, which De La Chica also directed and which has recently achieved acclaim on the international film festival circuit. Another work relating to his stories of the subway remains a work-in-progress, to be revealed at some future point.

The composer had likewise been keeping Poemas de Bar in his stockpile of unpublished material. “I believe very strongly in the power of music,” De La Chica says, “which I think is actually like a spirit. I have learned through the years that some projects wait until the time is there. When I know it is time, I will go there; don’t push me.”

By synchronicity, De La Chica himself had been patiently waiting for just such a connection for an unfinished project from a pivotal transition point in his own career. An unforeseen (virtual) encounter with Mann led him to realize she was the artist he needed, capable of doing justice to the musical language he had been developing over the past dozen or so years—a language that invites introspection and solitude and that, as it happens, is uncannily well-suited to pandemic times.

We’re accustomed to imagining the creative process as a clear-cut teleology, each state neatly aligned to follow what came before according to the basic arc creation—interpretation. But Yana Mann turned out to be a muse from the future who reactivated De La Chica’s earlier artistic vision: her unique interpretive gifts of unalloyed vocal clarity and total immersion inspired him to revisit the score from 2010 and at last bring it before the world.

Mann had been independently introduced to De La Chica’s work by a mutual friend, the film director Badr Farha. She contacted De La Chica out of the blue in the fall of 2020, reaching out from her home in Dubai to propose that she and the composer work together on a recording. She recalls being moved by his cycle Experimentelle und unbestimmte Lieder, Op. 9: “I loved his music so much that I didn’t even care what Julián would write for me. I was so sure he would do something amazing.”

After a period studying classical music and theater in her native St. Petersburg and Moscow, Mann moved on from a traditional operatic career in order to focus on interrelated projects involving experimental music, film, and fashion. De La Chica, for his part, felt an affinity with this path. He, too, had been immersed in the world of traditional conservatory training from an early age, starting piano from the age of five in his native central Colombian city of Manizales. But he rebelled against the conservative classical framework and left conservatory, earning the epithet “el vagabundo del piano” while he traveled about Europe to study disciplines beyond music and began investigating his new interests in spirituality and mysticism.

“You have a lot of noise in your mind when you leave the conservatory,” the composer recalls. “It becomes full of ideas of the patriarchal European tradition. But I was missing my own voice and identity.” Impressed by the tantalizing darkness of Mann’s mezzo voice and her emotional power in conveying the meaning of the text, De La Chica realized she was a perfect match for Poemas. “I was clear that this is not about operatic singing and its vibrato. She understood that. The approach is totally different. And she shares my love of details. Details are everything in music.”

Poemas de Bar is thus something of a palimpsest that embodies multiple layers of De La Chica’s artistic evolution. Back in Colombia, his teachers had rejected the Minimalism-inflected language in which he was beginning to find his authentic voice. Poemas de Bar is a vintage work of the period of adjustment of 2010, when he settled in New York. Though by then he had inner confidence in his music, he continued to keep much of it secret, waiting “until the time is there.”

Spurred on by the unexpected interest from Yana Mann, De La Chica subtly revised the writing and added another layer of keyboard synthesizer to the more classical setup of piano and voice that he had begun with. On top of this, both De La Chica and Mann have found in the cycle an opportunity to explore their more recent interest in video and film. The composer directed the first music video to be released in connection with the album, which offers new perspectives on the first song, “Ella.”

As if in ironic commentary on the subject matter of the situations of disconnection and alienation described in the texts of Poemas de Bar, composer and singer were never able to meet in person throughout the entire recording project. Zoom sessions had to suffice for rehearsals. Mann, who is also a professional producer, recorded her vocal tracks—including the one duet of the cycle, between soprano and mezzo (No. 4)—at her home studio in Dubai, integrating them with the piano and keyboard tracks De La Chica supplied from a studio in Williamsburg. If anything, says Mann, the imposed separation was an advantage. “Julián never told me how to sing his songs. I just connected from the start because I really like his darkness, depth, and honesty—these are not superficial songs. So we agreed: ‘You do you, I do me.’”

Given the temporal leap and spatial separation in Poemas de Bar’s genesis, it’s all the more uncanny how instinctively close Yana Mann feels to De La Chica’s music, as her interpretations bear out. It would be more than reasonable, not knowing these circumstances, to assume the composer began the cycle from the start with precisely her mesmerizing vocal colors in mind. For Mann, the achievement is a remarkable solo debut album that demonstrates not only the natural beauty of her voice but the sustained emotional directness with which she deploys it. Mann accentuates the faintest glimmer of hope in these songs detailing loss and absence with such gentle force that the cycle comes to generate a distinctly up-to-date melancholia. Mann recalls locating these emotions “in the situations, the stories, that can be found anywhere, not just a particular city.”

Poemas de Bar is at the same time a cycle of deceptive simplicity. Each song suggests the bare outlines of a complex scenario of relationships, layers of memory filtered through the straightforward poetry. “I would imagine a voice from someone from the past,” explains Mann. Musically, De La Chica knows how to use space and the weight of silence to load the most commonplace chords with aching resonance. Preconceived musical entities like “dissonance” or a jazz riff become sealed in a kind of sonic amber—objects in themselves.

The texts’ gestures of looking—how much of the narrator(s)’s observation touches on voyeurism?—find their reflection in the conspiracy between voice and accompaniment. Poemas de Bar builds into a set of variations on a mood. Even within a framework of prevailingly slow tempos, De La Chica reveals an astonishing range of colors and weights. In visual terms, his process is reminiscent of the subtle effects enabled by a palette of black and white—we merely need to retrain our senses to drown out the extra “noise” and focus again.