The Useful Impossible
written by Iván Enrique Rodriguez
Bahlest Eeble Readings Cycle 18 Fellow
In the year of our lord 2025, and more so in the United States of America, justifying a career in the arts has grown into an eldritch paradox. With rising inequality, untethered capitalism, a dystopian housing market, and existential threats such as climate change, to think of oneself as a “composer” suddenly absorbs heavy hermeneutic weights that—to those of us who have lived the real world—ring a tocsin that urge us to reexamine the meaning of that word: Composer.
On one hand, with the looming alarm(?) of artificial “intelligence” some of the lucrative jobs that were highly coveted just three to five years ago are in danger of substitution. As a result, countless planned futures that many concocted became a house of straw. For artists this could represent an opportunity to engage—to finally show the ubiquity, necessity, and irreplicable nature of art; a gateway to show how fertile of a ground art is for developing not only creativity but social skills, connection, community, discipline, commitment, and passion but, above all, empathy—hence, finally welcoming the arts into the “grand hall” of professional acknowledgment and career viability in an era where we have all been siloed into the behavioral manufacturing machine of surveillance capitalism that, as Dr. Zuboff argues, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” (1)
On the other hand, if I need to time bathroom visits to avoid violence; if I need to suddenly plan for powers of attorney in case I need to take care of a decades-long spouse in a medical emergency; if it feels normal to account for plausibly indifferent, or even retaliatory medical malpractice when choosing a primary care physician (because of who I am or, frankly, because of privacy details that, in my humble opinion—if you’re so interested in them—I wouldn’t want my children even a single light-year near you); if it feels obvious that getting a loan or a lease would be easier if I call instead of going in person; if it is routine to account for places that might not kick me out but certainly make perfectly evident that I’m not welcomed there; if I need to decide whether to pay for the month’s rent, medicines, or thirty packets of instant ramen instead of groceries; if I need to wait and make sure I’m at death’s door before seeking medical attention during a pregnancy, then suddenly the transcendental necessity of art becomes rather comical. The noble ethos of being an artist abruptly reveals itself as egotistic.
I guess I’ve chosen the egotistical path. I like to tell myself that I did so because, in the most literal sense, music had a life-saving outcome in my life. But what do we do when the aforementioned conflicts also exist in this artistic ecosystem? An ecosystem that, though initially transformative for me, also delicately and insidiously insists on trying to at best, tokenize, and at worse, plainly exclude me and those like me? That paradox—that conflict between identity, the senses, and perception, against colonialism, historic revisionism, and a nation’s refusal to self-examine—became one of the main catalysts for my musical language. It equipped me with a musical syntax that honored music’s role in my life while also allowing me to create a temporal hall of mirrors in which listeners and performers alike are welcomed to engage in conversations with themselves, conversations that we often either ignore or try to escape from. In other words, it materialized for me a mission in music, a core goal that will, hopefully, contribute a tiny grain of sand for the pursuit of a better, more equitable, and just world.
Whether it is because of the effects of colonialism, the inherent otherness the United States’ culture forces upon people like me, or just my personal and individual journey in this world, I can’t just compose selfishly. In the concert hall, nearly 95% of everything that’s programmed is white, male, and mostly dead. (2) The lack of self-reflection this country insists on has managed to severely limit opportunities in the concert hall, and the very few moments we do get are subjected to asymmetrical scrutiny. So, if I am to ask for your attention, to share something with you, I certainly would want to do so, generating a positive impact; one that’s intentional rather than accidental.
If you’ve endured reading until this point, I’m sure you can tell how important music is to me. But also, how important it is to me that such music is able to provide something other than empty carbs. Consequently, the piece that I was able to write during my time as a fellow at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, Sophistry, addresses some of those topics that are usually removed from classical music—topics that, as it is to be expected, are removed with the purpose of avoiding the “traditional” concertgoer any (disputably) unnecessary discomfort. Writing this piece while allowing myself to be as raw and direct as I was with it truly fulfilled what I have adopted as my musical mission. However, the richness I experienced in the academy, in comparison to other projects, didn’t reside in the musical content itself but rather in my personal relationship with it. Having the privilege of working in a place that displayed a sympathetic resonance with me, and created an environment that removed many of the procedural obstacles typical of the field, enabling a multidimensional engagement with my music.
That in-depth and multifaceted connection was, perhaps, the single most valuable experience during my residency as a fellow at GLFCAM. The action of sharing music morphed into a colorful blooming meadow. The combination of such colorful blossoms displayed the constancy of our humanity, but when observed as individual flowers, they revealed the beautiful inner workings of our individuality, the substrate of the facets that we perhaps don’t verbalize, but we surely embody. When the musical space was inhabited with a shared sense of memory, experience, and certainty, the music I composed, intending to communicate something, became a sort of stimulating compost. It fed each plant making its flowers bloom in their individual spotlights at their individual pace. It was utterly fascinating to witness how the holding of a note, its articulation, the performer’s interpretation, their act of presence sonically, physically, in relationship to others, and to the music itself managed to uncover such a vast spectrum of our constituting elements. I was able to experience what each performer, colleague, and mentor prioritized, what energized them, what pulled and pushed their attention. It was beautiful to connect how such manifestations related to the stories and personalities they shared with us, to the vulnerabilities of making music as interpreters, as mentors, as fully developed artists, but above all, as people in our inescapable, flawed, and yet profoundly striking, humanness.
Presenting my music to be engaged with in such a multifaceted way gifted me more than just an experience of musical curiosity and growth. It provided an exchange with each of the facets that engaged with my music, an exchange which presented itself as windows inside our own selves. A welcoming spot to relate more profoundly to the aforementioned spectrum, to the Schwartzian vulnerabilities, temperaments, dispositions, humors, range of emotion, style of expression, set of abilities, desires, and views of the world (3) that, while informing the whole of who we are, don’t tend to reveal themselves as individual characters. That powerful yet beautiful, and deeply human experience forced me to confront my music with different eyes (or ears, I should say).
As a Puerto Rican, born and raised in the island, our experience with the exterior, particularly with the United States, has been painfully sculpted by the still-living, still-thriving chisel and hammer of colonialism. From the 1493 Spanish Empire’s conquest to the 1898 United States’ invasion. Up to the present day, us Puerto Ricans have lived without agency for more than half a millennium. Our culture has faced threats of erasure, our flag was outlawed until 1957, and even our people faced threats of extermination through bloody events such as the Ponce Massacre, the United States government’s eugenic campaign sterilizing a lot of women, to the brutal actions of Cornelius P. Rhoads, an oncologist stationed in the island by the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Board. From Puerto Rico he wrote a letter stating:
I can get a damn fine job here and am tempted to take it. It would be ideal except for the Porto Ricans [sic]. They are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than Italians. What the island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be livable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far... The matter of consideration for the patients' welfare plays no role here—in fact all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects. (4)
Those vicious acts, paired with an education system carefully designed to instill an image of superiority, and mythical freedom of the empire, an engineered a priori: “The United States of America saved us, blessed us with industrialism and opportunity. They are the archetype we governmentally and morally replicate, and we recognize their superior knowledge and technology. We are grateful.” But it just takes a short plane ride over the Gulf of Mexico to experience the truth, one that is diametrically opposed to the ideological engineering they insidiously implemented.
Why is this important, you may ask? Well, once the truth is experienced, our sense of identity, of personhood, of humanity suddenly develops an epistemology independent of the imperialist mythmaking. An epistemology that includes in its data sources the lullaby grandma used to sing, the Christmas parrandas we enjoyed until dawn, the savory pasteles, the sweet coquito, the rhythms of our bomba and plena, the late nights dancing salsa, and many, many more rich cultural traditions, both old and new. And those elements, that have survived attempts of erasure, tell a story of resilience, passion, community, and determination.
Even though I compose music filled with the richness of my culture, my relationship to that same music, those pieces I spent lonely nights trying to materialize in ink, held a psychological agreeableness that was clearly an offspring of that ideological a priori that was so strongly branded in our minds. Experiencing in GLFCAM such an in-depth and revealing relationship to my music and myself as an artist, reinforced the sense of mission I feel I ought to pursue with music, while also highlighting the humanity of musicmaking and its social, artistic, and emotional results. It reminded me of the importance of community making, but above all, that such community is most successful when it acts from a space of selflessness, honesty, and vulnerability. That our joys and our discomforts do not merely happen to us, but are part of us, and it’s only when we embrace those elements that often we want to outsource, that we create community, family, support, meaning, and music.
So, a Composer… today? I might be biased, but I believe it is not only a useful contributing career; it is also a necessary one that, if pursued with the right ideals, is life-changing, enriching, and unifying, even in the face of violence, cruelty, or an uncertain and changing world. So, if there was a time to create music, that time is now, and I will continue to—sometimes afraid, and sometimes emboldened, but always committed—seize it with the next pieces I will create, as a work of passion, but also as part of my career. As I put down the pen after signing the contracts of my upcoming commissions, I’m also listening to those around me, to my people, my neighbors, to all of us who share the experiences a lot of people in this nation would like to, and are attempting to revise away from history, to create something that can, at least, incentivize dialogue, while remaining as a document of who we were, and which side we decided to take. Some are already conceptualized as works for:
Voice and organ, with text of Puerto Rican poets and fighters of our nation.
Pierrot ensemble, about the confronting the reflection this nation rejects to see in the proverbial mirror.
String quartet, celebrating all the colors of our LGBTQIA+ diversity with joy in the face of the current attempts to push us back in the closet.
Orchestra, about the act of historic revisionism.
For me, composing is not escapism. It is participation—in memory, in community, in resistance, in joy.
Works Cited
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Fronteer of Power (New York, PublicAffairs, 2019), 8.
Iván Enrique Rodríguez, “The White Hegemony over Orchestral Programming in the United States” (DMA diss., The Juilliard School, 2024), 128.
Richard C. Schwartz, “Internal Family Systems Therapy” (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 34.
Letter from Cornelius P. Rhoads to Fred W. Stewart, 1932, photostatic copy of the original, National Archives of Puerto Rico, Department of Justice Collection, Office of the Attorney General Series, File 11016, Box E. Archivist’s note: “Wolbach” appears erroneously as “Wallach.”
Iván Enrique Rodriguez
Described by San Francisco Classical Voice, Boston Classical Review, and New York Concert Review as fiery, gripping, lyrical, eloquent, with a strong feeling for musical drama, and a gifted colorist with an abundance of emotional energy and the means to communicate it, Puerto Rican composer Dr. Iván Enrique Rodríguez’ (b.1990) music has been performed in P.R., the U.S., throughout North/South America and Europe in important venues and landmarks such as the Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and Alice Tully Hall in New York City, Harpa in Reykjavík, Iceland, Jordan Hall in Boston, Massachusetts, among others around the world. In Italy, his piece Madre Luna, received 2014’s Rimini International Choral Competition prize; and where his Crípticos Nos. 1, 2 & 3 acquire him one of 2015’s International Composition Competition Maurice Ravel awards. Rodríguez received the 2019’s prestigious ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Award and 2023 ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize, and has also been invited to participate as composer-in-residence for Sweden’s Lövstabruks Kammarmusikfestival, the historic Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music 2022 season, among others. His musical-social involvement was recognized Musical America Worldwide naming him one of the 2021 Top Professionals of the Year, and by Junior Chamber International with 2014’s Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World award in P.R.
Iván Enrique Rodríguez received his Bachelor of Music degree at the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico, studying with Alfonso Fuentes. His Master of Music degree at The Juilliard School, and his Doctor in Musical Arts degree in Juilliard’s prestigious C.V. Starr doctoral program under the tutelage of Melinda Wagner, where he has been recipient of the Gretchaninoff Memorial Prize, the Bernard Jaffe Scholarship and Commission, the James D. Rosenthal and Marvin Y. Schofer Scholarship, the King Doctoral Scholarship and, the C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellowship, among others.