Review
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Title: Paco
Author: Nathan Thatcher
Publisher: Mormon Artists Group
Genre: Biography
Year Published: 2016
Number of pages: 266
Binding: Trade paperback
ISBN10: N/A
ISBN13: 9781523859092
Price: $19.95 (on Amazon)
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
This is a wonderful hybrid of a book, part journal, part journey, part discovery, and all in all an immersion in contemporary classical music. It appears to be modeled on a musical composition, one somewhat aleatoric, but rich and strange. I am not a musician, but a poet; however, I am even before that a reader, and Paco repays close reading.
As a composition, it opens slowly, with the author flying out of Philadelphia, and in his flight introducing several motifs: one of travel, one of his Spanish-language skills, one of his missionary labors, which he pursued in Philadelphia. To these opening motifs he soon introduces a fourth: Thatcher is a composer, and he is flying to Madrid to meet a Spanish composer named Francisco Estévez. He then introduces two more names: Glen Nelson and Nico Muhly. Muhly is also a contemporary classical composer; but Nelson is the head of the Mormon Artists Group in New York City, and it is he who has sent Thatcher in search of the Spanish composer Estévez.
For the next 65 pages, Thatcher expands on these names as the first movement of his composition. His relation to the men behind the names is almost mythic: he is a young pilgrim sent by a sorcerer into an unknown world in search of an elusive master, with a powerful wizard as his guide. Muhly is that guide, whom Thatcher introduced himself to on impulse in a restaurant in New York. Muhly has taken him on as a friend, if not a project — and at one point invites him to the premiere of a viola concerto he is working on, to be performed in early February, 2015. That’s when he finds time and means to fly to Madrid and seek out Estévez.
The lives of these four men are portrayed as intertwining in sudden and surprising ways, and it is not until much later in the book that you learn how extensively Thatcher had prepared before the whirlwind events that find him flying out of Philadelphia to spend a week in Spain, and in that week interviewing Estévez on only two days.
Thatcher portrays himself as an inexperienced, sheltered provincial, but still a composer. Muhly is the expansive, prolific and successful composer, the center of a coterie of friends (you can see his list of compositions online, in Wikipedia amongst other places). Estévez, elusive, even reclusive, is apparently still composing, but no one has been keeping score, and part of Thatcher’s mission is to discover what has become of him, and if possible to produce a biography of him and a catalog of his works.
The second movement, a brief allegro, describes the interlude between Thatcher’s return home and his final days as an undergrad at BYU. It includes a recapitulation of the themes of the first movement and a portrayal of the harried student composer. It also expands on a motif from the first movement, family: “The real story, though, starts to materialize as I piece together the facts and talk with Paco’s family” (p. 95; all parenthetical references are to page numbers). The story he is after is the story of Estévez’s obscurity. “His wife, children, and friends are eager to send me their glowing praises for their beloved Paco,” the nickname by which he is known to them all. He wants to know why “a man primed to foment a career in the eye of an international audience … never arrived there” (94). From his family and friends, “The story goes, then, that he turned away from that life, taking the wind out of his own unassailable sails. He decided that his family and his faith mattered most to him” (95).
He launches into the third movement with this observation from the end of the second: “Music is an art form that, in one sense, only exists in time. It is temporary and ephemeral. Just like people” (96). And, I might add, just like poetry. The relation between a score and a performance of that score is exactly that of the text of a poem and the reading of it. And neither exists except in the performance, in the reading — aloud.
This movement, the third chapter, is the biographical sketch, 33 pages, pulling together the many facts, memories, notes, hints, performance notes and happenings that can be wormed out of various sources. This is pretty much a straightforward chronology, and focuses, not surprisingly, on his activities as a musician and composer. Thatcher summarizes it this way: “Paco, like his music, is intense. He is incredibly hardworking — completely given over to both his art and his family. The music is focused, extreme, and even explosive. A lot of it has an almost obsessive quality, seemingly reflective of its author’s tendency to forget to eat while writing” (114).
I am drawn to the parallels between the portrait of this artist and that of La Monte Young that emerges from Jeremy Grimshaw’s Draw a Straight Line and Follow It. Estévez is a composer who is virtually unknown, yet who has produced some of the finest music by any Mormon, according to Thatcher. He is a convert who has found stability within the church. Young was born a Mormon but has moved into a wider spiritual sphere, and had a far larger impact on the music of his time. Yet the composers seem so similar. The music Thatcher describes in the fourth movement of this book sounds like it has many parallels with Young’s music, as described by Grimshaw. Estévez has been deeply involved with electronic music and dadaist performance, especially as a young composer, in his student days, before his conversion. After that event his music took on added dimension, but has remained experimental, if not avant-garde. You can read all about Young from a wide variety of sources on Wikipedia; if you look up Francisco Estévez, almost all the information comes from one source: Paco.
The glaring omission in this book, the lack that most robs it of real presence, is the want of any of the music of Estévez. Thatcher notes that it is available on the Web. Some has been posted on YouTube. He and Glen Nelson have traded files of performances from the broad span of Estévez’s career. But, as far as I can tell, there are no URLs offered to any of the available performances (which are rare).
My father, a teacher of literary criticism at BYU, loved Robert Cundick’s The Redeemer. He had several cassettes of it. I have always admired Leroy Robertson’s Oratorio from the Book of Mormon, which was recorded by the Utah Symphony and Maurice Abravanel. But as far as I can tell, neither work is currently available, nor much performed. So I am frustrated that with another significant Mormon composer, I can’t hear his music. Thatcher’s book makes me wish I could. It is a wonderful report of a fine journey of discovery. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.