Daniel Catán (1949-2011)

I studied composition with Daniel Catán for the past semester and since he passed away suddenly a few weeks ago I’ve been trying to think about a proper way to memorialize him in this space. At first I thought that perhaps it wasn’t my place to do that because I knew him for such a short time compared to dozens of other people in his life but, in the end, there are many ways to honor someone’s memory and my time with him meant a lot to me.

When people eulogize someone important to them I feel like it can sometimes veer easily into hyperbolic statements about the faultless virtues of the deceased; clichés can run rampant and nothing much is said about the person in question. But, as with any sort of cliché, it exists mostly because it's probably true. So that being said, I’d like to make the following statement:

Daniel Catán was an amazing human being. Cliché? Yes. True? Totally. And my story about how I came to know him starts a few years ago.

Smash cut to…

…Germany: the summer of 2006. I was on one of those semi-requisite, post-collegiate backpack traipses through Europe with a friend. Via the European train system, we ended up being on the road for about a month and a half and one of our stops was the town of Heidelberg in southwestern Germany. Like most of the places we ended up it was a process of getting off the train, finding and setting up the campsite we had booked and subsequently filling up any remaining time we had by seeing the sights, eating the food and, inevitably, drinking the beer. During this particular stop we were walking through the downtown area and, for probably the third day in a row, I was wearing a shirt from my undergrad choral days that said “Luther College Nordic Choir” on it. The fact that we weren’t able to wear fresh clothes every single day necessitated bringing along the kind of crappy t-shirts that Life sort of gives you once a year (think about it…you have a closet full of them, right?). In any case, as we were walking someone out in the crowd of people shouted, “Nordic Choir?!”

The shouter in question turned out to be a Luther alum who had graduated just a few years before us. He was working in town as a singer for the local state opera at the Theater Heidelberg and he ended up showing us around town, taking us out to eat (I had some crazy good semmelknödel) and eventually securing us comp tickets for that night’s production of an opera called Florencia en el Amazonas. It was sung in Spanish with German supertitles so, due to the fact that I only speak a little bit of either of those languages, it was a bit hard to follow. The beer secured after the first act and a question and answer session with a German couple also in attendance helped clarify things a bit.

And that’s where that part of the story ends. We had a good time at an opera we hadn’t planned to see and only half understood.

Smash cut to…

…Austin, Texas: the winter of 2010. Here I was slogging my way through graduate school and, during registration, it’s brought to my attention that there will be a composer-in-residence for the spring semester. His name is Daniel Catán and he’s been commissioned to write a new opera in honor of some local mega-patrons who gave $55 million to the School of Music (which was subsequently named after them). Supposedly he's written some pretty incredible stuff but I am skeptical at first because I’m a bit wary of signing away 25% of my lessons to somebody I have never heard of before. To this end I bring up his Wikipedia page to investigate a bit more and it becomes obvious fairly quickly that this guy is the Real Deal. Operas produced everywhere; widely respected, etc. In fact, as it turned out, the last thing he worked on was a commission from the Los Angeles Opera to write something for Placido effing Domingo. Whoa. Maybe I should study with this guy after all.

That’s when I scrolled down to the section where it listed all the operas he had written. There, listed amongst the others, was Florencia en el Amazonas; the opera I had seen by pure coincidence in the summer of 2006. The composer of that piece (whose name I had long forgotten) was Daniel Catán.

I took this as a sign and immediately put my name in the hat to study with him. “He’ll have some incredible advice on that opera I’ve been writing for the last few years,” I thought.

From the very first lesson (in which I recounted my story of seeing Florencia in Heidelberg) it became starkly evident that Daniel was an incredible human being who, through his compositions, wanted to take as many people on a beautiful journey as he could and he cared deeply for all of his students as both people and fellow composers.

For the uninitiated, I feel I should say that sometimes music lessons can devolve into a sort of empirical hegemonic exercise whereby a student is instructed by a master but, every Wednesday at 3pm, Daniel made it known through no uncertain terms that he considered his students equals and this was the position he wanted to talk about my music from. He would often lean forward, point at various measures on my chicken scratch manuscript and gently ask, “What are you trying to say here? I just want you to talk for a bit and I’ll listen.”

He was gracious and he was challenging but, above all, he was nurturing. Not every composition student needs this but, in my case, it helped me to get work done because I didn’t dread showing my music to him (and I hate presenting my music to other composers). We would often just sit and talk for a while; spending maybe 10 minutes of the hour on actual music I brought in. We talked variously--and for no apparent compositional reason--of a Norwegian dessert called rømmegrøt I had recently made for a dinner party as well as the different ways he felt Musetta could be played in any number of productions of La bohème (clearly he was the one who was on-task). At one point he found out that I played banjo and grilled me on notation for that instrument because he had planned on using it in the opera he was working on.

At our final lesson together, I brought in a piece for viola and piano I had written. I played it for him and he said, “Well, it doesn’t sound like you’re stuck on this. What else have you brought?” As this was 15 minutes into our lesson I freaked out a little because I didn’t know what I could play for him but, as it happened, I had the 50 pages of music I've got written for my opera, We, The Boys, with me. I took it out and he proceeded to school me at length on what I was doing right and wrong. At one point, he looked at me and said, “This is a song. You’re inspired by the troubadours, aren’t you?” I had to honestly say that I wasn’t...and I’m unsure if I’ll ever be compared to a composer of Occitan lyric poetry in the High Middle Ages again in my life. It’s certainly something to strive for.

In a sense, though, he was right. I’m woefully unfamiliar with the canon of troubadour music (for the moment), but the music of various singer/songwriters is something that informs my music in a deep way. And couldn’t modern-day musicians like Holcombe Waller or Ben Gibbard or Justin Vernon (to name a few) be said to have a connection to that ancient music. I definitely think so and he had heard the residue of those people in the aria I played for him. But that was Daniel Catán for you. He was one of the most perceptive people I have ever met.

He also had a wicked sense of humor that was as dry as the desert sand. It always took a second to figure out that he was even telling a joke in the first place because he wouldn’t say it any differently than he would any other sentence. During one of our lessons I was telling him about a new opera that I was excited about. He sat and quietly listened until I finished the story about the plot of the piece. Once I reached this point you could sort of see the gears turning in his head before he very calmly--and without a trace of invective or hyperbole--said, “You know…[beat]…this sounds like fucking bullshit to me.”

He was incredibly funny.

Also, due to the fact that he grew up for a time in the United Kingdom, he would often pepper his speech with the word “bloody.” He was born in Mexico but had lived as an English speaker for the majority of his life so he had this sort-of muddled Spanish accent that was hard to place. But here he was talking about how things were “bloody difficult” or “bloody great.” The passion of a Hispanic man crossed with the erudition of an English toff. Whenever I tried to imitate him I ended up sounding like a cross between Antonio Banderas and a leprechaun (I am not a very talented mimic).

And I will miss him dearly. As clichéd as this sounds, I learned more from him in our short time together than I had in the previous 10 years. He made me feel as if some of the decisions I had made about being a composer--decisions that I attribute to just blindly feeling my way around that particular endeavor--were the right ones and that, in fact, he toiled in the same proverbial vineyard as I did. The overwhelming message was, "Just write what you want to write. Everything else will take care of itself as long as you're truly happy with what you've written." And it’s not often that you find a compositional mentor that attempts to impart this very simple notion to you.

In talking with his other students, it turns out he had the same effect on them as well. He had the talent of saying the exact thing that needed to be said. Without malice or pretense he encouraged us all to be the composers that we were rather than the composers we wanted to be (and there is a vast difference between those two). To quote the beautiful obituary that Mark Swed wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

Everyone--even the singers and stage directors and opera administrators--liked him. Critics and some important people in the music business were put off by Catán’s unabashed neo-Romanticism, but no one had a bad word to say about him. His students adored him. He always struck me as someone who cared about people and who cared about music and had no intention of letting one form of caring obstruct the other.

Very, very true. One of the things that Daniel was quoted as saying is, “Love and art are the vehicles to self-realization as a human being in the fullest sense of the word.” Just take a second and figure out what that statement means to you.

Those words have resonated with me since the very first time I set eyes on them both because I was lucky enough to know the man that said them...but even more so because I think they’re bloody true. Love and art represent emotional purity and, ultimately, the power of truth. It’s a notion that I think he strived--sometimes willfully, doggedly so--to live up to. And that might be the noblest endeavor that anyone can undertake whether they write incredible operas or not.

Gracias por todo, Señor Catán. Te echaremos de menos.