Andante: A Musician's Footsteps — The Life and Work of Alberto Soriano.

Alberto Soriano was a presence at our dinner table long before I understood what that meant. He was a friend of my father's, and during his Buenos Aires exile he spent hours with us — at the piano, in conversation, generous and magnanimous in the way that only people who have lost everything and kept their dignity can be. I met his daughter Mireya years later, during a visit to Montevideo. She was then, as I imagine she remains, a warm and luminous soul, and I hope we will share a table again soon in Madrid after all these years. Here are my thoughts on her biography of her father — a book that reminds me we walked in the footsteps of giants.

Alberto Soriano with my father, Nelson Montes-Bradley. Montevideo, 1970

There is a phrase that appears near the end of this book, spoken not by the subject but by the people of a poor neighborhood in Concepción del Uruguay, Argentina, on the night Alberto Soriano was taken away to be buried in Montevideo. They had gathered to see him off, but the hearse left too fast, disappearing into the dark. They stood watching the dust. "It was all moonlight," the book says, "the field that night when he left."

That image — the cortège vanishing on a dirt road that looked like silver — is characteristic of the way Mireya Soriano writes about her father: with precision, tenderness, and an unwillingness to sentimentalize what is already, on its own, deeply moving. Andante: Los pasos de un músico is a biography written by a daughter, drawn from more than three thousand letters preserved in the family archive. It is also something rarer: a literary act of retrieval, an attempt to restore to the record a composer who was, and in many places still is, scandalously unknown.

Alberto Soriano (1915–1981) was born in Santiago del Estero, Argentina, to a nomadic family that settled in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, where he grew up, studied at the conservatory, played violin in silent film houses at fifteen, and immersed himself in the Candomblé ceremonies of the city's African communities — not as an observer but as a young man undone by what he heard, staying up all night transcribing ritual songs from memory onto music paper before the dawn could take them. That episode, which opens the book's third chapter, establishes everything essential about who Soriano was: a composer for whom ethnomusicology was never a methodology but a vocation, inseparable from his own formation.

Andante: Los pasos de un músico. Vida y obra de Alberto Soriano. By Mireya Soriano

Editorial Milenio. Spain, 2021. 227pp with Photographs.

The life that Mireya traces is one of perpetual transit — Bahia to Rio, Rio to Montevideo, Montevideo to Buenos Aires, across Europe and back — driven partly by professional ambition, partly by the difficulty of holding a family together across borders, and partly by politics. Soriano was twice deported: in 1969 by Uruguay's pre-dictatorship government for having traveled to Romania and the Soviet Union, where his music had been performed by Mstislav Rostropovich and recorded by major orchestras; and again in 1976 during the full dictatorship, when a naval officer in Buenos Aires released him in the dark with the words that give Chapter 24 its title: "Señor, no lo hemos visto." Sir, we have not seen you. He walked out of the port alone, with no money and no idea where he was.

Alberto Soriano's recordings — including works recorded by the Romanian Radio Orchestra and the Concerto for Five Guitars — were released in Argentina by Qualiton. His ethnomusicological studies, including the sound archive of more than nine thousand field recordings, are held at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo.

What distinguishes this book from conventional musical biography is its refusal to separate the life from the music, or the music from the letters. The thousands of pages of correspondence between Alberto and his wife Martha — a love story of great depth and remarkable endurance, conducted mostly across distance — give the narrative an intimacy that no institutional archive could provide. We hear him describe a moonlit night on the bay of Guanabara, the sound of a thrush near the Argentine Congress building, the smell of petrichor from a Buenos Aires patio. We hear him feeding pigeons on the Avenida 9 de Julio and composing on paper napkins. We hear him, in his last years in Concepción del Uruguay, talking to the frogs.

Alberto Soriano, Héctor Villalobos, and Andrés Segovia

The musical portrait that emerges is of a composer of radical originality who resisted every prevailing school while remaining unsentimentally connected to the cultures that formed him. Critics who encountered his work — from London to Leipzig to Bogotá — returned again and again to the same words: original, stripped, surprising. His friend and colleague Eduardo Fabini wrote that in his book Esencialidad Musical, published in Montevideo in 1940, "the most exquisite poetry and serene didactic exposition are joined." The conductor Víctor Tevah, who recorded his violin concerto, said he was "the composer with the least European influence of any I have known." And yet European concert halls embraced him when his own country exiled him.

Mireya Soriano has chosen a form for this biography that itself enacts a kind of music. The chapter titles are all tempo markings or musical gestures — Allegro vivace, Presto agitato, Lento cantabile — and the narrative moves accordingly, lyrical in passages of domestic intimacy, urgent in the political chapters, slow and deliberate when it arrives at the end. The book was written in Spanish and remains, as of this writing, unpublished. That is its own form of injustice — one more instance, in a long series, of Soriano arriving ahead of where the world was prepared to receive him.

For those working in American music history, in Latin American cultural studies, or simply in the larger question of what gets remembered and why, Andante is essential reading. It is the account of a man who spent his life making music for a continent still learning to listen — and who, on the night he died, was surrounded by people from the poorest streets of a provincial Argentine city, holding cassette tapes he had given them, weeping.