Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana: the tour

It is four o'clock in the afternoon in the carriage of a train that will enter Amsterdam at dusk. Loaded with instruments and suitcases, the bodies of Yasel Muñoz, Mariana Hutchinson, Sarah Gutiérrez and Pepe Gavilondo are asleep. Seventeen days ago, on April 18, 2024, they landed at the airport in Hamburg, Germany, to cross four countries and seven cities in 15 concerts. Together, for the first time outside their usual Cuban stage, they set out on the Europe Tour adventure of the Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana (EIH).

Months have gone by since they began their efforts last year with the announcement of the tour and their fundraising campaign on the WhyDonate platform, supported by German academic and producer Lea Jakob.

The EIH is a project of creators and performers dedicated to developing and promoting musical practices of an interdisciplinary and experimental nature. Since its founding in 2014, the Ensemble performs different formulas of collective improvisation and a wide timbral spectrum arising from the combination of varied instruments from the symphonic world, ethnic music and electronic music.

This log is based on the interest in documenting -thanks to the audio correspondence- the letters exchanged during the journey, the written and illustrative nuances of what could be called a provisional transplant in the life and soul of the musicians while they intercept other latitudes.

***

The train continues on its soundproof journey to Amsterdam. "I'll have to keep my voice down," Pepe's whispered voice is glued to the phone. On Línea de La Habana Street, the noisiest time of the day is about to arrive.

Nice but very tiring days slipped by in the retrospective of Vienna and Geneva. Now they are on their way to another capital city with eight very heavy bags. "But Vienna is special," says the voice, "it's made like fine cakes. A city of silence, order and anti-chaos".

It was in Vienna that the first letters from the EIH arrived. There they had a reunion with two souls that populated branches of the Ensemble's history: violist Angélica María Cruz (Angie) and clarinetist Vivian (Vivi) Ferrero were with them. Angie has been living in that city for more than six years and Vivi made a trip from Italy to join them. If someone had told them that five years later they would be walking the streets of Vienna giving the same cress as always, they would not have believed it.

It is almost noon in a capital ten times less noisy than Havana. Pepe is at the entrance of the museum. Inside, in the Leopold, the others are still looking at the collections of Klimt and Egon Schiele. It sounds choppy. The vocal cords try to shake the body when the eyes have seen too fast:

"Vienna is architecturally fascinating, it's time travel. It's also a lot of space, a lot of silence, calm," he pauses to flick his nose and this percusses the recording in a low register that places me in the darkness of the handkerchief, "spectacular.

For now, the freshest feeling comes in Pepe's last sentence: "Last night, in a bar, Yasel split Vienna in two".

Yasel Muñoz is on the stage of a jazz club, located on the left side of the night of Thursday, April 25. The flute is in this minute of the night the muscle that dominates the rest. The neck is a bow at the mercy of increasingly extended notes. Its entire body seems to be made of wind. Abrasive gale that bursts a flickering corner of the Viennese musical nocturne.

Yasel wakes up with a hangover. He dresses. A cigarette says the first word. The others wait. The day before, and the day after, the University of Applied Sciences and the University of Music and Performing Arts, both based in Vienna, were part of the journey of these Cuban musicians:

"We did another workshop where they were doing an environmental festival in Vienna and we collaborated with our musical contribution. We participated in a series of very interesting lectures about power in art and power as a global concept. We were able to listen and intervene. The exhibitions focused on the alternative, on breaking the barriers imposed by certain types of political and economic power, any of those paradigms. It was great to know that there are people connected in the same channel with us. To give a related example, we in Cuba were not included in the catalog of the National Center of Concert Music and there we are breaking completely with the power of an institution with so much structural power.

***

A train intercepting the Swiss Alps takes them out of Austria. Sarah is moved by the images of this journey. Snowy heights, grayish, rocky surfaces with white ribs will settle in her memory. Pepe's eyes are glued to the window. He carries a camera with a strap attached to his forearm.

In Geneva, the travel photos give an account of the stay in a city half gray, half sunny. They slept in a two-room apartment. A friend of Pepe and his brother's from the neighborhood took them to see the city from above. They went out to explore the mountains and there they found, next to the impact of the cold, a Buddhist temple and its monks praying. They climbed up to where CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) is located and viewed the facility from a balcony nestled in front, standing at a different height.

Geneva instructed the taste buds in the taste of the fonduea hot cheese casserole that smells great at the center of the table. A skewer dips into the soft, yellow lushness and then goes to the mouth. Combined with the cheese, at the dessert of the palate journey, hints of wine are palpable.

"We were walking around the city and we saw a swan in the lake. I started filming it very closely. Behind me, sitting on a bench, were Yasel, Pepe and Mariana. Yasel started singing a song in German, obviously invented, and we were laughing our heads off," Sarah laughs again.

They played inside a bookstore and also played at L'Ecurie, a bar and concert hall. On May 3, 2024, the Auberge des Verges French-language billboard anticipated in its entry: "Through intercontemporaneity, aesthetic connections and the mastery of composing free expressions, the Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana takes us on a journey of expansion. They expand the natural possibilities of classical instruments thanks to electronics to explore ritualistic, minimalist and free improvisational musical territories. This is the dramatic plot of the experience: to offer a guide through extravagant landscapes, zones of ups and downs, bubbling rhythms and doses of folklore".

For Yasel, collective improvisation within the contemporary music circuit has a particular language, with very defined gestures and determined interactions: "We have opted to have a little less prejudice when it comes to approaching this type of language. We play in conventional and unconventional venues. We perform in more serious venues where we play music by established composers, a more chamber style and written music. And, suddenly, in another place a tap dancer joins the scene, with us doing super crazy rhythmic variations. This modality, like contemporary music and the sound painting, was invented here. It comes from 20th century European music, especially from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Cuba we always kept that aesthetic of playing in more institutional concert halls, such as Bellas Artes and Fábrica de Arte Cubano, and in unsuspected spaces, such as a park, the entrance of an elementary school, a P2 bus, an elevator, it didn't really matter. We can be just as academic, as popular, as folkloric.

"There were people who told us that they did not expect this coming from a group from Cuba because, perhaps, they went to the concerts with a certain expectation. There were, on the other hand, those who valued going to another country where we were going to perform or sending their acquaintances to our concerts -Mariana prints the serene tone of her ten o'clock at night over my four o'clock in the afternoon-. We knew we were giving those people a unique experience. Along with that, apart from the fact that what we do can be a peculiar combination, we don't limit ourselves to a genre, we don't pigeonhole ourselves, and that usually happens here: either you have something very experimental, or you have pop, or you have folk... We broke those aspects. We are all very different and there is everything in Cuba and among everything there is this, and this, in its own way, is very Cuban".

"The general impression of the public is that they have never seen anything like this. Cuba can offer experiences like this, out of the traditional. Well-known jazzmen came to our concerts. We are connecting with the people. We have been surprised on both sides," Pepe recalls.

In Albatross Library, a silent piece in a city of peaks, the sonorous restlessness of the EIH raised the notes above the silence of the books. In the auditorium, the music moved through the realm of the living like the wind through the mountains.

"The rhythmic aspect has an impact on the audience. In the workshops, the presentations and the conversations after the concerts, we noticed that people are not used to being touched and embraced. There were those who wanted to leave with us after the meetings - Mariana catches her breath before admitting that her personal side is now between two waters. It's nice when those two, or so many Northern European cultures collide with the Caribbean culture. My classmates discovered the two sides, the rigid people with zero sensitivity and zero reflection, and the people who welcomed us with more wholesome expressions, which although very direct were sincere. I am somewhere in between. Personally, I found myself in a curious position between the cultures. Being in the middle of the two. Entering into one and the other. Abstracted, as if out of the situation, I also placed myself between the feelings of the spectators' side, because I am Cuban and German".

***

"I continue outside the carriage, because of the rules of transportation. I can talk but not on the phone, even if I'm whispering." Still set in the Austrian journey, the audio was interrupted by a schhhh. The one on the side puts his index finger to his mouth. Before leaving for Geneva, one of the performances left echoes in Sternwartestrabe 36, 1180.

At dusk, the afternoon builds in the four bodies an exercise of interior music that invokes the reddish Antilles. A glass-window informs that, outside this room, gray and calm still insist. The first movements bend what will never be a line, but rather a spiral of circles that start from the sequential existence of the insinuation of a tango, which then raises its voice in the vociferous chaos of the instruments.

The first shadows mark the musical march like footsteps escaping along a wet sidewalk. Percussive stridencies, they hurry along the thin edges of the weather up to the audible desire at the threshold of what is already a moving and at the same time solitary night. One then arrives at a place of a campy note to try to sleep or to remain, even if in the wakefulness or the dream reappears, in the background, the drizzle.

"Ariella's house, which is where we did the concert, has a patio full of flowers and insects full of water because of the spring. The performance was not part of any festival. That experience brought us together with people who were happy to receive us. There was no rehearsal. Vivi played as if he had never left. The Cuban idiosyncrasy that is not lost but sometimes missed. How nice to be Cuban, asere. How nice to get along so well.

"Now we say goodbye to Switzerland, its mountains and its expensive food. Unlike Vienna, which is more like the magic house of a fairy tale, in Geneva we find a geography full of mountains with its lakes and with a difference in its customs and a more familiar dynamic. More forests, more palpable mountains. Lots of children, green energy programs, friendly people".

They will be on this train for a few more hours. Preserving the creative rhythm and the concentration to improvise, together with the tiredness, challenges them. Tomorrow is concert time. They will do, once again, a performance with an unrepeatable script. A beautiful day is predicted with Léster Domínguez, another musician in the veins of the EIH who will accompany them on percussions. But today they will arrive dead.

***

Illustration: Rubén Cabra

Thirty minutes have passed at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Yasel is still standing in front of The round of the night of Rembrandt. He doesn't understand why people raise their cell phones over the art print.

On the way to the next destination in the Netherlands, the Rembrandt painting still lingers in the mental flashes of Yasel, who, unlike his colleagues, discovered most of the places for the first time on this tour. The first time in Germany, the first time in Austria and the first time in the Netherlands. mood The city's atmosphere is one of the nicest things a tour can have. Amsterdam had a particular nuance to it all. As Mariana had already lived there, we entered the city where we had to enter it. We did almost all the tours by bicycle. We toured the canals and discovered the magnificent architecture of these people from the minute they laid the first red brick. How they built that city on water, a city so cosmopolitan and so heterogeneous that at the same time embraces you and has its own personality. The feeling of seeing an architecture that is born from below and then you look up and see those super narrow houses, with their economy of space. It blows your mind.

"The vibe of each city takes you to a place when it comes to expounding a speech. Arriving in the city of Rembrandt and the city of Van Gogh and having that super pincha in sight. All of that transfigures you to build a language within that language, a metalanguage within your own, bumping into things. Anyway, you are being permeated by all that art and you end up in a kind of sensory trance that you will release when you go on stage".

"They spent four days off in Amsterdam, the city I enjoyed the most on the tour. We were able to be together with a little less stress. Relax a bit," Sarah has another narrative passage. On one of those days, Yasel and I hopped on a water bike and rode off drinking wine, floating over the canals in the area. The succession of concerts got better and better, but where I felt most comfortable was at the concert at Splendor Hall."

At Splendor the blue Amsterdam light filters through two square openings. The afternoon will die very slowly. The beginning comes. Violin and cello strings sound, overlapping branches on the docile earth of the piano. Then it percusses, stones in the hands sparkle on top of the branches. And a continuous hiss of flute ignites the first flash of fire.

Fire steams the stage. Its initial acoustics ascend to the streak of electronic churning. It is nighttime. The branches crackle, burn. Warm the base of the earth. The flame is fanned by the wind that also cools the surface of its origin in the echo of the contact between the stones.

The fire that allows a throat clearing around it knows how to be generous. It is still lit. Tap steps carry in their hands metallic artifacts that raise, like shining diamonds, the body of Marije Nie, in the climax of this bonfire. The flame of an improvised combustion knows how to die. It lets its trace escape. The ash flies in the applause, to a full house.

We all fell in love with Amsterdam," Pepe's audio sighs. Just like a crush. Hard. Falling hard. Illustration: Rubén Cabra

The Rotterdam sun welcomed them after getting off the train, before a multi instrumental and acoustic night in the Batavierhuis hall. Arrive, set up and play. A short stay in another Dutch city. Mariana was a cultural translator of social codes in the Dutch artistic scene: "It was very special to go with the EIH to Europe. It's like taking my Cuban family to that other part of my life. I had personal and curious moments of reunions, people I hadn't seen in a thousand years and I didn't know they were going to be there. Where it happened the most was in Holland, because many people I knew came to the halls. It was surreal. People I love very much in Holland coincided with people I love very much in Cuba. Very different worlds came together.

Mariana's voice moves on a light string. She opens boxes of different memories along the way. In one of her travel bags are the paper receipts from the entire tour. She was in charge of the bookkeeping on this adventure. That means managing the funds, keeping track of the expense figures, the tickets that were added up from some concerts where they were paid "out of the hat".

From his perspective, the self-management of the groups is not something peculiar to the EIH or to being Cuban: "it is a fairly common thing in the world, although it is more in line with the type of group we are. In Cuba, it is generally Pepe who produces things, plus other things that I manage. We are used to self-managing, but in another context. The tour put us in front of the style of making the trips alone. Nobody can afford the luxury of having a producer, the big orchestras maybe yes, but all these groups that are more on the verge of the mainstreamThey often have to manage themselves. Apart from being intense and tiring, doing it was a good experience.

From Rotterdam to Hamburg. The will fights against exhaustion. The sixth train trip. Sixteenth of twenty stops. Walks, food, the canals and their watery routes in German cities. In Pepe's audio the time of this other place is remade:

"Hamburg captivated us. It is a city of sea and ports. A small but beautiful hall awaited us there. TONALi Saal is hidden in an alley, has a great piano and a guest apartment where Yasel and I stayed. The concert filled the hall. A lot of young people attended. They were musician friends of our production company and friends of Mariana. One of the performances more special, for everything that came out. A transcendental and interdimensional channel. Playing flute, cello and piano was something we hadn't experienced in a while. It was like bringing back that factory we did as a trio once in the pandemic, when Sarah started with us, and improvising at home.

"People were impressed with our free aesthetics. They asked us how we worked the rhythm, because they were struck by the way we handled that, which for them is not so strong and they understand it in a different way. The richness of our work has surprised the Europeans. I think they perceived the sincerity within that intensity that emanates in our interpretation. We are very open in what we feel.

In TONALi there was also a soundfarm and a soundpainting with academics from that room, professionals between 30 and 35 years old who study and work in the field of music. The talks and hugs with the people, usual gifts of human quality: "The day after we did a four-hour workshop that took place in a healthy environment in which, as director, I was able to get more out of it than in other workshops and have more things".

***

Sarah is amazed, even though this is not her first tour. Clearly, it all started without knowing what she was getting into: "I went with an orchestra on an extensive tour and the odd other route. But the EIH Europe Tour has been the most exhausting, the longest, most varied and versatile run. A lot of new things. Plus the fact that in this mode of experimentation you do something different. You never know what dimensions something can go to, until you are living it. We knew, apparently, that there were going to be many trains before many concerts, but one thing is theory and another is practice. Yes, we knew it was going to be crushing, but it was definitely wonderful."

According to Mariana's observation, the challenge is to keep everything always fresh: "We had to renew ourselves, to accept that there are things that could be repeated and it is valid to repeat them and not to elaborate everything from scratch in every performancealthough I was surprised at how little we repeated. We did a good DJ in the sense of giving a different twist to all the concerts. It's not like touring with orchestras, where you work with a score. Each performance was unique and for that there were multiple tools at our disposal. We did purely acoustic concerts with violin, cello, piano and flute, multi-instrumental, and others using the pedals we have with live electronics.

"If you feel less energetic today, what will come out will be that. It's part of the process to be yourself within that improvisation. We knew we were going to wear ourselves out. To say: gentleman, today I'm with zero inspiration. The strategy was to do something different, but without rehearsing, so as not to waste so many ideas at rehearsal time. There were concerts where we felt more connection than in others. That is the challenge of constant improvisation, since even in Cuba we had not played so often", he adds.

From one city to the next, we made up to three stops in one day, with suitcases and instruments," says Yasel. We were carrying a cello, which normally takes up a lot of space inside a transport. We prayed that one train wouldn't be late so that the other wouldn't leave, which luckily didn't happen. We ran at many of those stations, because at the transfer all we had was five or seven minutes. That was get off and get on, deal with the other passengers and move on with all that heavy luggage to another area of the station. It's a madness that physically and mentally overwhelms you. There were places we got to and that same day we had to play. Additional efforts within the tour, which in the end found us dejected".

In a silent room in Berlin yawns Pepe Gavilondo's penultimate letter. They arrived in Berlin exhausted: at the final stop of the seventh train, at the irremediable peak of physical and creative exhaustion: "But Berlin is a city full of different people from all over the world, perfect to meet with friends. It is magical and relaxed, it has something special that surprises. A modern peace that expands.

They stayed at the home of Sarah Willis, a member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and a presenter of classical music programs, who always offers to help Cubans she encounters throughout the region. One afternoon, the four agreed to meet at Tempelhofer Feld, the runway of a former airport now converted into an open space where people go biking, skating, picnicking and flying kites. Europe shook them from April to May, in thirty days of living together.

Mariana begins: "It was intense to be together all the time. Living that daily routine of having breakfast, lunch, going camping. It was also intense because we had a pile of suitcases. A lot of carrying and traveling by train. We had our channeling time to combine four people, who in the end are very different, for a month. Knowing when to support each other, when to criticize each other. Understanding that you don't have to do everything together all the time. We handled it pretty well. I would like to know if you notice anything changed after the tour. We go through very fast-paced moments, moments where we need each other. We cry. We laughed. We got to know each other a lot more in our little daily habits. Our pleasures, our dislikes.

"I learned to stay calm, to economize ideas, to take space and time to be alone. Because, even if they were my best friends, living together for a month under stress can be complicated, and yet it went well," says Sarah.

The following day, the last performance for which they chose an electronic format. Kater Blau, a complex of bars and restaurants, will host them in one of the showcases within Classical: NEXT, a festival that presents artists and ensembles from various countries that transgress the boundaries and broaden the horizons of music.

***

The streak of a period in motion whipped the cadence of the Ensemble members. The end of a cycle is a boomerang. History's inevitable return. At the beginning, there were other faces that arrived by plane to this same country, last April 18. One day later, 246 kilometers from Berlin, Lüneburg dawned with less than 10 degrees Celsius. Located in the northwest of Germany, this town has among its public institutions the University of Leuphana, a center for humanistic, sustainable and practically oriented education that promotes the free desire to understand, innovation, personality development and social commitment.

"Lüneburg is a small town in Germany that has its own characteristics. Super cute, but watercress. Tremendous cold dog. The first experience was with the university students of Leuphana, young people studying economics, social sciences, business... a whole bunch of different careers, but none of them were directly music. Several students signed up for this seminar. It was quite complicated and we had to start inventing. In the end, the dynamics in the workshops worked. It was three or four days of work and interaction with the students. They were very receptive, kept their interest and asked us a lot of questions about Cuba," Yasel intoned in perfect Holguinese.

Mariana adds: "We made two presentations with the workshop participants we work with. This kind of interrelationship takes others out of their day to day lives a little bit stiff. We received a lot of information and feedback during the concerts and from the contacts we had with many people in general. They positively got the energy that one has as a Cuban and the sensuality or the joie de vivre. Here, in general, people are more self-conscious, perhaps in the whole world there are many codes, and we, coming from the Cuban relaxation, we kind of skipped that".

Sarah made her debut in the teacher's place. She stopped being a student only three years ago. For the youngest of the EIH it was quite crazy to be on the teaching side: "In the first workshop I didn't realize I was the teacher until three days later. I was behaving like a student in the teacher's place. After I talked it over with Mariana, I was a little bit like in shockbut it was enjoyable. I felt that I could do it and that I can do it if I try".

After devoting the entire day to work sessions at Leuphana University, Sarah had study routines. June three. The date of the audition for her long-desired master's degree was getting closer and closer. The tour split her schedule in two, for the meetings and for self-preparation. A functional duality she could not cope with every day. Before starting this journey, she knew that for her it would be a test of faith mixed with discipline.

The workshop concluded on April 21, with a musical exercise conceived in the square space between the corridors of Leuphana. Its instrumental mechanics simulated the water cycle. Mariana is the ascending stitching of the vapor that was drizzle. She kisses the ear that rises and at the top of the hill, she catches a glimpse of a distant mouth. Sarah is the horizon, a brush on the sea where the altar of what was Mariana's drizzle rests. Yasel is the cloud that drags the blizzard with a plummeting rain. Pepe, fiery shock effect after the rainy wind of Yasel in the breaking of the high cloud on the dry land, severely wounded.

***

On May 18, before being returned to the 35 degrees Celsius of Havana, Pepe was alone at the Berlin airport. In the departures department, he was accompanied by a suitcase, a suitcase and Sarah's cello. He submerged the waiting time in longing. Berlin was over faster than he would have liked, as it always happens, because he would like to live there.

He glued his spine to the back of an uncomfortable airport seat. He closed his eyes. He returned to the thought that flooded him the minutes that slipped away before the final performance in Kater Blau. The word last was left floating. Not the last one, he said to himself, when the four of them are in the insular August they will make a presentation in Cuba: "The time has come to say goodbye for a little while. It's ten years and a pile of feelings and memories and experiences that I cannot really describe or contain. Life is like that. Beautiful things come in cycles, and this cycle is coming to an end. I am convinced that it is not ending, but that we are taking a pause for our lives to continue through other facets. Let's see what happens in the future."

Close to Pepe, in the suffocated anteroom of that final concert, was Mariana's nostalgic feeling. Among the accumulated memories, the shock of the reunion will weigh: with Léster, who came to Amsterdam from Spain, and with Vivi, who came from Italy to the streets of Vienna. And how that flowed so naturally: "Once you are part of it, you will always have the EIH bug on a personal, artistic and musical level. That's something that gives a lot of hope in the sense of now. Where are we going to be? Are we going to meet again at 70 years old and tour like old men? I think so; the EIH bug in us feeds on experimentation, on not being pigeonholed, on not being afraid to search."

In Sarah, the concept of gratitude matures in the thirsty anatomy of an evolved performer. "After I left the academy, all I did was play cello and study classical music in my room, alone. I didn't really have much chemistry with people in Cuba to play. I think that, as with everything, if you don't have chemistry with the people you play with it's very difficult, especially if it's a small group, because in an orchestra it balances a little better because a conductor leads it. When I met Pepe, Mariana and Yasel that changed, I found three of my best friends, without a doubt, people with whom I had a spectacular connection and people with whom for the first time in Cuba I felt I could make music and share and do everything. Pepe introduced me to the world of improvisation, something I had never done, and yet I could tell he had a lot of ease and good intention for it. My life definitely changed. It changed the way I appreciate music. It changed the way I appreciate even classical music. Now I see music as a whole, where genres feed back and not as one genre or another. It changed my life to relax not only in music but in every way. A challenge, no doubt, but a challenge that cost me nothing. It has been and will continue to be a wonderful journey".

Yasel understood, in his walk through life, that certain emotions are condensed and summarized. His synthesis has three points: "the fact of trying our speech of so many years here where this was invented, to see the response of the public that knows and does not know, to be impacted by these experiences and to know new places, experiences that are nuanced".

Illustration: Rubén Cabra

Pepe's last letter was the most melancholy of the tour. His own hymn of permanence supports the EIH story. The audio ends with a manifesto whose thesis finds in change the subterranean roots of the perpetual existence of something: "A beautiful decade full of much music, much love and emotions and much intensity is coming to the end of its first stage. For the time being we need a break to follow our paths in music and in life, to change a little bit and learn new things, and eventually come together again, even if it's just one day in one place and put together all that we will have changed. That's what it's all about, that's why the Ensemble is eternal. That's its concept. I know that as long as we are alive, the four of us plus Léster, Vivi, Santiago Barbosa and Luna Tinoco, the Ensemble will always exist and we will always be able to play and do something. The Ensemble will keep changing and will live on. And that is beautiful.

It is May 15. The atmosphere of the Kater Blau resounds on the side of a canal in Berlin. DJs, urban dances, drinks and voices from the languages of the world transpire and converge at Classical: NEXT. Quarter past eleven at night. On the small stage, turn nine of the ten showcases that have crumbled the day. The Ensemble resists for half an hour, without stopThe tide is hypnotized in the storm of sound. The tide is hypnotized in the storm of sound. Pepe's playtronica extinguishes the lifespan of the murmur of the crowd.