Moisés Simons
Encyclopedia
Cubans
Cubans or Cuban people are the inhabitants or citizens of Cuba. Cuba is a multi-ethnic nation, home to people of different ethnic and national backgrounds...
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
, pianist
Pianist
A pianist is a musician who plays the piano. A professional pianist can perform solo pieces, play with an ensemble or orchestra, or accompany one or more singers, solo instrumentalists, or other performers.-Choice of genres:...
and orchestra leader
Bandleader
A bandleader is the leader of a band of musicians. The term is most commonly, though not exclusively, used with a group that plays popular music as a small combo or a big band, such as one which plays jazz, blues, rhythm and blues or rock and roll music....
. He was the composer of the Peanut Vendor, possibly the most famous piece of music created by a Cuban musician. The Peanut Vendor (original title: El manisero) has been recorded more than 160 times.
Early years
The son of a Basque musician, he started studying music with his father, Leandro Simón Guergué. By nine, he was the organistOrganist
An organist is a musician who plays any type of organ. An organist may play solo organ works, play with an ensemble or orchestra, or accompany one or more singers or instrumental soloists...
at his local church in the barrio
Barrio
Barrio is a Spanish word meaning district or neighborhood.-Usage:In its formal usage in English, barrios are generally considered cohesive places, sharing, for example, a church and traditions such as feast days...
of Jesús María, and choirmaster of the Pilar church. At fifteen, he undertook advanced studies on composition
Musical composition
Musical composition can refer to an original piece of music, the structure of a musical piece, or the process of creating a new piece of music. People who practice composition are called composers.- Musical compositions :...
, harmony
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
, counterpoint
Counterpoint
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...
, fugue
Fugue
In music, a fugue is a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation and recurs frequently in the course of the composition....
and instrumentation
Instrumentation (music)
In music, instrumentation refers to the particular combination of musical instruments employed in a composition, and to the properties of those instruments individually...
, under various maestros.
Career
Later, he became a concert pianist and musical director of lyric theatre companies. He worked at the Teatro Martí, where they put on musical comedies by Ernesto LecuonaErnesto Lecuona
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado was a Cuban composer and pianist of Canarian father and Cuban mother, and worldwide fame. He composed over six hundred pieces, mostly in the Cuban vein, and was a pianist of exceptional quality....
. Then he moved to the Teatro Peyret under contract to the Spanish composer Vicente Lleó, who directed a zarzuela
Zarzuela
Zarzuela is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular song, as well as dance...
company. With them he toured México
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...
, Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
and Central America
Central America
Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...
.
In 1924, Simons founded a jazz band which played on the roof garden of the Plaza Hotel in Havana. It consisted of piano, violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
, two saxes, banjo
Banjo
In the 1830s Sweeney became the first white man to play the banjo on stage. His version of the instrument replaced the gourd with a drum-like sound box and included four full-length strings alongside a short fifth-string. There is no proof, however, that Sweeney invented either innovation. This new...
, double bass
Double bass
The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, standup bass or contrabass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2...
, drums and timbales
Timbales
Timbales are shallow single-headed drums with metal casing, invented in Cuba. They are shallower in shape than single-headed tom-toms, and usually much higher tuned...
. As well as Simons (piano), its members included Virgilio Diego (violin); Alberto Socarrás
Alberto Socarras
Alberto Socarrás Estacio, , was a Cuban-American flautist who played both Cuban music and jazz....
(alto sax, flute
Flute
The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...
); José Ramón Betancourt (tenor sax); Pablo O'Farrill (d. bass). In 1928, still at the same venue, Simons hired Julio Cueva
Julio Cueva
Julio Cueva was a Cuban trumpeter, composer and band leader. He was an important figure in the spread of Cuban popular music in the 1930s.- Life and career :...
, a famous trumpeter, and Enrique Santiesteban, a future media star, as vocalist and drummer. These were top instrumentalists, attracted by top fees of $8 a day.
Simons did research into the history of Cuban music, and published in newspapers and magazines. He wrote the scores for stages shows and several films. He was President of the Association of Musical Solidarity and the technical director of the Society of Wind Orchestras (Orquesta típica
Orquesta típica
Orquesta típica, or simply a típica, is a Latin-American term for a band which plays popular music. The details vary from country to country. The term tends to be used for groups of medium size in some well-defined instrumental set-up.- Argentina :In Argentina, a típica is a tango orchestra...
s).
As a composer he was renowned even in that great era between the two World Wars, when Alejandro García Caturla
Alejandro García Caturla
Alejandro García Caturla was a Cuban composer of art music and creolized Cuban themes.He was born in Remedios. At sixteen he became a second violin of the new Orquesta Sinfonica de La Habana in 1922, where Amadeo Roldán was concert-master . He also began composing at a young age, whilst studying...
, Amadeo Roldan
Amadeo Roldán
Amadeo Roldán y Gardes was a Cuban composer and violinist. Roldán was born in Paris to a Cuban mulatta and a Spanish father...
, Ernesto Lecuona
Ernesto Lecuona
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado was a Cuban composer and pianist of Canarian father and Cuban mother, and worldwide fame. He composed over six hundred pieces, mostly in the Cuban vein, and was a pianist of exceptional quality....
, Eliseo Grenet
Eliseo Grenet
Eliseo Grenet Sánchez was a Cuban pianist and a leading composer/arranger of the day. He composed music for stage shows and films, and some famous Cuban dance music. Eliseo was one of three musical brothers, all composers, the others being Emilio and Ernesto...
, Gonzalo Roig
Gonzalo Roig
Gonzalo Roig was a Cuban musician, composer, musical director and founder of several orchestras. He was a pioneer of the symphonic movement in Cuba....
, Rodrigo Prats
Rodrigo Prats
Rodrigo Prats was a Cuban composer, violinist, pianist and orchestral director. The son of a musician, Jaime Prats, Rodrigo began to study music at the age of nine...
and Jorge Anckermann
Jorge Anckermann
Jorge Anckermann was a Cuban pianist, composer and bandleader. He started in music at eight with his father. At ten he was able to substitute in a trio...
were working. It was the era of afrocubanismo
Afrocubanismo
Afrocubanismo: the movement in black-themed Cuban culture with origins in the 1920s, as in works by the cultural anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. The movement marks the time, between the two world wars, when white intellectuals in Cuba acknowledged openly the significance of African culture in Cuba....
, when at last the contribution of the black people to Cuban culture was recognised and celebrated.
Later years
Simons was in France, mostly Paris, for much of the 1930s, and was still there when World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
broke out. He was finally able to get out and return to Cuba in 1942. Soon he was off again to Tenerife
Tenerife
Tenerife is the largest and most populous island of the seven Canary Islands, it is also the most populated island of Spain, with a land area of 2,034.38 km² and 906,854 inhabitants, 43% of the total population of the Canary Islands. About five million tourists visit Tenerife each year, the...
and then Madrid, where he signed a contract to provide music for the film Bambú. The film included his last composition, Hoy como ayer (Today like yesterday). He died in Madrid in 1945.
El manisero
The fame of El manisero (Peanut Vendor) led to Simons' own worldwide recognition. It sold over a million copies of sheet musicSheet music
Sheet music is a hand-written or printed form of music notation that uses modern musical symbols; like its analogs—books, pamphlets, etc.—the medium of sheet music typically is paper , although the access to musical notation in recent years includes also presentation on computer screens...
for E.B. Marks Inc., and this netted $100,000 in royalties for Simons by 1943. Its success led to a 'rumba craze' in the US and Europe which lasted until the 1940s. The consequences of the Peanut Vendor's success was thus quite far-reaching.
The number was first sung and recorded by the vedette Rita Montaner
Rita Montaner
Rita Montaner, born Rita Aurelia Fulcida Montaner y Facenda , was a Cuban singer, pianist, actress and star of stage, film, radio and television. In Cuban parlance, she was a vedette , and she was well known in Mexico City, Paris, Miami and New York, where she performed, filmed and recorded on...
in 1927 or 1928 for Columbia Records
Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...
. The biggest record sales for El manisero came from the recording made by Don Azpiazú
Don Azpiazu
Don Azpiazú was a leading Cuban orchestral director in the 1920s and 30s. His band introduced authentic Cuban dance music and Cuban musical instruments to a wide audience in the USA...
and his Havana Casino Orchestra in New York in 1930 for Victor Records. The band included a number of star musicians such as Julio Cueva
Julio Cueva
Julio Cueva was a Cuban trumpeter, composer and band leader. He was an important figure in the spread of Cuban popular music in the 1930s.- Life and career :...
(trumpet) and Mario Bauza
Mario Bauza
Mario Bauzá was an important Cuban musician. He was one of the first to introduce Latin music to the United States by bringing Cuban musical styles into the New York jazz scene...
(saxophone); Antonio Machín
Antonio Machín
Antonio Machín was a Cuban singer and musician. His version of El Manisero, recorded in New York, 1930, with Don Azpiazú's orchestra, was the first million record seller for a Cuban artist...
was the singer. There seems to be no authoritative account of the number of 78rpm records of this recording sold by Victor; but it seems likely that the number would have exceeded the sheet music sales, making it the first million-selling record of Cuban (or even Latin) music.
The lyrics
Lyrics
Lyrics are a set of words that make up a song. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist or lyrist. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of...
were based on a street vendors' cry, a pregón
Pregón
Pregón, a Spanish word meaning announcement or street-seller's cry, has a particular meaning in Cuban music, and Latin American music generally...
; and the rhythm was a son, so technically this was a son-pregón. On the record label, however, it was called a rhumba, not only the wrong genre, but mis-spelled as well. On the published score both music and lyrics are attributed to Simons, though there is a persistent story that they were written by Gonzalo G. de Mello in Havana the night before Montaner was due to record it in New York. Cristóbal Díaz says "For various reasons, we have doubts about this version... El manisero was one of those rare cases in popular music where an author got immediate and substantial financial benefits... logically Mello would have tried to reclaim his authorship of the lyrics, but that did not occur." The second attack on the authorship of the lyrics came from none other than the great Fernando Ortíz
Fernando Ortiz
Fernando Ortiz Fernández was a Cuban essayist, ethnomusicologist and scholar of Afro-Cuban culture. Ortiz was a prolific polymath dedicated to exploring, recording, and understanding all aspects of indigenous Cuban culture...
. For Ortíz, the true author was an unknown Havana peanut seller, of the second half of the 19th century, who served as the basis for a danza
Danza
Danza is a musical genre that originated in Ponce, a city in southern Puerto Rico. It is a popular turn-of-the-twentieth-century ballroom dance genre slightly similar to the waltz. Both the danza and its cousin the contradanza are sequence dances, performed to a pattern, usually of squares, to...
written by Gottschalk
Louis Moreau Gottschalk
Louis Moreau Gottschalk was an American composer and pianist, best known as a virtuoso performer of his own romantic piano works...
. Of course, it may well be that elements of the song were to be found in real life. The English version is by Gilbert
L. Wolfe Gilbert
Louis Wolfe Gilbert was a Russian-born American songwriter.-Biography:Born in Odessa, Russian Empire, Gilbert moved to the United States as a young man and eventually established himself as one of the leading songwriters on Tin Pan Alley.Gilbert began his career touring with John L...
and Sunshine
Marion Sunshine
Marion Sunshine , was an American actress. She appeared on Broadway in musicals such as Going Up. She appeared in 26 films between 1908 and 1916....
; the latter was Azpizú's sister-in-law
Sister-in-law
A sister-in-law is the sister of one's spouse, the wife of one's sibling, or sometimes the wife of one's spouse's sibling...
, who toured with the band in the U.S.A. as singer. The English lyrics are, in the opinion of Sublette, of almost unsurpassed banality.
The Peanut Vendor had a second life as a hit number when Stan Kenton
Stan Kenton
Stanley Newcomb "Stan" Kenton was a pianist, composer, and arranger who led a highly innovative, influential, and often controversial American jazz orchestra. In later years he was widely active as an educator....
recorded it with his big band for Capitol Records
Capitol Records
Capitol Records is a major United States based record label, formerly located in Los Angeles, but operating in New York City as part of Capitol Music Group. Its former headquarters building, the Capitol Tower, is a major landmark near the corner of Hollywood and Vine...
, in 1947. This was also a great and long-lasting hit, re-recorded by Kenton twice with the band, and played by him later in life as a piano solo. The Kenton version was entirely instrumental, with the rhythmic pattern emphasised by trombones.
Several films included versions of El manisero. It appeared in The Cuban Song by MGM, with Ernesto Lecuona as musical advisor; Judy Garland
Judy Garland
Judy Garland was an American actress and singer. Through a career that spanned 45 of her 47 years and for her renowned contralto voice, she attained international stardom as an actress in musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist and on the concert stage...
sung a fragment in the film A Star is Born
A Star Is Born (1954 film)
A Star Is Born is a 1954 American musical film directed by George Cukor. The screenplay written by Moss Hart was an adaptation of the original 1937 film, which was based on the original screenplay by Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker, and Alan Campbell...
.
Other works
Simons' musical compositions include lyric theatre scores for the following operettas or zarzuelas: Deuda de amor; La negra Quirina; Le chant des tropiques; Niña Mercé; Toi c'est moi, several of which were premiered in Paris during the 1930s. The operetta Toi c'est moi, written with Henri Duvernois, a popular French novelist, and starring Simone SimonSimone Simon
Simone Thérèse Fernande Simon was a French film actress who began her film career in 1931.-Early life:Born in Béthune, Pas-de-Calais France, she was the daughter of Henri Louis Firmin Champmoynat, a French engineer, airplane pilot in World War II, who died in a concentration camp, and Erma Maria...
, was opened at the Opéra-Comique
Opéra-Comique
The Opéra-Comique is a Parisian opera company, which was founded around 1714 by some of the popular theatres of the Parisian fairs. In 1762 the company was merged with, and for a time took the name of its chief rival the Comédie-Italienne at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and was also called the...
in Paris in October 1934. The work consisted of a series of extremely varied numbers, punctuated by humorous scenes. Carpentier praises Simons' good taste and technical accomplishment, and says this is by far the peak of his creative career.
Individual pieces of note include: Cubanacan, Los tres golpes, Así es mi patria, Chivo que rompe tambó, La trompetilla, Paso ñáñigo, Serenata cubana, Vacúnala, Marta, Hoy como ayer, Danzas cubanas, Rumba guajira.