Lontananzas, Anton

Lontananzas means “offings” in Spanish, the ships just over the horizon which sometimes a mirage levitates into view. And it means the promises as well, which are gestating offstage, in the wings.

I took it from “Lontananzas, Celeste,” a gorgeous piano piece by the great Spanish composer, the excelentísimo señor don Antón García Abril, the father of our friend Antón and his wife Débora, who, with their atelier, Ensamble Studios of Madrid and Cambridge, Massachusetts, built three paleolithic “structures of landscape” at the Tippet Rise Art Center. Antón wrote it to convince his wife Aurea to marry him. (It worked.) It wasn’t a goodbye, but a bridge between distances.

He came to visit his son, his daughter-in-law, and us in Montana, bringing many of his family with him, a week after Aurea died, around the summer solstice. He read his poems and a few small pieces of his were performed.

Later, his son put his piano piece under my poem “Solstice,” which I include in this volume for easy reference. The music and its sense of yearning, its nostalgia, accompanies the film of the christening of Ensamble Studio’s autochthonous “Beartooth Portal,” born out of the land beneath it, like the “palisades,” the giant stalagmites which can be seen on the Beartooth Mountains looming above the site. Aurea died near the solstice; I wrote “Solstice” to celebrate the fact that we are never far away from our loved ones. There is something eternal to the rolling monadnocks beneath the mountains in that primal part of Montana, and much that is eternal in the music.

Antón, Senior, died on March 17th, 2021, just before the March equinox. As “Solstice” is for Aurea, “Lontananzas” is for him. Both poems are for our friends Antón and Débora and their children.

His music will always be for us embedded in the cathedral spires of the Palisades, and in the Portals at Tippet Rise, in their inexpressible yearning for the heights (which they in fact express quite lucidly). They are obelisks, pyramids in whose rock mysteries pharaohs endure. Like the steles of Avebury and Stonehenge, like the porticos at SGAE headquarters, designed by Ensamble in Santiago di Compostelo, they are gnomons, pillars whose uniqueness anchors and measures the stars, compasses that align the endless music of the spheres with our transient shepherd songs, lending them, by association, longevity. As Shakespeare says of words, they give life to us. Through words and notes, through the art of architecture, we touch infinity.