"Les Luthiers were a Catalan invention in Argentina"

How were Les Luthiers born?

They were born a while ago… Oh my god! fifty years Buenos Aires was a prosperous and great cosmopolitan city, which, since the Second World War, welcomed exiles from all over the world with their cultures and folklores…

Did any sardana slip into the mix?

My mother was Jewish of Turkish Sephardic origin and my father, from Murcia; but in the engineering polyphonic choir we did meet a son of Catalans: Gerardo Masana, who became the soul of that group of misfit musicians addicted to joking…

Why were they called Les Luthiers?

One day Gerardo appeared with the libretto of an opera from his grandfather’s trunk, Il figlio del pirata, and asked for interpreters.

And they created crazy instruments?

Because we wanted to enjoy our addiction to humor and our musical training by creating instruments from cans, hoses, tubes, balloons… The sounding box of our tin violin is a ham tin… It was only logical that we luthiers

And his lira seat?

Or lirodoro: a lyre made with a devater seat and attached mandolin peg.

Didn’t they accuse them of being elitist?

We had different levels of demand for each audience, but with a vocation to connect with everyone. Our plumber’s Tango, for example, dedicated to Gardel…

Is the plumber the plumber?

Yes, in Argentine. We are going to parody the movie Cuesta abajo: “The plumber went to work early / And he saw the pipe that he was losing” …

“…and welded it”.

I didn’t “sold it”. “Lo sol (and here it must be intoned a sol: the note sol) dó (ends with a do)”. “Lo sol-dó”… Viste?

“When I left Santiago / all the way I cried / I cried because I had left…”.

…”The whole road is wet”. So we added another note – now the do – to the joke.

“Oh sun, oh sun / burning and burning / Oh sun that cooks us / Oh sun…”.

…“Oh G flat!” (and must intonate it).

Is it “sol-o bossa suya” and not “bo ssa nostra”?

We enjoyed “Solo-o” like pigs, because to finish like that with a flat solo you had to pass the whole melody through there…

This effort makes them classics.

In Teresa y el oso there are certain levels of humor that very few, by the way, catch.

Teresa and the bear and Pedro and the wolf?

We, instead of orchestral instruments like Prokofiev, put our own to describe the traumatic metamorphosis that a happy mollusk undergoes when he is transformed into a handsome prince…

Poor mussel: so happy on his rock.

But few recognize the citation of four chords from Scriabin’s The Metamorphosis.

Aren’t musical quotes common?

But this one is dodecaphonic. Not everyone enjoys listening to it.

Let’s see if you guys get excited now with reggaeton: too easy to parody?

One day I was playing a harmonic dall’estro by Vivaldi and I realized that… I was actually playing an Argentinian carnavalito! Bach already did it in the quadrivets, mixing fragments of works that coincided.

Like Johann Sebastian Mastropiero?

Earlier in El regreso de Carlitos ( Gardel) we fooled them all with a final double rhyme, because our Gardel doesn’t return to Buenos Aires but to… Paris, which is more fun.

If we look at Argentine inflation, then yes.

What a mess! And the causes come from afar. By then we were already in the era of the Latin American left, a tough bone to gnaw on.

With loose results.

Venezuela, yes, Cuba… Argentina, finally.

Meanwhile, Quilapayún had little desire for irony and they were always on strike.

We created a revolutionary cantata in which there were six of us “united people” at the beginning, but we kept fighting and each of us set up our own party…

This is pure actuality in this country!

In the end, division after division, the six of us sang separately: in six choirs of one.

Do we see Argentina worse than it is?

To sigh in relief. Argentinians run every time they get their salary to spend it before it doubles.

Did the Luthiers never fight?

When Masana died, we all had to go to the psychoanalyst…

are you kidding

Is true. The Luthiers spent 17 years in “institutional psychotherapy” so we wouldn’t fight and dissolve, and you can see: it worked.

I thought I was “joking”.

I will summarize the successes of my entire life with an aphorism…

I listen to him.

If you want to know, buy the book.

Wings.

“If you get it right when choosing a job, you’ll never have to work again in your life” and I got it right with Les Luthiers: I’m 81 years old and still “walking”.