Les Luthiers
Encyclopedia
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
-speaking countries such as Paraguay
Paraguay
Paraguay , officially the Republic of Paraguay , is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to the east and northeast, and Bolivia to the northwest. Paraguay lies on both banks of the Paraguay River, which runs through the center of the...
, Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
, Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
, Ecuador
Ecuador
Ecuador , officially the Republic of Ecuador is a representative democratic republic in South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and by the Pacific Ocean to the west. It is one of only two countries in South America, along with Chile, that do not have a border...
, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, Colombia
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
, Mexico
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...
, Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
, Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
, Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
and Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
. They were formed in 1967 by Gerardo Masana
Gerardo Masana
Gerardo Masana, born February 1, 1937, in Banfield, Argentina, founded the comedy-musical group Les Luthiers in 1965. Masana died of leukemia eight years later, on November 11, 1973. The other members of Les Luthiers remained together, and as of 2011 they still perform live in tours through Latin...
, during the height of a period of very intense Choral Music activity in Argentina's state universities. Their outstanding characteristic is the home-made musical instruments (hence the name luthier
Luthier
A luthier is someone who makes or repairs lutes and other string instruments. In the United States, the term is used interchangeably with a term for the specialty of each maker, such as violinmaker, guitar maker, lute maker, etc...
s, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
for "musical instrument maker"), some of them extremely sophisticated, which they skillfully employ in their recitals to produce music and texts full of high class and refined humor. From 1977 until his death in 2007, they worked together with Roberto Fontanarrosa
Roberto Fontanarrosa
Roberto Alfredo Fontanarrosa was an Argentine cartoonist and writer. He created the characters Inodoro Pereyra, a fictional gaucho, and Boogie, el aceitoso, a fictional serial killer.-Early life:...
, a renowned Argentine cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
and writer.
Musical Stylings
Les Luthiers began writing humorous pieces primarily in a Baroque style, especially imitating vocal genres such as cantatas, madrigalMadrigal (music)
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six....
s and serenatas. Later, they diversified into humorous renditions of music in other genres, from romantic lied
Lied
is a German word literally meaning "song", usually used to describe romantic songs setting German poems of reasonably high literary aspirations, especially during the nineteenth century, beginning with Carl Loewe, Heinrich Marschner, and Franz Schubert and culminating with Hugo Wolf...
er and opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
to pop
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
, mariachi
Mariachi
Mariachi is a genre of music that originated in the State of Jalisco, in Mexico. It is an integration of stringed instruments highly influenced by the cultural impacts of the historical development of Western Mexico. Throughout the history of mariachi, musicians have experimented with brass, wind,...
and even rap. Their stage show is often intermingled with humorous skits, often involving absurd situations, the music and biography of fictional composer Johann Sebastian Mastropiero and a heavy reliance on fairly sophisticated word play
Word play
Word play or wordplay is a literary technique in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement...
. Much of the humor derives from the basic contradictions between the formality and highly developed vocal and instrumental technique of classical musicians and the sheer silliness of their show. Three members of the group also provided their voices for the pigeons in the Latin American and Spanish dubbings of the 2008 Disney film, Bolt.
Informal Instruments
Les Luthiers are known in particular for employing a diverse ensemble of invented instruments created from common, everyday materials. The group's first home-made musical instrument, the bass-pipe a vara (a sort of tromboneTrombone
The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. Like all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate...
), was created by Gerardo Masana
Gerardo Masana
Gerardo Masana, born February 1, 1937, in Banfield, Argentina, founded the comedy-musical group Les Luthiers in 1965. Masana died of leukemia eight years later, on November 11, 1973. The other members of Les Luthiers remained together, and as of 2011 they still perform live in tours through Latin...
, the founder of the group, by joining paperboard
Paperboard
Paperboard is a thick paper based material. While there is no rigid differentiation between paper and paperboard, paperboard is generally thicker than paper. According to ISO standards, paperboard is a paper with a basis weight above 224 g/m2, but there are exceptions. Paperboard can be single...
tubes found in the garbage and miscellaneous items. Forty years later, this instrument is still being used on stage.
The first informal instruments were relatively simple, like the Gum-Horn, made with a hose, a funnel
Funnel
A funnel is a pipe with a wide, often conical mouth and a narrow stem. It is used to channel liquid or fine-grained substances into containers with a small opening. Without a funnel, spillage would occur....
and a trumpet
Trumpet
The trumpet is the musical instrument with the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BCE. They are played by blowing air through closed lips, producing a "buzzing" sound which starts a standing wave vibration in the air...
's mouthpiece
Mouthpiece (brass)
On brass instruments the mouthpiece is the part of the instrument which is placed upon the player's lips. The purpose of the mouthpiece is a resonator, which passes vibration from the lips to the column of air contained within the instrument, giving rise to the standing wave pattern of vibration in...
, and some of them were born as a parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of musical instruments, which is the case of the latín (referred to in English as fiddlecan) and the violata, bowed instruments whose resonating chambers
Sounding board
A sound board, or soundboard, is the surface of a string instrument that the strings vibrate against, usually via some sort of bridge. The resonant properties of the sound board and the interior of the instrument greatly increase loudness over the string alone.The sound board operates by the...
are made out of a large tin for processed ham
Ham
Ham is a cut of meat from the thigh of the hind leg of certain animals, especiallypigs. Nearly all hams sold today are fully cooked or cured.-Etymology:...
and a paint can respectively, the marimba de cocos, a marimba
Marimba
The marimba is a musical instrument in the percussion family. It consists of a set of wooden keys or bars with resonators. The bars are struck with mallets to produce musical tones. The keys are arranged as those of a piano, with the accidentals raised vertically and overlapping the natural keys ...
made out of coconut
Coconut
The coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, is a member of the family Arecaceae . It is the only accepted species in the genus Cocos. The term coconut can refer to the entire coconut palm, the seed, or the fruit, which is not a botanical nut. The spelling cocoanut is an old-fashioned form of the word...
s, and others.
Inventor and instrument-maker Carlos Iraldi (1920–1995), as "Les Luthiers' luthier", was responsible for inventing several more sophisticated instruments, including the mandocleta, a bicycle
Bicycle
A bicycle, also known as a bike, pushbike or cycle, is a human-powered, pedal-driven, single-track vehicle, having two wheels attached to a frame, one behind the other. A person who rides a bicycle is called a cyclist, or bicyclist....
whose rear wheel
Bicycle wheel
A bicycle wheel is a wheel, most commonly a wire wheel, designed for bicycle. A pair is often called a wheelset, especially in the context of ready built "off the shelf" performance-oriented wheels....
moves the strings
Strings (music)
A string is the vibrating element that produces sound in string instruments, such as the guitar, harp, piano, and members of the violin family. Strings are lengths of a flexible material kept under tension so that they may vibrate freely, but controllably. Strings may be "plain"...
of a mandolin
Mandolin
A mandolin is a musical instrument in the lute family . It descends from the mandore, a soprano member of the lute family. The mandolin soundboard comes in many shapes—but generally round or teardrop-shaped, sometimes with scrolls or other projections. A mandolin may have f-holes, or a single...
, the bajo barríltono, a 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...
whose body is a giant barrel
Barrel
A barrel or cask is a hollow cylindrical container, traditionally made of vertical wooden staves and bound by wooden or metal hoops. Traditionally, the barrel was a standard size of measure referring to a set capacity or weight of a given commodity. A small barrel is called a keg.For example, a...
, and others.
After Iraldi's death in 1995 Hugo Domínguez took his place, and made instruments such as the desafinaducha, the nomeolbídet etc.
Current members
- Carlos López PuccioCarlos López PuccioCarlos Alberto Daniel López Puccio is a multi-instrumentalist musician, orchestral and choral conductor, composer, arranger and one of the current members of Les Luthiers....
: Bowed Strings (violin, viola, cello), synthesizers, vocals, percussion, dactilophone, etc. - Jorge MaronnaJorge MaronnaJorge Maronna is an Argentine multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer, author and a founding member of the comedy-musical group Les Luthiers. Born August 1, 1948, in Bahía Blanca, he joined I Musicisti while still a teenager, and helped Gerardo Masana and Carlos Iraldi build the first informal...
: Vocals, fretted strings (guitar, bass, banjo, charango, lute...), cello, synthesizers, etc. - Marcos MundstockMarcos MundstockMarcos Mundstock, born May 25, 1942, in Santa Fe, Argentina, is a musician, writer, comedian and former broadcaster and copywriter, most famous for being a founding member of Les Luthiers, their emcee, and writing many of their libretti and lyrics...
: Vocals, percussion, trumpet, synthesizer, etc. - Carlos Núñez CortésCarlos Núñez CortésCarlos Núñez Cortés was born October 15, 1942, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has been a member of Les Luthiers since 1969.In the group, his functions include:* Creating new instruments ....
: Piano, vocals, recorder, piccolo, Bunsen flute, synthesizer, etc. - Daniel Rabinovich: Vocals, guitar, violin, bass-pipe, sousaphone, recorder, drums, etc.
Former members
- Gerardo MasanaGerardo MasanaGerardo Masana, born February 1, 1937, in Banfield, Argentina, founded the comedy-musical group Les Luthiers in 1965. Masana died of leukemia eight years later, on November 11, 1973. The other members of Les Luthiers remained together, and as of 2011 they still perform live in tours through Latin...
, founder (died in 1973): Guitar, bass-pipe, vocals, percussion, etc. - Ernesto AcherErnesto AcherErnesto Acher, born on October 9, 1939, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and orchestral conductor. He was a member of Les Luthiers between 1971 and 1986, where he worked as songwriter, actor, instrument designer, choir master, singer and played over thirty different...
(left the group in 1986): Piano, horn, trumpet, clarinet, drums, synthesizers, cello, vocals, etc.
Shows
- Les Luthiers cuentan la ópera (1967)
- Todos somos mala gente (1968)
- Blancanieves y los siete pecados capitales (1969)
- Querida Condesa (1969)
- Les Luthiers Opus Pí (1971)
- Recital '72 (1972)
- Recital sinfónico '72 (1972)
- Recital '73 (1973)
- Recital '74 (1974)
- Recital '75 (1975)
- Viejos fracasos (1976)
- Mastropiero que nuncaMastropiero que nuncaMastropiero que nunca was a theatrical humour/music show by Les Luthiers, first performed on Friday 9 September 1977 and last done on Sunday 27 February 1983...
(1977) - Les Luthiers hacen muchas gracias de nadaMuchas gracias de nadaMuchas gracias de nada is the sixth album by Les Luthiers, recorded live in the Teatro Coliseo. It was released in October 1980....
(1979) - Los clásicos de Les Luthiers (1980)
- Luthierías (1981)
- Por humor al arte (1983)
- Humor dulce hogar (1985)
- Recital sinfónico '86 (1986)
- Viegésimo aniversario (1987)
- El reír de los Cantares (1989)
- Les Luthiers, Grandes HitosLes Luthiers, Grandes HitosLes Luthiers, Grandes Hitos was a show performed by the Argentinian comedy group Les Luthiers.-The show :...
(1992) - Unen canto con humor (1994)
- Bromato de armonioBromato de armonioBromato De Armonio was a show made by the Argentinian comedy-musical group Les Luthiers. The show itself was showcased all around Latin America between 1996 and 2001.-The Programme:...
(1996) - Todo por que rías (1999)
- Do, Re, Mi, Já (2000)
- El Grosso Concerto (2001)
- Las Obras De Ayer (2002)
- Con Les Luthiers y sinfónica (2004)
- Recital Folklórico Cosquín (2005)
- Los Premios Mastropiero (2005)
- Recital por los Cuarenta Años (2007)
- Lutherapia (2008)
Discography
- Sonamos Pese A TodoSonamos Pese a todoSonamos Pese A Todo, the debut album of Les Luthiers, released in September, 1971. It was recorded in late 1970 at ION Studios in Buenos Aires, and it featured Les Luthiers as a quintet, with some guest musicians and an orchestra for some numbers. The album was done before they collectively...
(1971) - Cantata LaxatónCantata LaxatónCantata Laxatón is the second album of Les Luthiers, released in August, 1972.-Side one:# "Cantata Laxatón" -Side two:...
(1972) - Les Luthiers (volumen 3)Les Luthiers (volumen 3)Les Luthiers , album released in October, 1973.-Side one:# "Voglio entrare per la finestra"...
(1973) - Les Luthiers (volumen 4)Les Luthiers (volumen 4)The fourth album of Les Luthiers, released in November 1976. From now on, there are no individual credits for the songwriters, although it's been confirmed later that both 'Teresa y el oso' and 'Doctor Bob Gordon...' were composed by Ernesto Acher, with script by Marcos Mundstock...
(1976) - Mastropiero que nuncaMastropiero que nuncaMastropiero que nunca was a theatrical humour/music show by Les Luthiers, first performed on Friday 9 September 1977 and last done on Sunday 27 February 1983...
(1979) - Muchas gracias de nadaMuchas gracias de nadaMuchas gracias de nada is the sixth album by Les Luthiers, recorded live in the Teatro Coliseo. It was released in October 1980....
(1980) - Les Luthiers (volumen 7)Les Luthiers (volumen 7)Les Luthiers , album released in August, 1983.-Side two:# "Marcha de la Conquista"# "Papa Garland had a hat and a Jazz Band and a mat and a black fat cat "# "Homenaje a Huesito Williams"#* "L´otro día caminando"#* "Siento algo por tí"...
(1983) - Cardoso en GulevandiaCardoso en GulevandiaCardoso en Gulevandia is the eighth album of Les Luthiers, released in October, 1991. The recording, like antriores disks in the group, took place in the ion studies of the city of Buenos Aires , in the month of October of 1991...
(1991) - Les Luthiers En Vivos (2007)
- Lutherapia (2010)