Rage Against the Tortilla Machine
To begin, a somewhat recent conversation with my dearly patient partner, Mauricio:
“So…I was thinking of writing a piece about tortillas.”
“…why…?”
“Well, remember how I use to make tortillas at the grocery store?”
“You hated that.”
“Yes.”
(confused look)
“I recorded the sounds of the tortilla machine when it was being loud and horrible.”
(concerned look) “What’s the instrumentation?”
“Electronics and two piccolos.”
“Oh God.”
As anyone who has sat through one of my composer talks may know, there was a period of time when I was making tortillas at grocery store while I was trying to make a go of it as a composer. The hours were long, the pay was bad, and the customers could be…a lot!…but one of the most notable things about that job was the horrific sounds that would often emanate from their over-worked tortilla machine. Despite the bakery being towards the back of the store, you could sometimes hear the machine from the front doors as you entered, and being next to it was like psychological warfare. The best we could do was try and grease up a few pieces and hope the sound would simply not happen anymore.
Just imagine this beautiful lullaby for 9 hours as it burns your fingertips <3
However, aspiring composer as I was at the time, I was determined to make the most of it. Covertly I recorded several different instances of the tortilla machine’s hellish screams, knowing some day it would become a piece. And, nearly 6 years later, it’s finally happening!
While I’ll be saving details about the commissioner and my musical plans for the piece itself for a future blog, there’s some important groundwork I’ve been doing on this piece that I’ve been DYING to share—and so, I present to you: more than you ever wanted to know about tortillas.
Researching Tortillas
Unsplash: @minimdesignco
An (All Too Brief But Still Longer Than You Wanted) History of Tortillas
The tortilla has a thousands-year-long history, and there is so much to appreciate about it! While I’m covering some basics below, it cannot be understated just how fundamental tortillas—and corn especially—are to both pre- and post-Hispanic Mexican culture. There is a LOT of history surrounding this seemingly humble food, and it’s definitely worth a deep dive of it’s own! I got information from a few different sources, but found Cocina Fácil to be a great resource (it’s in Spanish, but you can also use Google Translate if you’d like to read it for yourself and don’t speak the language):
His flesh was made from yellow corn and white corn, and the man's arms and legs were made from corn dough. Only corn dough entered the flesh of our fathers.
Image from The Met
This passage is fragment from Popol Vuh (a very important book in Mayan culture narrating the origin of the universe) describes the Mayan belief that man was literally formed from corn—not so different to the Christian version using clay. Corn was seen as the lifeblood of humanity, and many pre-Hispanic dishes from the region made use of it—including the early start of what would later become the tortilla. Evidence of these dishes were later found in Aztec settlements, including those raided by the Spanish in the 1500s. When colonizers from Spain arrived to modern-day South America, they found something to write home about (quite literally, in the case of Hernán Cortés). While the Spanish had a quasi-equivalent made from chickpeas, the prolific use of corn in dishes from the region and the corn tortilla’s portability and shelf-life made them a new favorite.
The early days of tortilla-making were done entirely by hand, of course—so the final result was a bit inconsistent and irregular (though well-documented as delicious). It took until the 1900s for the modern-day tortilla to finally “take shape.” This modernization, however, came at a cost—with mass-production farming impacting all food sources, the taste and consistency of the modern tortilla changed quite dramatically as the corn itself changed. The resurgence of small farms has helped to revive corn-connoisseur’s desire for more “authentic” tortillas. In the US, tortillas are currently a $6 billion dollar industry.
Image: NASA for CNN
In the modern era, tortillas have even been to space! Due to the crumbs of other grainy foods and the compact, long-lasting nature of the tortilla, space-based workers use tortillas for their sandwiches and snacks rather than sliced bread since the 1980’s. NASA even designed a special mold-resistant tortilla that can last for up to 18 months!
Making a Tortilla
While modernization certainly impacted the tortilla, much of the process to make it has remained unchanged from ancient times. A simplified summary of the process follows below:
"Las Tortilleras,” by Pierre-Frederic Lehnert (1836)
Step 1: nixtamalization - soak corn in a lime and water mixture overnight, causing the kernal to separate from the skin.
Step 2: Grind the soaked kernals into a doughy mixture (known as masa)
Step 3: Separate the masa into balls, flattening them out into circles
Step 4: Cook the masa dough circles on a hot grill
Step 5: Nom nom nom nom
You can also see a great video on the process linked below!
Fascinating! But how is this leading to music again?
And so, in order to write off every tortilla I eat between August and November as a business expense (and to compensate myself for the emotional damages of the tortilla machine), I must write a piece about them. Right now, my idea is to follow the industrialization of the process—having the work begin with calmer gestures in the instruments and more naturally-occurring sounds in the electronics (birds, grinding of corn, fire, etc.), and transforming them overtime (birds and grinding being turned into the sound of the tortilla machine, sounds of a market becoming punctuated with cars, the instruments performing more mechanically, etc.). While I will, of course, be using my own recordings of the tortilla machine, I hope to draw on recordings from others made in Mexico of the world around tortillas as time as changed.
While the “nature-to-machine transformation piece” has certainly been done before, I hope not to present it so much as “better to worse” (which is what frequently happens in these pieces) as “this ancient thing is still happening in the modern era even when so many things have fundamentally changed about the ways our lives function and it’s pretty cool that we’re still into tortillas this much.”
This is still a work-in-progress, of course—but there’s so much to explore, the real challenge will be getting my ideas streamlined into a 6-minute work!
Unsplash: @uconrad
More to be revelaed about the piccolo players, the music, and the commissioner in the next installment!
