CONCERT-DIALOGUE WITH COMPOSERS

José Luis Perdigón
Enceladus (for voice and percussion)

Enceladus, for tenor and percussion, attempts to portray the propagation of sound through atmospheres other than our own. Drawing inspiration from silent and inhospitable realms, the work blurs the relationships and limits between sound and gesture, which are seen as layered realities. The work invites us to enjoy a porous experience in which the limit between what we see and what we hear, between what is perceived and memory, becomes fluid, allowing our imagination to take part in the work and the work to breathe back.

Mario Carro
Poemas de la Isla (three songs for tenor and marimba with texts of Canarian poet Josefina de la Torre)

Poemas de la Isla is a cycle of three songs for tenor and marimba with texts of Canarian poet Josefina de la Torre. A writer linked to the Generation of ’27, she is considered one of the figures associated with ‘Las Sinsombrero’ (the hatless women), a group of creators who remained in obscurity for decades within that literary context. De la Torre developed a plural artistic career as a poet, novelist, actress and singer, and her literary work is characterised by her intimate and personal voice.
The selected poems Me busco y no me encuentro, Si ha de ser and Remolinos del aire were published in the books Poemas de la Isla and Marzo incompleto, which contain some of the essential elements of her writing style: love, introspection and the presence of nature as a symbolic and emotional space. Although her language appears to be simple, it provides a window into her tremendous inner depth. This work explores the combination of tenor and marimba. The timbral balance of this unusual template was among main focal points considered during the process of composition. The marimba provides warm and resonant colour that allows the establishment of several types of relationships with the voice, from schemes of accompaniment to more tightly woven interaction between the two performers.
My notation places particular emphasis on harmonic transparency and an approach to the material that allows the discourse to be clearly perceived. In this context, the relationship between tenor and marimba is often expressed through heterophony, with both instruments taking part in the construction of a single, shared melodic phrase.
The voice is treated in the same terms, seeking a certain expressive transparency, which favours the intelligibility of the poetic text. To this end, I make continuous use of a diatonic language that allows the words to be projected naturally within the web of music. In this way, the cycle is structured in three songs that propose different focusses of this dialogue
among words, timbre and resonance.

Samuel Aguilar
Del Llanto (for tenor, marimba, bass drum, triangle and pre-recorded audio, based on a text of Federico García Lorca)

This work is comprised of two sections. After a long introduction in which the acoustic texture achieved with the bass drum and triangle is combined with the gesturing of the singer, the work undergoes subtle transformation, segueing to a complex rhythmic section performed on the marimba and the heartrending text of Federico García Lorca interpreted by the tenor.

Sergio Blardony
…and Suddenness (for tenor, percussion and four small electronic devices. Based on a poem by Emily Dickinson)

The choppy quality of Emily Dickinson’s poetry provides the musical work with discursive potential in the voice and the percussion. This style is enhanced by its fragmentation through the repetition of elements such as words that are stammered, giving the impression that the language remains restless and rambling. The poem on which the musical work is based also contains formidable explosions from which discourse inevitably emerges, supported by powerful phonemes employed in the work’s acoustic aspects, both as disruptive elements and to provide rhythmic continuity; an apparent paradox that helps to generate a peculia musical construction.
The transcendental question posed by the poem (Alma’s connection to immortality) is shattered by the need to find an answer in the thunderclap that tears through the landscape; in the instantaneous and visionary nature of the catastrophe.

Poem 974 EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)
The inconfundible Connection
of the Spirit with the Supreme
Best disclosed in Peril
or in Sudden Calamity –
As the Lightning on a Landscape
reveals the Vastness of the Space –
unsuspected – save by the Flash –
by the Crack – and the Unforeseen.