The French musicologist Michel Arcens gently included my “Música invisible” in one chapter of his book John Coltrane, la musique sans raison. He made a poetic interpretation of my music connected with John Coltrane’s. The book was just released, in French. The presentation is 12th October in Librairie Torcatis, rue Mailly à Perpignan. Merci beaucoup, Michel!
If you are around… Read More »
I would like to invite you to the concert Musiques d’intérieurs next week at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (27.09/19:00) and at the Temple Allemand in La-Chaux-de-Fonds (29.09 20:30/ 30.09 19:00) with the Die Ordnung der Dinge Ensemble (Cathrin Romeis, Daniele Pintaudi, Vera Kardos and Iñigo Giner)
Musiques d’intérieurs is an interdisciplinary concert combining music, theater and performance with objects and light. The four musician-performers unveil a programme that reinterpretes everyday objects and situations, creating a poetic world populated by lamps, tables, lights, bubble wrap, tableware, different kinds of foods, balloons, instruments, a very long piece of string, and many other musical objects.
Programme:
The president’s speech (Iñigo Giner Miranda), for pianist and visual pianist
El libro de los gestos (Cecilia Arditto) for violin, cello, piano, percussion and lamps
Hors d’oeuvres (Peter Streiff), for performers and tableware
Rotblau -parts 1&2- (Jessie Marino) for two performers
El orden de las cosas (Iñigo Giner Miranda), for three actors, objects, lights and tape
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The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast.
Walter Benjamin “On the concept of history”
I picture time passing like a bad contact switch, which turns, randomly, the light on and off. We are immersed in this intermittent room where the chairs, the stage and the musical instruments appear and disappear in flashes of sense; the complete picture of a continuous hypothetical space is only in our minds; the real space is in fact fragmented.
Time is a bunch of threads all tied up together. Our precarious perception tools wrap the emptiness around with more hope than certainties. Most of the time, time is just about random jumps on a continuous waiting state, that we, composers, attempt to fill with notes.
The remains of the day.
A seven part show for clarinet, magic lanterns, mirrors and a couch.
Written by Cecilia Arditto, played by Michel Marang.
A scenario of darkness around light. A black sea full of presences and memories, that keep on going when the last light has been turned off.
Inspired by the Franco-Flemish composers of the XVth century with their puzzles and musical games of mirrors.
Zeemanshuis, Nieuwevaart 3, Amsterdam
October 8th & 9th, 7.30pm
Free entrance
for violin, trombone, piano, radio, cassette player and a rocking chair
commissioned by NFPK, Holland
There are three people sitting in a room; they are just staying but also remembering the past and dreaming about the future all at the same time. It is always difficult to say what now and here means because our hearts gets always confused about organizing emotions on a timeline.
Koen rewinds, anticipates and plays the cassette player as a metaphor of past (and future?) memories. Bas plays a radio that catches the air in an ever-flowing present. Nora moves back and forth from the piano in a rocking chair, looped in her own clock.
Music is a powerful time machine, traveling through chronologically organized sounds, but mainly through the mixed archeology of our emotions.
• Gestalt (2014)
• Esta tarde leo a Adorno/This afternoon I read Adorno (2013)
• El libro de los gestos / Book of gestures (2008)
• Split piano (2011)
• Gespleten piano (2010)
• La arquitectura del aire / The architecture of air (2009)
Time machine (2011) – program notes Read More »
“I find a resemblance with everyday life, where we are living our unresolved spells in canon with our fantasies, slightly late, slightly early.”
Last
Saturday my piece La Magia was played in Berlin by Barbara Kysela (harp) and Anja Füsti (percussion). La Magia is a particular piece made of sounds, gestures, images in “tableaux style” and invisible connections between things. The rehearsal process was incredibly creative. It felt like throwing an unpredictable ball that the ensemble caught in the air.
The concert itself didn’t go very well. We couldn’t find the energy or focus we certainly experienced during the rehearsals. We were kind of “out of phase, slightly late, slightly early.“ In my experience, this kind of music, so fragile, needs a couple of shots before being “there” with some kind of entity. Everything is very subtle, in the border of being something else, or just being nothing. When it works, it is very strong. When it doesn’t, it is painful. It seems that there is nothing in between. It takes time for me (the composer) to find the space in my mind to understand what I am doing.
Not all my productions are like this. I have a couple of pieces like La Magia that are almost theoretical experiments, where my uncertainties are bigger, and the research in undefined processes is riskier. I am thinking also about Around music.
After a couple of concerts (or a couple of years), the music takes shape, and I am able to put all these experiences on solid ground. Certainty is also a good thing: swinging back and forth from “terra incognita.“
It was a very long week in Berlin, including rehearsals, a lecture I gave at the UdK, and multiple conversations with the ensemble and colleagues. I was thinking all the time, like a mantra, about composing a music in the middle of things.
I crashed in Abel Paul’s place, who extremely kindly hosted me during the whole week, sharing not only all my extended luggage full of umbrellas, ping pong balls, and props for the piece but being the perfect friend to discuss all these shared concerns. He also had an amazing piece played at the concert, that for some reason, probably similar to mine, couldn’t find the right energy.
… “where we are living our unresolved spells in canon with our fantasies.”
For the moment I don’t need to feel safe and run away … I feel like running in, more and more inside… finding this thin string that is my own voice and pulling and pulling it with the hope to catch the golden fish sometime in the future. There is still more to compromise, more to do, more to improve, more questions to make. I am trying to write music that doesn’t exist… yet.
Conference about my music at the University of Berlin, May 27th, 2010. Part 3/3
Music scores bring together diverse elements into a unique storyboard. Lights, movements, objects, visuals, and space design. By the fact of being written down on a music score, they are under the light of a musical logic. A musical score is not only a method of registration of actions and sounds, but it is mainly a big grid from where to conceive and appreciate certain ideas. It is not only about writing musical sounds but about organizing musical thoughts, even if they don´t sound.
Music notation is the best tool to write down events into a timeline. Sounds are fragile and very abstract, so it is necessary to use a very efficient tool to make them exist. Notation makes fragility strong, using a precise graphic vocabulary to talk consistently about abstract things. I find this particular relationship between the fragility of the materials combined with solid structures, the foundation of all my music.
Even having the perfect score and the perfect performer, controlling the way water falls, a snare drum echoes, a radio speaks, the way a cello bow bounces it is never going to be completely predictable. There will be inevitably some deviation. We know that musical notation is about what is written, but I think that is also about what cannot be expressed, a margin of unexpectedness. This margin of error is also the margin for freedom. Music is what is written in combination with what is being played. Notation doesn’t describe, notation doesn´t command. Notation invokes.
Musical scores analyzed, classify and organize events in a timeline. The paradox of this enormous laborious activity is that the outcome is always a fresh live event, produced in the same instant of the performance.
The scores […] are sometimes an essential tool for composition. There are things that no composer would have been able to do all of a sudden, without looking at the paper, step by step, what is happening between the different things that he or she comes up with. This may be one of the most important things which distinguish Western music from other cultures.
Leo Masliah
