Fragments from Mujeres de mazas tomar Paco Yáñez lunes, 24 de septiembre de 2018
Extensive review of Festival Internacional de Creación Musical Contemporánea Vertixe Sonora, Galicia, Spain
Link to original review in Spanish
Women who “take arms” (fragments)
… the concert was closed by Cecilia Arditto (Buenos Aires, 1966), Argentine composer of Galician origin who visited the land of her grandparents for the first time. This created a very emotional atmosphere, heightened by the performance in the dark. Her piece, Musique Concrète (2015), uses the sonorities of everyday objects, in Cage’s style. The five (from seven) pieces heard tonight in Pontevedra created a remarkable poetic breath bringing together composer, musicians and audience, all of them spread around the room.
Musique Concrete not only uses pre-recorded sounds, in Pierre Schaeffer´s style, but also uses the music of the objects themselves: ventilators, radio transmissions, the subtle rubbing of a string -that like Ariadne’s thread- guides us through a sound labyrinth. The rhythmic duplication on a vibraphone of a music theory text -very close to Voices and piano (1998) by the Austrian composer Peter Ablinger-, in the version of the percussion player Gÿe, was perfect in textual prosody and percussive rhythm.
In addition to the music, we saw a poetic performance of light and image with the help of Cecilia Arditto herself and Neopercussion.
Percussionist Juanjo Guillem played a cotton string, making sounds with “the song of everyday matter”, while a magic lantern projected shadows on the walls. There is magic and memories of childhood in the projections of Arditto (with echoes of Matisse and Miró), and the images on the wall are like sinusoidal waves on a magnetic tape.
… as the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar wrote in 1974: “behind each string there is an immense spiderweb of affinity choices”, something that not only Cecilia Arditto has proven in her beautiful and poetic “Musique concrete”, but also the other four women composers of this program. Music made with mirrors, ribbons, pillows and rain, invites us to focus, not only on everyday life, but also on tradition.
The French writer Georges-Louis Leclerc wrote, back in the eighteenth century, that “Le style c’est l’homme même”. Tonight in Pontevedra, lead by these five composers and the excellent performance of Neopercussion, we can say that “Le style” is, also, the woman herself.
‘Musique Concrète’ (2015) de Cecilia Arditto. Festival Internacional Vertixe Sonora, 2018. © Paco Yáñez, 2018.