Recordings!

This week I finally got the recordings from the performance of two of my latest pieces. I've already talked a lot about them here, the first one is the vocal piece with the text in Sanskrit, which was finally titled as Pavamana Abhyaroha; the second one is the piece for accordion, the Trois tableaux.

I feel really satisfied with both performances, all the musicians with whom I worked were really interested and involved in the project and they all gave their best to perform my pieces. Also most of them liked the music very much, which is great at many levels. First, it makes me feel reallu happy that someone likes what I do, then it results in the musicians enjoying to play the pieces, this results in the pieces sounding great, which results in the audiences also liking the music. So, it's a win-win.

I was a bit doubtful with the title of the accordion piece being in French, because I feel that it could sound very pretentious, and the intention of the piece was quite the opposite. But in the end I decided to keep it, because in my mind the accordion sound and the idea of the piece has a kind of Parisian air to it that I thought was highlighted by the titles in French, there is no more reason for it. The thing is that still I don't feel that Trois tableaux is a great title for it, it's a bit bland, so I guess I have to think a bit more about it.

The métro in Paris

The other piece was completely satisfying to me. It was great because the organizers of the concert decided to project on the background the texts of all the pieces that were performed (they were all vocal pieces). I sent mine in the original script (in Devanagari, one of the scripts used for Sanskrit), so the audience (unless there was some person that knew Sanskrit) had no idea what the text meant, which is good because I always felt that the translation of the text sounds to preachy and cheesy.

So, without further ado, here are the links.

Pavamana Abhyaroha, performed by Jasper Leever (voice) and Ivan Pavlov (piano) at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. April 22, 2014.

Trois tableaux, performed by Robbrecht van Cauwenberghe (accordion) at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. April 25, 2014.

A thousand acid alien tears for Giger

Two days ago, in Zürich, R. H. Giger died, he was 74. He was, to me, one of the greatest artists that ever lived. He suffered from chronic night terrors, which means that he had horrible nightmares every time he went to sleep, and he painted them. To me, he was like a window into the dark parts of the soul, into our own suffering, which I think is one of the most important things we need to understand, because that makes us realize our own frailty. His art is really dark and sometimes very disturbing, but also very humand and beautiful. He creates impossible machines, or robots, or aliens which reflect at the same time such deep states of mind. But to me it's also the fact that his art is just so perfect and beautiful and moving in every way. 

Here is an article to the Huffington Post piece on his death.

"My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy. If they like my work they are creative ... or they are crazy."

For all my geek friends over there, you will recognize this... yes? no?

It's part of the concept art for Alien!

And this one is one of my favorites actually...

Now thinking about him and the deep impression his art has always had on me, I think that maybe I should write a piece in his honor, to pay my respects to such a great artist. I don't think anything I do could be up to the task, but I guess he would have appreciated it even if it was modest in its attempt. I decided to change completely the concept for my fortepiano piece and rather make it an in memoriam for him, forgetting a bit about Beethoven.

New pieces in process

I was absent from the blog for quite a while since there was a really big festival organized by the composition department, the Spring Festival, and I had two pieces performed (the accordion pieces and the vocal piece in sanskrit) and played in two other pieces by my friends. It was a great week, with over 12 concerts concentrated in 4 days, but at the end of it I was exhausted, I slept for 4 days in a row barely leaving my house. 

Now I began three new pieces, one of which I think is finished. 

The first one, the one that is finished or almost finished, is a piece that will be performed in the rhijnhof cemetery in June. I already mentioned it before, it's a piece for beer bottles. I decided to make it as free as possible, the score is just a text indicating what kind of sounds can be made from the bottles, what kind of texture should be aimed for and how to end the piece. I hope that with some two or three rehearsals this piece can be ready to be performed. It is by far the most free thing that I have ever written. I wonder what my teachers will think about it, but I didn't do it just for laziness, I genuinely think that this is the only way to obtain the texture that I want, and also the state of mind of the performers.

The second one is a piece for solo fortepiano that a friend asked me to write. The fortepiano is the parent instrument of the modern piano, but it has a very different timbre, and very different sonoric capabilities. It has in general a softer sound than the modern piano, but it compensates by having a very clear lower register, which in the modern piano is in general very muddy. What I decided to to with it is "deconstruct" the Sonata op. 2 no. 1 by Beethoven in different ways for each of the movements. The first movement is almost readyin its first draft form. It basically consists of a mega-extension of the last two bars of the first movement of the Beethoven sonata, which is just the final cadence. For the second movement I have the idea of making a "minimalization" of the second movement of the sonata, adding lots of silences and deleting as many notes from the original as possible, so that the shape is still at least vaguely implied but the texture is completely disappeared. For the third movement, I wanted to write a different dance, now one inspired in the dances from the region north of Chile, south of Bolivia, but still using in some way (that I haven't yet thought about very deeply) the material from the third movement of Beethoven. I still have no ideas for the fourth movement, but it will be very fast, that I know for sure.

I hope I won't make the old man angry with my music.

The third piece is in stand-by mode for the moment. It will be a piece for two harpsichords, accordion and singer. The text is the Tabula Smaragdina, a XII century alchemic text in latin, which deals with the nature of the unvierse and the origin of all matter (the One Thing from which all came, and that kind of stuff). I don't particularly believe in that, but I find it very interesting to use a text in latin that does not relate to the Roman Catholic ritual. Also, latin is one of my favorite languages, and the text is actually quite interesting.

An image inspired by the Tabula Smaragdina, 

it's not less weird and epic than the original text.