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.
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