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Profile
In
1985 I arrived in Italy with my diploma, a couple of prizes
in composition and about a dozen of pieces about which I felt
reasonably confident. My first confrontation with the great
italian composers of the day somewhat shocked my convictions
and put a strain on my daily life: it's true that Petrassi
was gentle with me and gave me words of encouragment; but
both Manzoni in Milano and Donatoni in Siena showed me in
earnest the difficulties of the way ahead and throw me in
a struggle that was going to last for years. I toiled with
books and scores, going to every concert in town and around,
visiting libraries and museums, trying to find my way out
of the maze of contemporary art.
During
my sojourn in Europe I wrote the quintet Tritimes,
-to be premiered years after in Boston-, Finilitudes,
for piano and percussion -premiered in Siena- and a vast and
somewhat pretentious piece for twenty-one string soloists,
Omenoni,
to which I owe some awards but which has been since, as often
happens, never performed. In that work I tried my hand at
a kind of 'alphabetic serialism' which derives proportions,
pitch, durations and the rest of the structural components
from a literary source -in this event, a fragment of a book
of P.D. Ouspensky in its italian translation-; given that
the amount of letters exceeds the chromatic set, it was necessary
to enlarge the repertoire of pitch including quarters of tone
-imagine the happiness of the performers!-, thus arriving
to the number 21 which permeates, as it were, the whole composition.
Back
in Buenos Aires, I unfolded this procedure in another set
of pieces:
Triades
I & II,
(for violin, cello and piano), Stasera
(for guitar, based on a short poem by Ungaretti),
Epitafios
(for female voice and piano, on poems by J.R.Jiménez), and
Ouroboros,
for nine performers.
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This
last piece was not based in a text, but in the manipulation
of relationships derived from the nine letters of
its name; in this work, in which I laboured for long months,
I approached the ideas of fractal construction derived
from the studies of Benoit Mandelbrot, which were totally
unknown to me at that time.
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In 1988 I went to USA for a Master Program in the New England
Conservatory of Boston. I had already grew bored with my esoteric
pet serial procedures and, under new and fresh influences
- mainly from my instructor, Robert Cogan, chairman of the
Theory Dept.- I undertook new explorations, this time concerning
the long design of a piece, the sonic quality of it, and the
interaction between visual and sound proportions. The first
results of this research were
In the doldrums
-commissioned by the Deknatel Quartet-,
Sun, el viento
-for six woodwinds, first performed at the N.E.C.-, the
Double-piano variations
and Yzur,
for organ; all this pieces dealt with different questions
derived from the application of the Fibonacci series.
Back again in Argentina, I underwent a somewhat 'dark' period;
for a number of years, I was not capable to finish a new piece.
I had all kinds of doubts: about language, about structure,
about form, about meaning, about all and everything! Personal
crisis and financial struggle came together, as usual, and
for a while I just gave up. Then, out of failure and confusion,
and quite unexpectedly, it came out a series of piano pieces,
written in a semi-conscious frame of mind: it was to become
the Album 1996, thirty three pieces in six series, that shortly
after was recorded by IRCO. That was the prelude to
a period of intense production, characterised by the close
relationship with a group of excellent performers: the mezzo-soprano
Marta Blanco -Nanas
de Felisa,
Los Puentes,
Blanca per Blanco and Ocho Haiku-;
pianists Federico Jusid -Five
pieces 1998-,
José Luis Juri -
Mar blanco-, and
Claudio Espector -Microclimas
and Vulnerata
Musica-, cellist
Leo Viola -Duo
per Leo,
Tres Soliloquios
for cello and piano, and the
Trio 1999. Among
other pieces dedicated to friends and colleagues came
Trio per Drago
-violin solo-,
Due -violin and
piano-, Tre per
Frette -marimba-,
Percorsi a tre
and Percorsi
a quattro. Also
came the commissions for
Sennin -chamber
opera based on a tale by R.Akutagawa- and
Quattro per Jusid,
for piano and symphonic orchestra; both pieces were premiered
in 1999, with a quite good reception from the public.
I cannot explain out the characteristics of this new phase,
because I am still too much involved with it. The music is
certainly more simple and transparent than it used to be;
the importance of silence is still greater, the direction
of lines is prevalent and durations tend to isochronism. Origami
-for harp and symphonic orchestra-,
Ecos de Travesía -for string
orchestra-, and Kaleidos -for
cello and orchestra- look as series of tiny
landscapes, concerned mainly with colours and broad movements
through register.
Years 2003 and 2004 were dedicated to genres that I had never
considered before, as piano sonata and the big opera. The
Sonata Selena was composed for
Uruguayan pianist Sergio Elena, and Rosas
emerged from the powerfull libretto by writer and regisseur
José María Gómez Ferreyra. Both pieces
-although obvious differences in scale and tenure- share many
details of language and structure, and prove quite demanding
on performers.
2005 presents as a year devoted to orchestral music: not less
than four major symphonic orchestras have scheduled my pieces
round the season with leading conductors in Paraná,
Buenos Aires, Mendoza and Tucumán.
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the next step in this uncertain voyage of trial and error,
I can only guess that it has to do with what the ancient
russian folk-tale points thus:
"go
you don't know where
seek
you don't know what.."
J.G.Noble
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