Arturo Fuentes: Chamber Music

Walking the line

Structure
Thinking about the form of my works, it seems to me like walking in a labyrinth: I lose the thread of the musical discourse, only to find it again after many twists and turns. In a maze, every step we take is one of great uncertainty, our sense of direction gets confused by the similar walls. Something similar happens when I compose.

This aspect of uncertainty, which I approach in my most recent works, is also inherent in painting, in the work of a painter. For me, Paul Klee's idea of ​​"walking the line" is identical to what awaits us when we walk in a labyrinth. Quoting Klee, I would say that »I walk a sound line«: the stopping of the line, the changes in speed, the moments of interruption, the backward movements, ... all this is for the development of a sound object and further for the development of a musical context responsible. In the case of painting, the line drawn by the painter's hand becomes a pictorial object.

The title of this piece is closer to the concept of 'modeling' than 'module', although both would be complementary to the musical process. "Modulate" has a material and visual origin, as if we were referring to the modeling material (of painting and sculpture). Once mixed by the sculptor's hands, the material begins to create "modules": forms with a specific meaning; things that tell us something; Pieces of a puzzle that we can articulate and put together. We have a general view, "a state of things," so to speak. This musical development process makes me think of the words of Cezanne. Quoting him, I would say that I am "starting to move away from the landscape to perceive it" in order to progress in the development of the piece.

The sound of this piece is to me like the material of a soft, easily deformable and difficult to combine paste, like an uncontrollable spill of plasma. I like to think about the fluidity of the material while composing and I hope to be able to convey this idea or rather this sonic sensation.

Antecedent X
Although the title of this piece is reminiscent of the book Antecedente X (1980) by the Italian composer Franco Donatoni, it does not use his compositional technique. I focused on the book's main theme, the relationship between material and uncertainty: "The uncertain is assimilated through its suspended status of multiplicity and acts as a mediator in every effective decision." A theme he also explores in his book Questo (1970) explained.

If it's an operational choice that's meant to run throughout the play, the possibilities are certainly endless. Paradoxically, this lack of certainty gets us further in composing the piece. Thinking about the possibilities of the material used in the piece, my goal was to find a way of composing that would result in a sound that came close to improvisation, at least "written improvisation" (if I may allow myself that expression). may).

Lightness
The composition was created in close collaboration with the violinist Barbara Lüneburg, to whom it is dedicated.
For me, lightness is a musical quality and a tonal aspect. When we talk about this piece, I definitely have to refer to the Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) and his first lecture »Lightness« (1984). In my doctoral thesis I looked at this idea from a musical point of view. By engaging with Calvino's literary proposal, I analyzed the qualities of lightness, which have several characteristics such as mobility, freedom, rapid changes (of high speed), as well as delicacy, the focus on details, precision and, from my point of view, a certain amount of sophistication in the Writing and recognizable in the sound.

Of these aspects developed by Calvino, there is one that sums up his text on lightness and can be found encoded in Paul Valéry's phrase »light as a bird and not like a feather«. Lightness, as a quality and from an artistic point of view, needs to be assembled and controlled like the flight of a bird.

In this piece, the violin comes into contact with electronics, fused inside a dome of frenzied, granular sounds. As an image, one could imagine a bird taking off, causing the dust lying on the ground to rise in the form of a vortex, which follows the movements of the wings. One could also say (pointing to another image of lightness) that the electronics follow the violin as if it were the tail of a comet.

Passatempo
How can you compose a static piece that gives you the feeling of movement? Among other things, I use the repetition of musical phrases and their variations. The main strategy guiding my work is the play of "regularity - irregularity." Like the mechanics of a clock, the piece moves its gear train regularly and what is supposedly “moving forward” – time – is perceived as irregular. In other words, a passage in this work that seems regular to us may be perceived as irregular in another context. It's like color lines: a red next to a green is not the same as next to a yellow.

Plexus
The starting point of this piece was the exploration of air sounds: Plexus is an "air network" that sometimes mixes with other elements, such as the sounds of the keys of the saxophone. Air seems to have similar qualities to silence: it absorbs the energy between two points. When silence arises in a work, one wonders: What will happen? We establish relationships and make creative (compositional) guesses.

The aerial textures of this piece make us ask almost the same questions: Where are we going? But also to the origin of the sonority that is part of the wind instrument. It seems as if the interior of the instrument is open for a moment. How do you articulate air and silence musically? While composing this piece, I came across this question. One answer might be to stretch one into the other. The electronic part is like a long breath that covers the overtones of the sound produced by the instrument.

formantes
The pulsation in the music reveals a regularity, a coming and going of musical figures, a "stable" system. What draws my attention to this apparent stability is the difficulty of building a structure that allows the instruments to communicate with each other. In this piece, therefore, it was important to play with the differences, emphasizing them and composing sudden changes of register from one instrument to another in order to focus the listening. I noticed that this made the music more descriptive, in the sense that we perceive a kind of dialogue between the instruments (although we know that no story is being told). I call these communicative moments (without history) »formants«.

Arthur Sources