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Good night.
I would like to thank Ángeles López Artiga and Palau de la Música de Valencia
for giving me the chance to be with you tonight,
offering you this lecture-recital in the cycle "Las artes en paralelo."
As well, I am honored to share the responsibility of this event
with Venancio Rius and the members of this string quartet:
Enrique Palomares and Alberto Skuratov, violin; Santiago Cantó, viola, and David Barona, cello.
Today's lecture is in two parts.
First I will refer to "En la mar hay una torre" (In the Sea There Is a Tower)
a piece which I composed in 2009,
and in the second part of the lecture I will refer to the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, Op. 33, by Carl Maria von Weber.
I will talk about my compositional process,
and then we will hear the live performance.
I will then refer to aspects of structure and expression
in the clarinet quintet by Weber,
and we'll close with the performance of this second quintet.
"En la mar hay una torre" was commissioned by David Yang, Director of the Newburyport Music Festival, in the US.
The work is inspired by a Sephardic song with the same title;
its origins, in Spain, could possibly be traced to the Middle Ages.
Needless to say that, around this region,
the topic of the tower by the sea has a very special meaning.
There are many villages and towns with a tower (or the ruins of a tower) by the shore,
and it's not farfetched to imagine
that the tower of this story may have been one of them.
The lyrics of the song are as follows:
"In the sea there is a tower
in the tower, a window,
in the window, a maiden calling out the sailors.
If the sea were made of milk
I'd become a fisher
and catch my sorrows with words of love.
Give me your hand, dove
so that I climb to your nest
You're unlucky to sleep alone, I'll come to sleep with you."
When I read these lines, I try to imagine the context of this story.
Who is this mysterious woman?
Is she a friend... a lover...
...or a stranger?
Perhaps a siren?
In some anthologies, an alternate title is "La Serena"
which could be understood as
"The Serene One,"
or as a version of the word "Siren," albeit distorted by time
and the natural evolution of language.
Maybe both meanings are related.
Reconstructing the story,
I think of a sailor
gazing from the bridge of his ship at a castle in twilight.
I picture the ship gently rocking back and forth,
enveloped by the warm breeze of a Mediterranean evening;
the sailor singing of loneliness
accompanied by the sound of distant waves crashing against cliffs.
The appearance of the woman at the window of the castle's tower
turns his lament into a serenade
reminiscent of the lull of the sea and the steps of a sensual dance.
A declaration of love ensues and...
what happens next?
Does the siren extend her hand to the sailor?
Do the lovers unite (or perhaps reunite)?
Does he fall under her spell,
locked in that tower for eternity?
Or does he sail past the bay toward high seas,
never to return?
In my piece, this story (which is fictional but entirely plausible)
is represented, "told," by several contrasting sections,
several "chapters," so to speak.
The overall form is that of a mirror: "ABCBA."
The first part, section A,
describes the moment when the sailor sings his loneliness:
Thank you very much.
The next section is the dance,
this first sensual approach
between the two lovers,
I will ask the quintet to please play from that section.
The third section is the moment when the sailor declares his love;
full of rapture,
he must share his feelings with her,
passionately.
The tune of this central section (arranged like a chorale)
is extracted from the original song,
although transformed in different ways.
I'll ask the quintet
if they could start one measure before the beginning of the chorale. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
As I explained before, the form is like a "mirror"
we go back to the dance and then we go back
to the initial improvisatory melody.
In an effort to understand the narrative of my own piece
(as a composer, in fact, one is not aware of these meanings,
but now I think this is what it means),
what I think is that the sailor
now has a chance to decide
what to do.
So, after the mirror-like sections, "ABCBA," we have one last section, D,"
which features new material.
We could think of this section as a developmental coda,
in which the sailor chooses
whether to stay or to go.
But I am not going to tell you how the story ends,
because I prefer that you, by listening to the music,
reach your own conclusions
about what happens next, and what the piece ultimately means.
Before listening to the performance,
I'd simply like to say, once more,
that I am extremely happy and honored
for the privilege of realizing this project
with this magnificent group of musicians.
Without further ado,
I leave you with "En la mar hay una torre". Thank you.
muchas gracias