Mauricio Sotelo – 'Como llora el agua…'

Mauricio Sotelo – 'Como llora el agua…'
played by Juan Manuel CAÑIZARES

Audio-score


Score by Universal Edition Vienna – UE 33968
https://www.universaledition.com/maur...


CD by KAIROS-MUSIC / MAURICIO SOTELO: Wall of Light
https://www.kairos-music.com/cds/0012...



Composers comment:

"Since I dreamed (literally) of music when I was a child, I was obliged to take up the guitar – to embrace its body, to try to turn the music I heard in my head at night into real sounds. By contrast, my concern today with 'Como llora el agua' is to invent a new instrument, in order to learn anew how to play it, as Helmut Lachenmann says.

The work’s compositional progress began with the search for a scordatura, a modified tuning which deviates from the usual sonic world and renders the composition’s harmonic centre (C, G, D, G#, B, D#) – as it were, a gravitational harmonic axis or a “solar chord,” as I like to call it, in a system of “eternal suns” (Giordano Bruno).

Then the scordatura obliged the composer to invent a new way to manipulate the instrument. That began by “stroking” the strings in the air – arpeggio espressivo – while the fingers gradually create a spiral of sounds on the fingerboard, as they interweave. This makes for a centrifugal motion toward new sonic worlds in which the left hand must learn anew how to move over the neck of the guitar, to orient, position itself – and it is the right hand which shows the left hand how to open up the sonic space, which is in fact nothing more than the ancient canto de gemido, the lamenting sound of the flamenco.

The right hand traverses expanses conjuring up the flavours of flamenco styles such as soléa, bulería, tarantos and seguiriya; the hitherto unknown sound manifests itself today, noble and radiant, its taste matured, bearing the title flamenco spectral – born anew, like a sunrise, from the wonderful fingers of my friend Juan Manuel Cañizares."