I. LÁGRIMAS DE VIOLETAS

II. JARDÍN DE VIOLETAS

Pasión de Violetas is a piece in which I explore, through sound, the emotional and musical universe of the life and work of the great Chilean singer-songwriter Violeta Parra. I like to think that Violeta is also many violets: those of her love, her suffering, her fight for social justice, among others. In this piece, I return to the essence of those many and beautiful violets to create my own sound universe that evokes and pays homage to whom I consider one of the most original creative voices in Latin America.

The idea to compose Canto de Semillas (Song of Seeds) emerged from a shared interest between Maestro Miguel Harth-Bedoya and me: nature. I decided to write orchestral music inspired by modern poetry that talks about the relation between humans and nature. Poetry that, in speaking about the condition of nature, reveals something about our human condition. I found such poetry in Octavio Paz’s book Árbol Adentro (A Tree Within). I chose three verses from two different poems in the book and wrote one orchestral movement inspired by each verse.


The verse that I chose for the first movement appears in a poem called “Before the beginning”:

“Under your eyelids the seed of the sun ripens.”

When I read this verse I remembered an idea a friend shared with me many years ago. We were teenagers and pondering the difficult life choices ahead of us. My friend compared life choices to the germination of a seed. It is not easy for a seed to grow: it has to break itself and fight its way through the soil until it finds the sun. We, too, have to break secure boundaries to make the life choices that allow us to grow.

The musical material of the first movement is based on a three-note motif that is transposed and transformed throughout the piece. While composing I thought of it as the “seed motif.” The motif, which consists of the musical intervals of a minor second and a perfect fourth, is first presented in a chordal manner in measure one, but is soon distorted and absorbed by the sonority of the tam-tam and the appearance of a low G. In the strings, a polyphonic texture that includes the seed motif grows out of that low G, increasing in density and ambitious as it progresses, evocative of a seed’s germination. After this first polyphony, the music slows down, the contrapuntal density decreases, and the seed motif is played by the woodwinds at a more relaxed tempo, as if the germination has taken place and a leaf is about to feel its first ray of light.

The verse for the second movement comes from the poem “Night, day, night”:


"Fire asleep in the night, water that wakes laughing."


This movement alternates two contrasting sections (ABABA form). The A sections are inspired by “water that wakes laughing.” The rhythm is more flexible and the flutes play a medium to high-pitched melody that becomes more fluid and melismatic in each of its appearances during the first two A sections. The B sections consist of phrases made by a succession of low-pitched chords presented in a steady and rhythmically precise manner. Here the music is more solemn than the A sections and evokes the “fire asleep in the night.” The last A section comes back to the “water” melody of the flutes, but harmonized using the same chord structures as the B sections. The general register of this section is low, also reminiscent of the B sections, as if water and fire could briefly coexist at the end. The orchestration is completed by electronic sounds made by recordings of rain and fire, transformed to create evocative textures that could mix with the instruments.

The third movement is based on the following verse, also from the poem “Night, day, night”:

“Stream of light: a bird singing in the terrace.

In the valleys and mountains of your body it dawns.”

This verse led me to research songs of birds from the Mexican fauna. I transcribed songs of quetzal, northern mockingbird, white-throated thrush, hummingbirds, among others, and created melodies inspired by them. I also transcribed the rhythms of certain woodpeckers to create some rhythmic materials. I enjoyed this process of working with bird sounds, and it represents a new element in my composing.

Dawn is evoked in the movement by a chorale-like material that appears in the beginning and goes through various transformations until it appears one last time, in all the brasses, as a peroration before the coda begins.

“The commissioning and dedication of Amanece were fulfilled on September 20th, 2014, when the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra premiered the work by Antonio Juan-Marcos, with countertenor Rodrigo Ferreira and conductor José Areán. Weeks before this premiere, the composer ended an 11-year stay in France and to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began studies for a PhD in composition and started teaching music theory.” – Juan Arturo Brennan

“Amanece” is the third and last part of a piece cycle inspired by the poetry of Octavio Paz. I started composing this cycle in 2011, and finished it with the completion of this piece. The full cycle is called “Dos son un Jardín” (Two are a Garden). This title comes from a phrase by Julio Cortázar, “One cronopio is a flower, two [of them] are a garden”— from his book Stories of Cronopios and Famas. I find this quote incredibly sensitive, full of hope and love.

I have chosen three poems by Paz: first piece in the cycle was inspired by a poem called Custodia (Mostrance), from his book Ladera Este (East Slope), and the last two pieces were inspired by Coda and Árbol Adentro, from his book Árbol Adentro. These three poems express sensitive insights and deep reflections about love. Octavio Paz was a man of many reflections and experiences, yet the works that have caused the deepest impact and influence on me thus far are his poems and essays about love. His reflections on love, and the intellectual and aesthetic fashion in which he illuminates them, parallels some of my own experiences and informed my compositional practice while working on this cycle.

In brief, I started building an intimate, secret dialectical relationship with Paz. “Amanece” finds inspiration in the poem Árbol Adentro. For the piece’s title I took one word of significant weight in the poem: leading to the poem’s ending, Paz writes the word “amanece” (daybreak). The word is detached and right-aligned, positioned apart from the rest of the poem, providing visual space and a pause to the poem representing the unhurried time of daybreak. I tried to introduce this same pause at the formal level: leading up to the singer saying the word “amanece,” there is an instrumental orchestral tutti which is progressively built up. In this tutti, two piccolos play melodies based on musical themes from the Papantla Flyer ceremony. Their high tessitura and contour give them an agile and luminous character. I find a symbolic expression in them, as the daybreak’s first rays of sunshine. All the instruments gradually join the tutti until a wide and dense harmonic space is achieved. This gradual tutti as a metaphor of daybreak; a feeling of awakening, from dawn to full sunrise. The Papantla Flyer ceremony is in itself a worship of the Sun, and so I symbolically relate it with “amanece”—a crucial word for both the poem and the piece. The most relevant motives of the Papantla Flyer theme are introduced at the beginning: first in the dark register of the English Horn, and then in a transition passage played by a piccolo and glockenspiel. The melodies from the Papantla Flyers used in the tutti also provide a foundation on which I created the harmonic material that is explored throughout the piece. This tutti section is the only time where the harmony is fully deployed. In spite of the varying mutations and transpositions of the harmonic material, there are two pivotal notes in the low register constantly appearing throughout the piece as one of its several formal unity parameters.

In general, I have a tendency to express my musical personality through a poetry of what is sensitive, fragile, and lyrical. In “Amanece,” I have paid particular attention to achieving a more straightforward expression in both the orchestra gestures and the melody and verbal articulation of the countertenor. Regarding orchestration, I drew on a variety of sonic densities ranging from chamber-like, intimate moments, to passages of intense activity played by the entire orchestra.

As a composer, I am greatly influenced by the music and literature of Mexico that I was immersed in as a child. I remember spending sleepless nights listening to Revueltas’ music, and my hands trembling with emotion while turning the pages of Paz’s “La hija de Rappaccini” (Rappaccini’s Daughter). It is a huge honor and privilege for me to contribute my music to the 100th Anniversary of Octavio Paz, sharing the program with Redes, Silvestre Revueltas, and Ricardo Castro. I owe this privilege to Maestro José Areán and the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra, and I dedicate this piece to them.

———

ÁRBOL ADENTRO
Octavio Paz

Creció en mi frente un árbol.
Creció hacia dentro.
Sus raíces son venas,
nervios sus ramas,
sus confusos follajes pensamientos.
Tus miradas lo encienden
y sus frutos de sombras
son naranjas de sangre,
son granadas de lumbre.
Amaneceen la noche del cuerpo,
allá adentro, en mi frente,
el árbol habla.
Acércate, ¿lo oyes?

———

A TREE WITHIN
Octavio Paz

A tree has grown in my forehead.
It grew outside-in.
Its roots are veins,
nerves [are] its branches,
Its confusing foliage [is] my thoughts.
Your glances kindle it
and its fruits of shadows
are oranges of blood,
are pomegranates of fire.
Day breaks
in the body’s night,
there, within, in my forehead,
the tree speaks.
Come closer, can you hear it?