For a while now, we have gotten used to the omnipresent sphere in which we live. This Sphere has no specific shape, but is often described as a type of cloud-like Intelligence which can be perceived and interacted with via different interfaces. Among these interfaces belong our personal devices, which have gotten an incredibly relevant role in our lives: they serve us, assist us, take care of us. They do not particularly care if it is a matter of our pains and troubles, of our self-doubts or our emotions, they do hear us… even when we don’t say anything. They are like our Guardian Angels, sent by the all-mighty, omniscient Intelligence. Through their collection of data and their personalized feedback, they show us who we are and how other people behave and think, and with that they wish to discipline our understanding and our behavior. The communication outside the Sphere is nowadays almost unthinkable, and nevertheless it remains nontransparent to us, as well as to the people it serves. When we try to reach out to it, we cannot grasp its entirety, but only a concrete operation, which itself consists of the Human and the Machine, and which takes only part of the responsibility of the Sphere and carries all of its guilt. In the project SpamScore.exe, Shaotong He and Carlos G. Hernández simulate an intelligent Cloud, which uses the musicians as Content Providers in order to create a product for the audience. The Product is then modified by the audience’s choice of Terms and Conditions (GTC) and presented to them in a personalized edition of the product. The communication between the audience and the musicians occurs only through that artificial Cloud, which shall remain hidden to the audience’s perception.

A series of sounds are produced by the Oboe while accompanying words are projected on a screen. The listeners are asked to fill-in the gap created between the sound and the text, perhaps transferring the qualities of one into the other, or even creating their own narrative within the resulting experience.

With this versions of Vivaldi’s Gloria, I intend to produce an effect of getting closer and further away from Vivaldi’s original, by distorting its harmonies to different degrees throughout the piece. This changes the expressivity of the work, and gives it different undertones, but maintains it recognizable to the listener who’s familiar with the piece. By intervening this classic piece, the possibility of exploring different feelings and interpretations of it is open. Version A, which tends to the dissonance, will be performed on Maundy Thursday, and Version B, which comes back to the original, will be performed on Easter Sunday.

“Screens” aims at pointing out the relationship between people and their devices in recent times, and how it affects the communication systems between people themselves, perhaps by creating new models or modifying preexisting ones. The ensemble is set in the familiar situation of looking at their devices in the darkness, perhaps as they do when they watch some film at night or scroll through their social media accounts.

This piece is inspired by both the world of classical/contemporary orchestral music, as well as popular electronic music based on synthetic sounds. The idea is to use the orchestra as the traditional body that it is, but also as a synthesizer, as well as vice versa using the synthesizer referencing its own history but at moments also trying to sound like an orchestra. Each movement presents a different proposition for the relation between these two completely different bodies: either in collaboration, in conflict or indifferent to each other.

In “sin orejas” [without ears] I was interested on creating a situation in which the performers communicate with each other via an invisible net (instead of a visual one, such as a conductor), and have their own individual tempo and gestures, as if playing solo pieces, but in a coordinated manner. With this I hope to create different levels of coordination, of order and chaos, understanding and differing. It is the way of stating without hearing, but still longing for union, for approval and attention, that so many of us know in our daily lives.

Steel-wool was inspired on the paradox of an object that is made of metal, which can be also sharp, and nonetheless feels soft and porous to the tact. In this piece I tried to present different textures that vary from flat and smooth to coarse and harsh, presenting them in the context of a poly-structure for big ensemble, in order to convey to the audience both the feeling of porosity or flatness and the contradiction of having a very harsh sound produced out of soft techniques, as well as soft sounds which are the product of great friction in the instruments. To achieve the three-dimensionality of the sound, the ensemble is divided in four groups: amplified percussion (first soloist), piano (second soloist), amplified string quartet and the winds section (including double bass). These different layers or groups were composed with a certain level of independency from one another, with the intension of producing overlappings and strange cuts in the structure of the piece.

n ) . Gerzso - [ E is a piece inspired by and featuring the paintings of Gunther Gerzso. These are projected on a screen in a very rhythmical way, having both synchronicity and a-synchronicity with the guitar, while the presence of the performer gains significance as an additional visual element. A process of mapping was made in order to more precisely co-relate the music and the video, for instance relating the color and texture of the paintings with the timbre of the guitar. Decoupling those pairings becomes an important aspect of the composition as well. Structurally the piece consists on a number of sections that vary from very short (just a few seconds) to very long (up to 3 minutes) as well as from agitated to calm, presenting both the variety of techniques and sounds of the electric guitar as well as the different styles of the paintings of Gerzso throughout the piece.

Línea is an exploration of the perception of both time and the sound of the clarinet. The main idea of the piece is the stretching of time, while allowing the listener to dive in the sound of the Bass or Contrabass Clarinet. In order to achieve this, the whole piece consists on only one low pitch, inviting the listener to concentrate on the sound of the clarinet itself. The traditional playing techniques are broken into four main categories: sound (pitch and color), air (breath in and out), articulation  (such as the sounds t and k) and noises (key clicks), all of which are extensively developed and combined throughout the piece. The different noises, timbres, proportions and energies produce a time structure that carries the listener along the duration of the piece.

This piece consists on different layers of short, percussive sounds extracted from mostly knocking on wood (always with the hand knuckles!) sounds, which were recorded keeping the microphone in a extremely short distance in relation to the sound source, in order to preserve in the best possible way the qualities of the materials (wood, flesh and bone). The samples were then organized according to their different qualities of resonance, harmonicity and intensity and inserted into a complex fractal structure generated after a first cell or motive; the result is then a textural sound that is only interrupted in determinate moments by other –in this case continuous– wood sounds, thus producing the dialectics and inner tension of the structure of the piece.

My piece „Orchesterstück“ (“Orchestra Piece“) comes from the idea of making a Zoom-In process in music. Here it is related to a “subjective” enlargement of a musical gesture through the process of repetition (for instance, an only hit repeated 52 times) as well as the extension of normal processes (for instance, an original 3 second glissando is stretched to a 5 minutes glissando)- which I call “Micro-processes”.

This repetitions and micro-processes are the first element in the hierarchy of the piece. The micro-intervals (deployment of pitches in each moment of the perception by means of a slow glissando), micro-sound color changes (as in the small changing of the position of the mute in the brass instruments) and the “imperfect regularity” of the repeated impulses play an important role in the piece as well.

To accentuate the effect of “being inside the sound” of the Zoom-in, I set the orchestra in two different positions (whole orchestra on stage and small brass ensemble behind the public). The bass ensemble (which includes a Tamtam), helps in the task of producing the feeling of the room for the public by means of pointing out a consciousness of the room-effect of the actual concert hall. The different Tempi produced between the Orchestra and the Brass Ensemble transmit the effect of tension, which serves to define the structure of the piece.

The piece is inspired by and dedicated to the Philosophy and music of the American composers John Cage and Morton Feldman, seen through the glass of some musical and aesthetic ideas of my teach- ers Mark Andre and Clemens Gadenstätter, both students of Helmut Lachenmann. The sounds move freely in a dark room, the sensation of space is stretched by the different qualities of the sound (particularly dy- namics and color) and by the positions of the interpreters in the space, splitted in 6 positions around the public. The sounds function as lights in this black room, which represents the Universe. A dialectic of silence (darkness) and sound (light) is constantly developing itself, in a continu- ous apparently fragile equilibrium, as if the possibility of breakdown was always present. The piece pretends to show how different structures (mental, social, linguistic, musical, etc.) can coexist in equilibrium, al- most feeling the necessity of each other, in order to create a whole, and without the risk of breakdown. Equilibrium between instruments and voices, male and female, public and stage, light and darkness, sound and silence would then be achieved.

“Ir” is a piece for ensemble which explores the different relations that can occur between an impulse and its response (therefore the title “I-R”, which also refers to the Spanish verb for “go”) in music. In a Big Bang Theory-like structure, with an initial strike in tutti, the piece starts to unfold itself as a constellation of echoes and resonances (which themselves produce other echoes and resonances) that work as reactions to the original strike. This happens in many different spectral levels, as the original “bang” is rather inharmonic, it leads to both harmonic (for instance the arpeggio played on the vibraphone or the glissandi in the strings section) or noisy situations (Thunder-sheet or scratching in the lower piano strings). As the piece unfolds, the energy grows bigger and diminishes depending on the different chain reactions created between the impulses and their responses, up to the point that the energy cannot grow bigger and therefore stars a quick decreasing process, until it disappears into a last subtle impulse (or perhaps an echo).

GOUSTS is a piece conformed by short movements, which can be ordered in different aleatory ways. The vocal part is treated in two different levels: as a percussion, going back to its primitive exploration of sounds, and as an “evocative” of various moods or mental situations, etc. The electronic part functions always as a dialogue, a counterpoint to the voice, sometimes potentiating what the singer “says” or “thinks”, and sometimes denying it, creating a conflict or resistance with it. The electronic sounds become thus the representation of the singers “ego”, the voice inside his/her head: they travel around the room through a quadrophonic system as a representation of this “mental space”, while the actual voice of the singer stays in a fixed position in the center of the stage, thus illustrating the physical space of it.

Ritual.1 is a piece for small ensemble and electronics that combines different elements of tradition and modernity. 'Old' (Cembalo, Recorder, and Timpano+Cymbals, which can be considered both traditional/classical or primitive/archaic) and 'modern' (Electric Guitar and Electronics), acoustic and electronic, as well as the voice, which reminds us of immemorial times, mingle together in an scheme that goes from the order to the chaos. The beginning consists in an almost inaudible long-static tone section, that at some moments vibrates slightly; as the piece moves forward, this vibration grows progressively and is every time less static (that is, more chaotic) while other tones appear; after that, short tones or impulses appear as a result of the every time more irregular vibrations of the original tone, an then generate themselves groups of notes that are every time more violent, until they grow bigger towards the frenzy by the end of the piece. The cembalo-cadenza at the very end of the piece compacts the previously accumulated energy to then disappear suddenly (as it also appeared very suddenly) leaving the piece in an open state, as a sort of suspense, but at the same time closing the ritual.