This music can be cataloged as contemporary or art music, due to the orchestration, the use of non-conventional notation, or the exploration of electronic sounds through code and technological features for interactivity. Its intention of scientific dissemination through emotions and audience engagement makes the music a good fit for emerging and raising sustainability events and festivals around the world, sci-art and data-art conferences, sonification festivals, online catalogs, or workshops to promote social advocacy for scientific-artistic knowledge.
For these pieces, the sonifications were recorded as samples and used as an expressive toolset by the electronic performer, who operated them via MIDI controllers. In addition, the acoustic instruments were written using these sonifications as a source of inspiration for their melodic and harmonic shape, textural correlation, pitch set, and extended techniques development.
On a composition-design level, the blending process between the acoustic and electronic was designed to nurture each other. When writing the code for the electronic sounds, I had in mind, which textures could I relate to, and how the sound could be shaped, so it could easily fit different extended techniques. At the same time, while composing the music, I knew beforehand which textures, shapes, and movements the electronic sounds could develop for specific extended techniques.
The compositions are the most abstract layer in the project, and the scoring technique played a fundamental role. The music was written with a mix of detailed-notation that requires a solid technical ability, and graphic-notation for the performer’s vivid interpretation. The combination of both techniques was thought on a vertical relation, creating structural nets of balanced interaction within the orchestration; I seek to bring the performer into the music, by writing demanding passages mixed with graphic abstractions. In this music, I wanted the instrument to merge into a singing body, to find expression through the ubiquitous consciousness of a playful struggle.
The music pieces were based on sections with long developments. The detailed notation in combination with the composed graphic freedom established an element of controlled probability and a sense of vertical tension-release that extended horizontally. The continuous presence of sound makes the listener fall into a net that spikes with activity through sweet and emotional melodic-driven passages.
These passages were the ones moving the music forward, in contrast to the sections based on extended techniques that created complex structures. Overall this music falls into the spell of complex sonic textures, that are broken by emotional melodic qualities.
I composed this music for alto and tenor saxophone, cello, double bass, voice, and electronics. The orchestrations served my goal of working with multiphonics and various attacks on the wind instruments, harmonics and different bowing techniques on the strings, and extended techniques on the voice.
The performers I chose for this project have professional backgrounds in classical or rhythmic music, all of them with experience in improvised and scored music. I think that working together to perform compositions that address such heavy topics -as deforestation and ocean contamination, brought from the deepest of their intentions, a feeling of compassion and cooperation. The virtues of both backgrounds came together in the recordings to enlighten the compositions’ requirements with the highest of the ensemble’s capacities. A common goal was achieved within both worlds, something that does not happen so often between rhythmic and classic players.
The music was composed to be self-conducted, and the musicians always played with the full score in front of them. They needed to have full awareness of what everyone was playing at all times. In a sense, the performers needed to be contemplative conductors of the music.
The voice in the ensemble was one of the strongest tools that I used to connect complex scientific topics with emotionality. For the voice, I wrote two kinds of music material easily differentiable: a textural material that sounds dark and mysterious, and a melodic material that seeks beauty, evoking a sense of belonging. Seemingly, a folk tradition merged with a dystopic future.
As previously touched upon under "Aesthetic Decisions", the use of text was a key element for the voice to create musical access and connection to the audience.