This music can be thought of 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 many emerging sustainability events and festivals around the world, sci-art and data-art conferences, sonification festivals, online catalogs, and events/workshops that promote social advocacy for scientific-artistic knowledge.
The compositions are the most abstract layer in the project, where the scoring technique plays a fundamental role. The music was written using detailed notation that demands strong technical abilities, and graphic notation for the performers' vivid interpretation. The combination of both techniques was thought on a vertical relation, creating structural nets of balanced interaction within the orchestration. I sought to bring the performers' egos into the music, by writing demanding passages mixed with graphic abstractions. I wanted the instrument to merge with the performers' bodies, 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.
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 the 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 sonifications, I was contemplating which textures I could relate to, and how I could shape the sound, 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 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.
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 articulations for 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. The mixture of both backgrounds brought complexities regarding different technical capacities and their understanding of the poetics in my music. However, I think that working together to perform my compositions, addressing topics such as deforestation and ocean contamination, brought a feeling of cooperation in the ensemble. The virtues from both backgrounds, classical and rhythmic, came together in the recordings to deliver the technical demands and spiritual engagement required by the compositions.
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 that sense, the performers needed to be contemplative conductors of the music.
This is the text that the singer is using, in bold what she sings in the music excerpt above.
I AM THE FOREST
Breath me in, in the bliss of immensity
with your beating heart.
Breath me out, in silent eternity
for your quiet mind.
So breath me in, breath me out
as the wind whispers
untold and secret chants.
And breath me in, breath me out
as for the fragility of existence
where do you stand?