4 Disparates de Goya

4 Disparates de Goya (2018) was composed for a quartet of bass clarinet, cello, percussion and piano, with an electronic device that amplifies each of the instruments and provides pre-recorded sounds that are spatialized around the audience through four loudspeakers: a refined work whose purely electronic version was released on CD by Liquen Records (LRCD008), and that breaks up the electroacoustic materials of the chamber music edition and organise them in a different way.

As its title suggests, Francisco de Goya’s engravings known as Disparates (The Follies) or Proverbios (Proverbs) (1815-16/1824) inspire a work which draws from their formal plasticity and their textures, does not intend to illustrate, but to transcribe four of these engravings; respectively, numbers 7, 9, 15 and 18, which match with Disparate desordenado (Disordered folly), Disparate general (General folly), Disparate claro (Clear folly) and Disparate fúnebre (Funereal folly). Lines, stains and darkness of the Goyesque atmosphere become a music that does not transcribe each one of the engravings in that same order, but instead amalgamates an entire underworld between the dreamlike and that sleep of reason which, as Goya himself states in the series of Los Caprichos (The Caprices) (1799), produces monsters; here, authentic poetic cries. With a chromatic palette created by low resonances, Gómez Alemany’s musical follies will seem true acoustic hallucinations that we can hear in the central minutes of the quartet and that resemble veiled voices: mimicked by extended instrumental techniques to release an entire subconscious crouched in those engravings in which, according to him, Goya appears “more sinister, avant-garde and radical.”

These 4 Disparates de Goya, premiered on May 17th, 2018 at the Phonos Foundation in Barcelona, by the BCN 216 ensemble under Francesc Prat, offer an instrumental template that shares its preparation with some other pieces of this album: from the use of reeds in the cello strings to the activation of the piano with tubes or chains, the use of cardboard or polyethylene trays or kitchen containers in the percussion (a set of conventional sonority alterations in instruments that Joan Gómez describes carefully, as usual, in his score instructions). This preparation, plus a saturation of noisy techniques will produce “very screeching and annoying” sounds, as some of the characters portrayed in the Disparates would bring about to the well-thinking society of the 19th century, which is why socio-political readings shouldn’t be ignored. Sometimes these sounds, in the composer’s view, “are difficult to control and have a somewhat indeterminate and random aspect. That gives them greater complexity making them more difficult to be understood and perceived. For this reason, graphic signs are placed in the score to help with the accurate type of sound to be played”, which gives to the Valencian composer’s musical notation a plastic aspect that is twinned with Goya’s own engravings, with its mixture of precision and roughness, of refinement and coarseness. With these elements —and, again, according to him— “the musical form is continuous and homogeneous, like a great wave or flowing noise. The formal differences are more the consequence of texture density and sonority than of clear blocks or sharp sections”, although these also exist in an intense and distressing darkness work typical of a witches’ Sabbath of the Aragonese genius.

Paco Yáñez 

From the libretto of the CD 7 works for chamber music and ensemble edited by Liquen Records