Sotelo - Como llora el agua ... for guitar

The
greatest difficulty a composer confronts when dealing with the guitar is
doubtless its “handling”: the dependence on the positions of the player’s left
hand to produce the sounds; thus it is practically impossible to write music
for the guitar if the composer has not played the instrument himself – if he
cannot feel the strings vibrating under his own fingers, if he does not know
the guitar’s limitations.

Since
I dreamed (literally) of music when I was a child, I was obliged to take up the
guitar, the only instrument in my parents’ house – to embrace its body, to try
to turn the music I heard in my head at night into real sounds. By contrast, my
concern today with Como llora el agua is to invent a new instrument, in order to
learn anew how to play it, as Helmut Lachenmann says.

The
work’s compositional progress began with the search for a scordatura, a modified tuning which deviates from the usual sonic
world and renders the composition’s harmonic centre (C, G, D, G#, B, D#) – as
it were, a gravitational harmonic axis or a “solar chord,” as I like to call
it, in a system of “eternal suns” (Giordano Bruno).

Then
the scordatura obliged the composer
to invent a new way to manipulate the instrument. That began by “stroking” the
strings in the air – arpeggio espressivo –
while the fingers gradually create a spiral of sounds on the fingerboard, as
they interweave. This makes for a centrifugal motion toward new sonic worlds in
which the left hand must learn anew how to move over the neck of the guitar, to
orient, position itself – and it is the right hand which shows the left hand
how to open up the sonic space, which is in fact nothing more than the ancient canto de gemido, the lamenting sound of
the flamenco.

The
right hand traverses expanses conjuring up the flavours of flamenco styles such
as soléa, bulería, tarantos and seguiriya; the hitherto unknown sound
manifests itself today, noble and radiant, its taste matured, bearing the title
flamenco spectral – born anew, like a
sunrise, from the wonderful fingers of my friend Juan Manuel Cañizares.

Mauricio Sotelo

German translation © Sara Costa-Sengera / English translation © Grant Chorley

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