Five rivers

Five rivers (2019) reflects in music the geographic characteristics of famous Iberian watercourses in a descriptive work for orchestra. In 2018, I delivered a lecture in Paris at the IRCAM Forum Workshops about my work Franciscan(onic) dialogues, which focuses on the relationship between humankind and nature. That year, according to the World Resources Institute, was marked by extreme heat, record carbon dioxide emissions, intense storms, changing precipitation patterns, significant wildfires and shrinking ice caps. These worrying facts, related to climate change, led me in 2019 to compose Five rivers, a work for orchestra that focuses on one of our most precious resources: water. As a European classical music composer who lived in seven different countries, it has always been clear to me that I am, first of all, an earthling and a citizen of the world. This fact, along with my passion for natural sciences and my studies in social sciences, explains why many of my musical works are related to nature and Earth. During the compositional process of Five rivers, when thinking about the impacts of climate change and the water global freshwater crisis, the memories of my trips across the Iberian Peninsula came to my mind and I remembered five rivers I have been to: the Douro, the Guadalquivir, the Minho, the Nervión and the Ter. As I always do when composing, I aimed to join reason with emotion and started by associating each of these watercourses with a movement of my orchestral composition. I wanted to translate into sounds the geographic features of each of the mentioned rivers, such as length, shape, velocity and volume. At the same time, since watercourses flow through diverse cultures and habitats, I wanted to add to my work transformed musical motifs of the regions crossed by these rivers. And, for these purposes, the latest versions of the technologies developed at IRCAM in Paris proved to be extremely useful, especially when dealing with calculations and data processing related to algorithmic manipulations, fractalization and granulation. By uniting past and future, I combined traditional contrapuntal techniques found in Medieval music with the latest technologies developed at IRCAM in Paris to achieve my compositional visions. Despite the technical aspects behind Five rivers and the specialized knowledge needed to compose this work, I created it to be accessible to any audience.

Dr. (PhD) Jan Emanuel Abras (born 1 February 1975 in Stockholm, Sweden)

www.janemanuelabras.com