La religión del sonido

La religión del sonido was premiered by Schallfeld Ensemble with conductor Leonhard Grams the 17.02.2017 at the impuls Academy & Festival 2017, Graz (Austria).

EXPLANATION OF THE PIECE: La religión del sonido (2017) was written for bass flute, bass clarinet, baritone saxophone, violin, cello, double bass, percussion and piano. It is a score in which repetition plays a very important role in building the sort of processional ambulatory that time and musical form weave here. For this reason, rhythm is crucial to establish a pulsation that is opposed or hybridised by the different layers of textures that create the work. Thanks to the fundamental role of this rhythm, the structure is articulated through contrasts between slow moments with their clear and precise pulsations, that mimic the ritual, against fast passages, that through textural glissandi will remind us of the ornate portamenti of Asian religion songs, since Joan Gómez himself recognizes that La religión del sonido shows influences from an array of music traditions, encompassing from Arabic, Japanese and Tibetan, as well as through the reworking of these same ones in the work of composers such as Giacinto Scelsi or John Cage.

La religión del sonido, which was premiered on February 17th, 2017 in Graz, within the impuls Festival, by the Schallfeld Ensemble and conducted by Leonhard Garms, combines the most spiritual and mystical moments with exaltation and catharsis episodes, in which rhythm accelerates and multiplies in layers, by means of an intensification of extended techniques to evoke delirium, in the most chaotic bars of a score whose global fabric is marked by that slow wander punctuated by the percussive, as an ascetic ceremonial, revealing what Joan Gómez defines as “religiosity inherent in sound”: mystique of invisibility and attraction to constant and repetitive pulsation, to reach a state of trance just before the noisy overflows that make ecstasy explicit. In these bars, melismatic melodies, multiphonic blocks and low-pitched overlays of resonant textures synthesise light and darkness, painting a canvas of dark nuances, like the hoarse psalmody that the score builds from the rhythmic point of view, either by bringing materials together around it or dispersing them. This means that temporalities and their changes, with superimposition and counterpoints of various metrics, are constant in La religión del sonido, a score that he sees as “sound blocks built in a geometric style, a more rigorous construction prevailing over an intuitive one”.

Paco Yáñez 

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