Baez Cervantes, Flores, Humet, Martin Quintero, Sanchez Verdu: La nuit, le jour, Contemporary Music for Saxophone and Guitar

Description

Poetic Pieces
The piece is born from the reading of 3 English poems from the 19th century that evoke the spirit and night atmosphere with different nuances and perspectives. Some verses that describe the essence of the poems are: in the 1st movement, A Night Piece, by William Wordsworth, “…and the mind which slowly settles into peaceful calm…” The 2nd movement, The Voice of the Devil, the William Blake, “…Man has no body distinct from his soul for that called body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age”. The 3rd movement, The Eve of St. Agnes, by John Keats, “… young virgins might have visions of delight. And soft adorings from their loves receive upon the honey’d middle of the night “. The saxophone -with its warm and sensual timbre- is the voice of the poem, and allegorically evokes the settings and scenes of the texts. The guitar part is organically conceived, with an internal movement that arises from the soloist’s own musical phrase, and is reflected as a shadow with a life of its own. The atmosphere and general color of the work is sweet and calm, like the night evoked in the poems. The three movements are abandoned in a fusion of sound with silence, which is the deepest music of the soul.
by Ramón Humet

Miniaturas
In 2011, I wrote this piece at the request of the Icarus Duo. This unusual formation suggested a very particular, meticulous and balanced sound world. For this reason, I opted for a brief and concise format in which, as the Japanese Haikus, I could present a concrete and suggestive concept. The work is based on four Haikus, which serve to paint the sound canvas with which I conceived the mixture between these two instruments.
I. Snail miniature: Dance, dance, snail. And if you don’t want to dance, the foals, the heifers, will step on you and cook. But if you dance very well, we will let you play in the garden where little flowers grow. Ryoyin Hishou (1170) of the Emperor Goshirakawa.
II. Miniature of the moon: The full moon. Simply beauty. Spotlessly bright. Miura Chiióra (1729-1780).
III. Miniature of the water: The same as the water towards the hill that goes among the mosses wetting the rocks, I go quietly through life. Rioukan (1758-1831).
IV. Insect miniature: In this world there are also insects that sing well. Others sing badly. Kobaiáshi Issa (1763-1827).
by Santiago J. Báez

La nuit, le jour
This work was composed in 2013 for alto saxophone and guitar, with real-time sound processing and dedicated to the Ícarus duo, part of a harmonic initial material, from which a multitude of spectral-type processes are generated, rhythmic, etc. by developing it linearly or cyclically and expansively. The title alludes to the opposition of clearly contrasting and differentiated elements, even opposed at many times, that shape the general texture of the piece, as are the sound characteristics of the two acoustic instruments involved. The piece begins with the natural sound of the saxophone, which by means of multiple delay produces a complex harmony as a resonance, to which is added the generation of quarter tones derived from the use of multiphonics, from an initial chord of G minor. Gradually, a timbral and morphological transformation of the sound takes place by means of processors built within the programming environment of the Max-MSP software. In the guitar, the use of granular synthesis stands out, which enhances the production of percussive sound, typical of the amplitude envelope of this instrument. In this dialectic between saxophone and guitar, continuous and discontinuous sounds, natural and processed sound, tension and relaxation, epic and lyrical, the evolution of the piece unfolds. by Antonio J. Flores

Jondo ma non troppo
It is a piece that, as its title indicates, is based on an expressive material similar to Andalusian cante jondo but with a treatment that has nothing to do with the usual “sticks” of flamenco. In it there are strong contrasts between energetic fragments and very calm. The guitar uses technical resources of the flamenco guitar such as “rasgionado” or “punteo” and also others with a classical tradition such as harmonics or glissando, which are rarely found in flamenco. We can find melodies in both instruments where the extensive use of the final tetrachord in the Spanish Phrygian mode, which has a very different treatment here, basically atonal. The sax alternates “passages of bravery” with “quiet passages”, and contains some extended techniques such as multiphonic, “breathing only” or some harmonics. The choice of the soprano saxophone instead of the C-flute (more frequent in flamenco) is due in part to its lower pitch that allows me to connect better with the guitar, but also because of its colour: darker, deeper. more “jondo”. by Francisco J.Martín Quintero

Mizu no oto (“Water sound”)
Version for saxophone and guitar
All the poetic, sonic, visual -in short, sensual- image of the next Japanese haiku by Basho made me build in my imagination, just in few seconds, this piece that was written in Germany on August 3rd 1997 and was dedicated to Saiz-García Duo. The piece was originally written for shakuhachi and guitar.

古池や | 蛙飛びこむ | 水の音
Furu ike ya | kawazu tobikomu | mizu no oto
Into the ancient pond’s mirror | A frog jumps | Water’s sound!

Its utopian ideal would be to convert the rumour of an instant on an eternity, to freeze one picture in the memory through a game of readings and re-readings of a material that change from something lineal to just poetry, just image, just rumor, just a moment… by Jose M. Sánchez Verdú