Program notes (ENG)
The resilient, long-living, “upside-down” baobab tree seems like an apt metaphor for how this piece behaves. Through sustained repetition, the work observes one single melodic line as it unfolds over time: sometimes expanding out from a central note, sometimes starting from the edges and gradually growing inward, the notation resembles a tree growing both vertically and horizontally. And like a tree (and like the word baobab), this melody is almost symmetrical—but not quite.
Deepest thanks to Barbara White, who shared with me her knowledge of shakuhachi practice and notation systems, and to Riley Lee, whose patient generosity helped make this piece a reality.
I think a lot about translation, its challenges and its joys. Sometimes, I will write music as an attempt at figuring out little translation problems.
For this piece, I tasked myself to write music on words so simple they could potentially be translated into any language, without losing meaning and without having to tweak the music too much. I thought counting numbers could be an answer, its action being so universal, its rhythms so universally similar.
Paradoxically, the word contar doesn’t translate very well. In Spanish, depending on context, it means both “to count” and “to tell” (and it sounds very similar to cantar—“to sing”—which is only fitting). I find that ambiguity fascinating: what stories could counting tell? I wrote this piece to find out.
Ritual is monolithic at first, but shows more detail when viewed up close. If it were a painting, this music would be like a mural in an ancient church—enduring, yet fragile, timeless, yet layered.
The piece is in two sections. The first is fanfare-like and exploits some metric ambiguities characteristic of traditional South American folk genres. The second part, darker in nature, is like a shadow-self of the first, yet a glimpse of light creeps in toward the very end.
Sequere me (“follow me”) is one of many enigmatic inscriptions that can be found in riddle canons of the 15th and 16th centuries. It feels like a nice metaphor for friendship and trust, and is an apt description of how this piece is built: four parts in unison that slowly drift apart in time, only to reunite at the very end.
Orenda is written for a little stone-walled area of the old canal to the side of Lock 17 in Little Falls, NY.
Inspired by ancient conceptions of place and interconnectedness with nature, I wanted to write a piece that would be suitable to be performed outdoors and that would welcome the sounds of the environment without fighting them—more of a sound tapestry than a “concert” piece. This music behaves a bit like running water: a continuous stream of motion underneath which things change only imperceptibly over time.
Floating above that tapestry, a singer chants words from the Oneida Nation’s motto: “good mind, good heart, strong fire”. To those core values, I added a few more principles of my own choosing. The text can be interpreted as a prayer, an invocation, a list of wishes, or a declaration for oneself.
La astilla de hueso is a chamber opera in three acts about the equivocality of language, the multiplicity of time and the madness of love. The libretto is inspired by the statue repair workshop of the city of Buenos Aires and the stories it carries from a geological perspective: different temporal layers that suddenly become active and start singing, acting and dancing.
The commission for this piece came with a prompt: to reexamine the history of the construction of New York’s Erie Canal through the lens of its effects on the native natural and human landscape.
As a foreigner I wasn’t familiar with the history of the canal itself, but as a global citizen, the idea of reflecting on what technology leaves behind resonated with me deeply. In setting out to write the libretto, I looked up the terms “land” + “there used to be”; more than thinking about a specific region or culture, I wanted to find out what is universally recorded as having existed somewhere but no longer being there. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most results mentioned houses and natural elements. It seems like, in the end, we all miss the same things: a sense of belonging and of connection with nature.
A stripped down, alphabetically-ordered list of those results became the skeleton of this piece: a meditation-like recitation, an anonymous exercise of remembrance, a kind of crowdsourced elegy for a world collectively missed.
Tattarrattat is a celebration of all things palindromic, so I’m borrowing the title from what, turns out, is the longest palindrome in English—an onomatopoeia coined by James Joyce in his Ulysses to describe the sound of ‘a knock at the door’.
Francisco del Pino
More and more my work converses with ancient forms. I don’t intend the music itself to sound old, but—perhaps paradoxically—sometimes it’s only by looking back that I can fish for ideas that feel exciting. In this piece, the expressive marking at the beginning of the score is “nostalgically joyful”, words that in hindsight are like a metaphor for that other, broader program.
The idea of the passacaglia works more as an allusion rather than as a straight description, but still seems apt due to both the persistent ternary nature of the music and its circular harmonic progression. Only hiccup is, the passacaglia was first of all a form of dance—and this one might be a hard one to dance to!
Francisco del Pino
Mantra, for improvising ensemble
The contemplation of abstract sequences (even the mundane, like, in this case, the order of the letters of the alphabet) has always had for me a strange fascination. There is something of a penitential quality to them, a sense of journey that is as accepted as it is inexorable. I find that quality beautifully captured in Rebekah Smith's poem, a stream-of- consciousness text where the alphabet sequence is like a clock ticking away, relentless, unforgiving.
Francisco del Pino
Essentially a sort of gigantic round canon, Material was written as a companion to my previous piece The sea. These two works, while performable as standalone pieces, are meant to form a unit, each functioning as a refracted mirror for the other. The music of The sea, like its title, evokes fluidity and expansiveness and is fundamentally free-flowing; Material, on the other hand, is recursive, self-referential, and heavily process-based. In The sea, the drama is in the words; Material, contrarily, seeks expression through abstraction. My governing metaphor, however, is in both cases the same: the contemplation of a suspended present, a present that like liquid, seethes slowly until completely evaporating.
Francisco del Pino
When Soo Yeon Lyuh asked me to write a piece for her, I became obsessed with the idea of a piece that was not only ‘for’ but also ‘about’ her instrument—an instrument that, for me, was uncharted territory.
I thus set out to learn about the haegeum. I found out that the instrument is sometimes referred to as paleum—“eight sounds”—due to it being made using eight different materials (bamboo, clay, gourd, hide, metal, silk, stone and wood). I also learned that the word haegeum has a second meaning: the lifting of a prohibition, the unlocking of something previously forbidden. The piece became a study on the instrument’s many faces and also a meditation on our own inner voices and secrets.
Anima is based on a seven-note tune using a ciphered version of the word ‘haegeum’: B, A, E, G, etc. I conceived this piece for a soloist with pre-recorded haegeums, but I wanted it to also function as an ensemble piece. As such, no effects have been added, no processing has been made to the backing tracks: all that sounds stands as it was played in real time.
Francisco del Pino
A baroque-inspired prelude of sorts, this piece proliferates from one single chord through an extended application of what Messiaen called the “stained glass window” effect. I owe to Dmitri Tymoczko for his insights on this subject!
Francisco del Pino
Animal is a follow-up to my solo-percussion piece Huancara. Loosely inspired by Xenakis’ percussion music, both these pieces share a similar spirit where constant change is drawn from a sound palette as minimal as possible.
Francisco del Pino
Invisible was an Argentinian power trio formed by Luis Alberto Spinetta during the mid 70s and is my favorite band from my home country. Spinetta was a genius and a poet and perhaps the most uniquely Argentinian of our ‘rock’ notables, and his passing ten years ago still hurts me today. This piece has no quotations, nor does it aspire to be an elegy, yet—I think—it displays a sense of yearning, a longing for a glimpse of those we can no longer see.
I want to thank ~Nois for welcoming me within the group, and for their generous and sensitive input which helped me work out the ultimate shape of the piece.
Francisco del Pino
This piece originated as a response to Gabriel Fauré’s Impromptu in D-Flat. While the latter is in one continuous movement, my piece is divided into three parts, each of which zooms in on a specific harp technique. More like études in their own right, these miniatures wrote themselves quite spontaneously, so they still feel to me as if they were prompted “by the spirit of the moment”.
Francisco del Pino
In this piece I superimpose a filtered version of Cage’s In a landscape with a loose variation on the tango Malena, yet the result (I think) doesn’t sound like either of them. American experimentalism and tango, NY and Buenos Aires—the crossing of these sources is almost a metaphor of my recent musical journeys. I wonder what kind of third entity arises from the montage—and whether it represents the sum of different musics, or the root that unifies them.
Francisco del Pino
The Sea is a long poem made up of names waiting to be conjured on the page: waves carved on rocks, clams like white neon lights. The sea, not only with its movements, with its sound, but also with its rays and reflections. The present before it dissolves. The poem investigates a world distilled, vaporized, and once again condensed in a new space, where time goes on simultaneously with its influences and recesses, tides and colored fish waiting to be discovered at the bottom of the sea. A discovery of a sea made up of naming, inside a word, a word that like a life, sleeps, until no more.
Rebekah Smith
This piece is my third setting of poetry by Victoria Cóccaro, and probably the one in which music and text are more inextricably linked. It was my intention, rather than putting the words to music, to build a sonic space that would hopefully echo that of the text—a highly visual poem that reflects on the act of writing, and on the passing of time and the passing of life, with the precision of a topographic map.
Francisco del Pino
Wankara—hispanicized as Huancara—is the Aymara word for “drum”, more specifically a type of large drum used extensively in traditional music from the Andes region in South America. Huancaras are frequently performed outdoors in combination with panpipe ensembles, usually in processions as part of agricultural and religious festive days. Initially intended as a personal response to Iannis Xenakis’ percussion music, in writing this piece I also had in mind the sounds, the views and the nostalgic festiveness of parades and carnivals in Northwest Argentina.
Francisco del Pino
Iris took shape out of a short exercise on compositional applications of trichordal pitch-class sets. The piece grows from dark to light, and—seemingly contradicting its abstract starting point—it’s one of the most colorful pieces I’ve written in the last couple years. The title I borrowed from a track in Coltrane’s Stellar Regions: huge thanks to Rudresh Mahanthappa who pointed out to me the important role of pitch-class set usage in Coltrane’s late period improvisations!
Francisco del Pino
The text of this piece is loosely derived from a hymn set by Guillaume Du Fay in his cantilena motet Flos florum (Flower of flowers). I made my version out of various English translations of said hymn, adding bits of my own and filtering out the explicit religious elements in search of a more personal and common expression. These words are both a prayer and a conversation as well as a remembrance of someone loved and missed, and I am privately dedicating them to the memory of my mother, who was also my first music teacher.
Flowers are also something one gives as a gift: this one is for Loadbang, with gratitude and admiration.
Francisco del Pino
Cactus is built around an essentially linear idea that branches into four divergent paths. As cacti do, this music waits and endures, thriving at its own pace, as though it owned time itself.
Francisco del Pino
Lumen: a unit of luminous flux. From Latin: light, air shaft, opening.
This piece is basically a four-part canon on a melody treated as a kind of cantus firmus, where the two outer voices play the tune and its retrograde at a long, drawn-out pace and two inner parts do the same in fast, sprightly groups of 16th notes. The main melody comes from a series of previously written pieces around ideas of light and reflection.
Francisco del Pino
Ronda is an extended exploration of a simple harmonic sequence shaped as a series of continuous micro-variations. Written for Sō Percussion’s composition seminar at Princeton during lockdown, I wanted to somehow reflect on the value of ‘togetherness’—how can music express the realization that a ‘being together’ is precious and not to be taken for granted? My response here is an endurance-based music packed with interlocking patterns and echo-type gestures, through which the players undergo constant recombinations only to come together at the very end of the journey.
Francisco del Pino
I wrote Cave / Cueva shortly after transplanting myself from Argentina to the US for graduate studies, during days in which translation was a daily concern for me. By translation I mean not only speech, but the broader sense of translation as learning to live, think and communicate in a new culture.
When I started writing the piece I knew I wanted to use a text that was both familiar to me as a Spanish speaker, and also relatable to English-speaking singers. It turned out that the Argentinian poet Victoria Cóccaro, with whom I had previously collaborated in my song cycle Decir, had recently written, as a kind of experiment, this bilingual poem called Cave. This seemed an ideal text for the project because I was already familiar with her writing and also anticipated it would be engaging for both Spanish and English ears.
Cave is organized in couplets of two verses—one in English, the second in Spanish—that start out as exact translations of one another. As the poem unfolds, a kind of distortion in the translation occurs, blurring meaning so that what in the beginning are parallel lines turn progressively into divergent paths.
What I found exciting about this text is the way in which it presents the problem of translation as a sort of impossibility: we can’t actually turn things from one language into another—we can only relearn how to live, how to think, how to say.
My setting also has two layers, which get in and out of sync and reciprocally mirror each other in various ways. Some of the visual imagery of the text is recreated musically by the use of echoes, cascade-type effects, and by having the ensemble sing in a rather limited registral range as a way of experiencing narrowness of space. There is as well, in the main melody, a reference to the Pange Lingua medieval hymn: “Tell, my tongue, the mystery [...]”.
Francisco del Pino
Inti could be seen as one movement of an imaginary concerto for bass and ensemble. I reimagined the bass as a kind of giant viol with sympathetic open strings: this resonant, pervasive instrument is at the center of a solar system of sorts, with the rest of the ensemble revolving around it, reflecting its light and depending on it.
As I envision it, the character of the piece (calm, ecstatic and finally joyful) is that of a musical offering—a prayer without words. The whole work draws on a nine-note tune played by the bass that is loosely based on the Pange Lingua medieval hymn, at the center of which is the note G (“sol”, Spanish for “sun”).
Inti, in Andean cosmology, is the sun revered as a god.
Francisco del Pino
The text of this piece is a rewriting of Matthew 22: 37-39, which was set by William Byrd in his 8-voice canon Diliges Dominum: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: love your neighbor as you love yourself”. For my version, I tried to leave aside the specifically religious aspect of those words and underline the idea of an intimate, personal statement of love between peers:
I will love you
with all my strength, with all my soul, with all my mind,
I will love you
with all my might, with all my light, with all my life,
I will love you
with all my heart, with all my flaws, with all my dreams,
and most of all:
I will love you
as I love myself.
I sought to musically convey the sense of connection and community that is so strong in the original text by setting the lyrics in the manner of a continuous hocket—there is thus basically one single line for the whole piece, in whose building everyone is involved. Completed during the difficult isolation days of the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, the composition process took on added meaning: to express longing for the experience of sharing music and collaborating with others.
Diliges Dominum is also known for being a musical palindrome, in which four voices sing the same music as the other four, but exactly in retrograde motion. Continuing the reference to Byrd’s piece, I will reflects itself backwards in the second half, ascending where it had previously descended and vice versa.
Francisco del Pino
Decir—“to say”—is a 50-minute theatrical concert of songs and poetry co-created with Argentine poet Victoria Cóccaro and augmented with visuals by Argentine artist Maximiliano Bellman. Conceived as the staging of a long poem, and written during a process of profound collaboration, Decir materializes into three layers—words, music, and visuals—each revolving around themes of suspension, repetition, fractality, and displacement. A topographic reflection on the materiality of writing, an exercise in transforming words into worlds (and vice versa), Decir explores the notion of territory in both a geographical and a sociocultural sense: how a body is present; how a voice becomes a place.
Victoria Cóccaro & Francisco del Pino
El alma—Spanish for “the soul”, but also used to refer to “the soundpost” of a string instrument—is an instrumental derivation of one of the pieces in my song cycle Decir. It is a voluntarily-expressive piece that works, at the same time, as a tribute to the instrument itself.
Francisco del Pino
“Luz by Francisco del Pino presents a wholly contrasting attitude. Rather than setting the text of the [Ave Maris Stella] hymn as is, the composer used the text as a starting point for a new, original text in Spanish. To attenuate the religious meaning of the text, he extracted the words of different translations of Ave maris stella (mainly from Lope de Vega’s) and combined them with the lyrics of a popular waltz, Desde el alma, then re-arranging the whole set in alphabetical order. In this way, words are musically magnified in their symbolic potential by repeating descending melodic gestures—thus counterbalancing the A-Z “ascending” order of the text—while the harmony progressively modulates down as the piece unfolds. The result is almost a musical mantra, which becomes evident in the central section when a solo male voice stands out of choir. By mimicking musically the obsessive patterns of a rosary, the composer sought to capture a sense inherent to any religious practice in general: a focus on self-knowledge and introspectiveness as a path to spiritual development.”
Da Vinci Publishing
Atrapa el pez dorado is the title of the Spanish edition of Catching the big fish, David Lynch’s book on meditation and creativity.
Lynch says that ideas are like fish. Small fish swim on the surface, so it is not difficult to catch them. But to catch a big, golden fish, it is necessary to enter deeper waters: one way to do this would be the sustained practice of meditation.
The idea for this piece appeared to me almost without searching for it—one morning, when I woke up, it was there: I just needed to write it down. I am not a meditation practitioner, but I thought that, perhaps unintentionally, I had been lucky enough to catch un pez dorado, to catch a big fish.
Or maybe the music is not the fish, but the fishing boat.
Francisco del Pino
While composing this piece, the fact that its first performance was to take place near the resting place of the Roman philosopher Boethius made me think of his teatrise De Institutione Musica. In short, De Musica… describes three levels or branches of music: of these three, musica humana is the music of the human spirit—an orderly relationship which controls the union of the body and the soul and their parts. It is through musica humana that the more perceptible musica instrumentalis (the actual sounds made by the instruments) can be created, for which musica mundana (the “perfect” numerical relations of the Cosmos), would provide a model and an inspiration. Thus musica humana merges the physicality and the soul—the irrational and the rational, the corporeal and the abstract—in a harmonious whole.
This piece draws freely on these concepts, although without any programmatic intention. It does so by elaborating a tight harmonic structure through a strong focus on energy and rhythm, but also through a rather mathematical approach to the musical form: a metric skeleton based on a fixed sequence of numbers and proportions serves as the primary layer from which the whole organization of the musical material is derived.
Francisco del Pino
Two basic materials are superimposed in this work: the first one is a free canon in which the cello acts as a sort of shadow or rarified echo of the violin, and derives from a previous series of solo string pieces on the idea of tears (Una furtiva lágrima, for viola, 2013; Lágrimas, for cello, 2014; and Jardín de lágrimas, for violin, 2014). The second material, introduced by the piano, is a filtered version of Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28 N° 15, popularly known as “Rain drops”. The title quotes the last words of the ‘replicant’ Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: “[…] All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain […]”.
Francisco del Pino
Rondeau - Double is a hocket-driven, palimpsest-like piece based on Guillaume de Machaut’s rondeau Ma fin est mon commencement. The eight sections in which it is divided correspond to the eight parts that structure Machaut’s piece. Each section is the result of a different process of filtering by which some of the notes from Ma fin… are removed while others remain intact, thus allowing the emergence of melodic and harmonic patterns that remain virtually hidden within the original. The title refers both to the classical double as a variation form, and to the fact that each performer acts as a shadow-self for the other.
Francisco del Pino
The main idea of this piece is to develop a single, ever-varying melodic line by means of a ping-pong alternation between two independent layers, the first of which is a loop whose tonal content is reinterpreted by constant harmonic shifts in the second line. The basic material is a reworking of elements coming from Cantagrimura (2011), for four female voices.
Francisco del Pino
The departure point for this piece is an anonymous folk melody included in the book El Folklore Musical Argentino by the musicologist Isabel Aretz. It also draws upon a summa of materials that come from a previous cycle of solo string works, comprising: Una furtiva lágrima, for viola; Lágrimas, for cello; and Jardín de lágrimas, for violin. At the beginning of the piece, diverse fragments of musical material (each one associated to a different character and tempo) are scattered upon a non-measured temporal field. As the work progresses, each material is developed individually through a somewhat episodic approach to the form, until reaching a point where everything that was previously heard is intermingled in a chaotic manner—as fragments of memories in dreams.
Francisco del Pino
The word copla in Spanish refers mainly to a type of versification that is frequently found in Spanish and Latin American popular songs. Coming from the Latin copula, it might also mean “couple”: a set of two persons or things that are linked together or that have some resemblance. In this piece, voice and piano are not treated as melody and accompaniment but rather merge in one single polyphonic web. In writing this work I tried to achieve a balance between a complex rhythmic and polyphonic structure, and an expression closer to the mood of early vernacular songs. The lyrics combine fragments of two different poems from Trilce, by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo.
Francisco del Pino
In this short piece, the instrumental writing is constrained to the extent of using the piano only in a monophonic/linear manner. The pitch material is entirely derived from the first seven notes of the piano part of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which can be heard as a direct quotation towards the end of the piece.
Francisco del Pino
Aura belongs to a series of works exploring rhythm as a departure point for the structuration of an entire piece. A metric skeleton based on a numeric sequence of numbers and proportions serves as the primary layer from which the whole organization of the musical material (in terms of pitch, form, density of events, etc.) is derived. Beyond that, the piece describes an expressive curve which is treated in an almost romantic sense, thus presenting a tension between the rational and the emotional forces of the composition. The title refers to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” of a work of art, and also suggests an idea of the piece being a sort of multilayered map of the thoughts and feelings of a person.
Francisco del Pino
The title of this piece comes from the seventh chapter of the novel Rayuela by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar: “[…] And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water”. The idea of reflection suggested by the title plays an essential structural role in organizing several aspects at the macro and micro-levels of the musical form. Several passages of the work are based on the first seven notes of the piano part of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.
Francisco del Pino
Jardín de lágrimas—“Garden of tears”—is the third of a cycle of solo string works comprising Lágrimas, for solo cello and Una furtiva lágrima, for viola. It is conceived as a highly virtuosic étude in which several layers of melodic material are developed by means of an extensive use of hidden polyphony. Both the rhythmic structure and the global form are based on a fixed sequence of numbers and proportions, which eventually proliferates affecting all levels of the construction. Beyond that, the overall expressive curve is treated in an almost romantic sense, and there exists in the piece a certain “narration” that the listener is invited to discover. The title refers to the constructive aspect as well as to the emotional contents of the work: development, blossoming and proliferation on the one hand; anguish, melancholy on the other.
Jardín de lágrimas was awarded the 2nd Prize at the First Jean Sibelius Composition Competition, Finland, 2015. Kaija Saariaho was chairperson of the Jury.
Francisco del Pino
This work is conceived as an étude in two movements: the first one, Lágrima blanca (“White tear”), is markedly virtuoso and makes extensive use of natural harmonics (including high, distant harmonics); the second, Lágrima roja (“Red tear”), elaborates an oblique polyphony which draws heavily on the works for solo strings by J. S. Bach, while including fragmentary remembrances from the previous movement.
Lágrimas forms part of a series of solo string works comprising Una furtiva lágrima (2013) for viola, and Jardín de lágrimas (2014), for violin. It was awarded the 1st Prize at the 2014 Sorodha Composition Competition organized by the Société Royale d'Harmonie d'Anvers, Belgium.
Francisco del Pino
Una furtiva lágrima is conceived as an étude on hidden polyphony, partially inspired by the works for solo strings by J. S. Bach. It also draws on an extensive exploration of natural harmonics. The piece forms part of a series of solo string works comprising Lágrimas (2014) for cello, and Jardín de lágrimas (2014), for violin.
Una furtiva lágrima won unanimously the 1st Prize at the “Viola’s 2014” Composition Contest, organized by the Association Franco-Européenne de l’Alto. Its first performance was given by Grégoire Simon at the CRR de Paris, France on 5 April 2014.
Francisco del Pino
This short piece takes the form of a nocturne for orchestra, structured as a succession of brief episodes or scenes with a strong influence of film editing. Although with no programmatic intentions, the work portrays a watchful state of preparation and waiting during the passage from night to day.
Francisco del Pino
The main idea of this work is to explore the capabilities of the instrument to simulate a complex texture of virtual polyphony, by means of a proliferation of different layers of musical material. The form was conceived by continuously varying the way in which these materials are combined, often superimposing or juxtaposing layers where each one carries its own tempo, rhythmic characteristics, dynamic contour, harmony and registral placement. This textural density, however, is not synonym of bravura: the piece is written in a somewhat non-idiomatic way, avoiding the traditional virtuoso marimba passages in favor of quiet harmonies in pianissimo and long, sustained, resonance-type rolled sounds, which is one of the main performance manners of the work. The result is a sort of “calm complexity”, tensely maintained, that leads to a liberated, more violent conclusion.
…de sólo estar was nominated “Best piece for marimba solo” in the International Composition Competition within the Frameworks of the Fifth International Competition for Performers on Wind and Percussion Instruments, Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory.
Francisco del Pino
This work is constituted by three pieces that, in turn, show three different readings of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Capricorn” from the cycle Tierkreis. Each piece is the result of a process of filtering of the original tune by which, along successive iterations, some notes are suppressed while others remain intact, thus allowing the emergence of new melodies and harmonies that remain virtually hidden in the original. Although there are neither new notes nor rhythmic alterations, there does exist at various levels an elaboration of the parameters that Stockhausen left open in the original piece: tempo changes as a form-articulation device, varying dynamics and timbres, etc. In the second piece, the registral placement of each note is also altered. Besides the reference to Stockhausen’s work, Tres versiones de Capricornio pays homage to the mind and the spirit of the Argentine composer Gerardo Gandini.
Francisco del Pino
This short piece overlaps a filtered version of “Capricorn”, the last of the twelve melodies in Stockhausen’s Tierkreis, with the main motive of Debussy’s prelude Des pas sur la neige. The result is the musical metaphor of an imaginary meeting.
The Stockhausen layer of this work is quoted in Tres versiones de Capricornio (2013).
Francisco del Pino
This piece is based on the second movement of the Sonata for two clarinets by Francis Poulenc. The name—meaning “strand” or “filament”, as in a plant or a fruit—refers to its structure derived from sparse fragments of a single melodic material, and also to its quiet, almost fragile character.
Francisco del Pino
The starting point for this piece was the desire to put into sound some ideas included in the book El pensamiento indígena y popular en América (“Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America”), by the Argentinian philosopher and anthropologist Rodolfo Kusch. This book elaborates the anthropological and philosophical category of estar as a key to understand the indigenous thinking—a concept that would imply “a clear preference for circumstance” and constitute the manifestation of a way of seeing things and a conception of the world opposed to the causal, progress-oriented thinking that defines the mentality of the European bourgeoisie. From this premise I conceived the idea of a strongly repetitive music that, instead of moving forward or developing from basic materials or motives, simply está: a static, fundamentally expositive music that revolves around itself, and that keeps moving around a few elements that are repeated without development or are subject only to minimal variations. The idea of statism and of a “preference for circumstance” is also present in the notation: the work gets rid of a traditional full score, in order to assign to each performer a completely autonomous part and a few instructions for coordinating each part with the others. Thus the performers also están estando, in a spirit closer to a crossing of paths than to the idea of a sum of parts.
Francisco del Pino
Serenata can be described from two standpoints. One is the intertextual reference to classical forms: the piece is in seven sections including, besides the introduction and the coda, a canon, a theme with two sets of variations, a fugue, and an impromptu-like piano solo, and draws on quotations from Schoenberg, Berio and Beethoven that are presented with varying degrees of emphasis and recognizability. The second is the idea of nocturnal music as a kind of “program” for the musical narration: a calm, melancholic evening song that is performed for the moon. Both aspects converge in the title: the word Serenata is both a reference to a genre and a summary description of the nocturnal mood of the piece.
Francisco del Pino
This work is conceived as a sequence of various kinds of interplay between the two performers, who take turns to play on different parts of the piano in a continuous variation and recombination of textures and modes of action. Pitch-wise, the piece is a slow unfolding of an essentially static harmony, where the different materials are conceived as means by which to explore the intimate and sensitive aspects of the contact with the instrument. The character—generally static but, internally, in subtle but constant motion—suggests possible connections with the haiku by the Argentinean writer Juan José Saer from which the title was taken: [translation by the composer]
Immobile plants
before the storm.
A single leaf trembles.
Francisco del Pino
In mid-2008 the Argentine pianist Malena Levin asked me to write her a piece for a concert devoted entirely to nocturnal music. The fact that my composition was to be listened along with Chopin and Scriabin had great influence on its writing process, and the remembrance of the piano works by such composers pervaded the whole mood of the piece, which freely takes the form of a nocturne. Also taken from Chopin’s nocturnes is a concern with the sensuous aspect of playing the piano, and therefore the harmonic and melodic materials of the piece are conceived as the mediating means for an intimate contact with the instrument itself. On two occasions, at the beginning and near the end, references to the second part of the famous tango Malena can be heard, as a gesture of gratitude and friendship to its dedicatee.
Francisco del Pino
Notas de programa (ESP)
La astilla de hueso es una ópera de cámara sobre la equivocidad del lenguaje, la multiplicidad temporal y la locura del amor. Está inspirada en el Taller de reparación de estatuas de Buenos Aires y en las historias que allí se condensan si se lo ve desde una mirada geológica: diferentes estratos temporales que de pronto se activan y se ponen a cantar, actuar y bailar.
Sinopsis:
Entre los objetos de una excavación realizada en el Taller de reparación de estatuas de Buenos Aires un Arqueólogo encuentra una estatuilla vudú con una astilla de hueso clavada en el corazón. Al pincharse, cae un rayo que revive a Manuelita Rosas y a Diana Cazadora. Una salida de su retrato al óleo, otra de la estatua de mármol, conversan sobre el tiempo y el amor: temas que, sea como diosa o como piedra, Diana desconoce, son sustanciales a Manuelita en cuanto ha venido a continuar una historia de amor con quien talló el muñeco vudú. Cada vez que el Arqueólogo se pincha con la astilla de hueso cae fulminado y, en su desmayo, es habitado por la voz del Vudú. Recién en el último acto se lo ve convertido en Vudú, ocasión en la que baila un vals con Manuelita. Un Restaurador de esculturas que está perdidamente enamorado de la estatua de Diana ve que el Arqueólogo desvaría y se obsesiona con el muñeco, en particular, con la astilla de hueso que ya no está en el muñeco. Entre el desvarío y el intento de volver a poner los tiempos en orden, el Arqueólogo intenta recuperar el huesito que Manuelita ha encontrado tirado en el suelo y utilizado para hacerse un peinado. Pero, a punto de hacer que Manuelita vuelva a la pintura y recuperar la astilla de hueso, las posiciones se invierten y es el Arqueólogo el que queda dentro del cuadro. Mientras tanto, Diana no pudo evitar tirarle una flecha al Restaurador y convertirlo en ciervo.
The Sea es la transposición musical del poema El mar, traducido al inglés por Rebekah Smith. Si el poema incorpora el movimiento de olas y mareas en su diseño visual (los versos van y vienen en el espacio de la página como una marea), la música trabaja con una voz en vivo y retornos de voces pregrabadas que van y vienen sobre la voz principal junto a vocalizaciones que están como en vías de convertirse en palabras, adoptan la temporalidad del mar, el mar, que siempre está empezando. No se trata tanto de un poema o pieza vocal sobre el mar sino más bien en el mar.
Victoria Cóccaro
Cave/Cueva es un poema escrito a dos lenguas, español e inglés. A medida que avanza, la traducción se distorsiona o enloquece en ecos deformados. El sentido se borronea y eso que en un principio iba por el mismo camino luego empieza a abrirse en caminos diferentes. La composición musical también trabaja con dos series de voces que se reflejan y desvían, que se abren en ecos y efectos cascada.
Victoria Cóccaro
Decir pone en escena un largo poema en dos partes que se ramifica en tres presencias: la lectura, la música y la imagen. Durante la obra, la escritura, a la vez que pone en tensión sus materialidades (sonido, imagen y sentido), funciona: diseña nuevas relaciones entre elementos diversos que encuentran allí un cosmos en común. Lo que produce el ensamble opera no tanto como 'musicalización' del texto sino más bien como focalización y potencialización. La imagen, a su vez, se desdobla en otras tantas formas de aparición, explora la conexión o desconexión entre el ensamble y la escritora—dos caras de una misma voz que dramatizan la pregunta por cómo decir—y es caja de resonancia de la pregunta por el territorio: ¿cómo un cuerpo está presente?, ¿cómo una voz se hace un lugar?
Victoria Cóccaro & Francisco del Pino
El alma es una derivación instrumental de una de las canciones de Decir, obra poético-musical que compuse junto a Victoria Cóccaro en 2019 por encargo del TACEC (Teatro Argentino de La Plata, Centro de Experimentación y Creación). Se trata de una pieza voluntariamente expresiva que funciona, a la vez, como un homenaje al instrumento mismo.
Francisco del Pino
El cineasta David Lynch dice que las ideas son como peces.
Los peces pequeños nadan en la superficie, por lo que no es difícil pescarlos. Pero para pescar un gran pez dorado es preciso adentrarse en aguas más profundas: un camino para ello sería la práctica sostenida de la meditación.
La idea de esta pieza apareció casi completa sin buscarla—una mañana, al despertar, estaba allí. Sólo hacía falta escribirla. No practico meditación, pero ese día pensé que, acaso sin querer, había tenido la suerte de pescar un pez dorado.
O, tal vez, la pieza no sea el pez, sino el vehículo con el cual salir de pesca.
Francisco del Pino
En esta obra se superponen dos materiales básicos: el primero es un canon libre en el que el violonchelo actúa como una suerte de sombra o eco enrarecido del violín, y proviene de una serie anterior de piezas para instrumentos de cuerda sola sobre la idea de las lágrimas (Una furtiva lágrima, para viola; Lágrimas, para violonchelo; y Jardín de lágrimas, para violín). El segundo material, a cargo del piano, es una versión filtrada del Preludio Op. 28 N° 15 de Chopin, conocido como “Gotas de lluvia”. El título es una cita del monólogo previo a la muerte del ‘replicante’ Roy Batty en el film Blade Runner, de Ridley Scott: “[…] All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain […]”. (“Todos esos momentos se perderán, con el tiempo, como lágrimas en la lluvia”)
Francisco del Pino
Rondeau - Double es un palimpsesto del rondó Ma fin est mon commencement de Guillaume de Machaut. La forma se articula en ocho secciones, correspondientes a las ocho estrofas que estructuran la pieza original. Cada sección resulta de un distinto proceso de “filtrado”, a través del cual algunas notas de Ma fin… son borradas mientras que otras se mantienen intactas: estas últimas permanecen generalmente en su ubicación temporal original, pero su duración está casi siempre alterada, dando lugar a la aparición de configuraciones melódico-rítmicas y armónicas potencialmente ocultas en la obra de Machaut. El término double alude tanto a una forma de variación musical, como al hecho de que cada intérprete funciona, en el dúo, como un “doble” del otro.
Francisco del Pino
Esta pieza se despliega como una única linea melódica en permanente variación, formada de manera oblicua por la alternancia entre las notas de dos capas melódicas independientes; la primera de estas capas constituye un loop cuyo contenido tonal es continuamente reinterpretado por el material de la segunda. El material armónico básico proviene de mi pieza Cantagrimura (2011), para cuatro voces femeninas.
Francisco del Pino
Estas dos miniaturas toman como punto de partida una pieza perteneciente a los Diarios para piano de Gerardo Gandini. La primera invierte las relaciones tonales del tema original, convirtiendo a lo que era melodía en acordes y, a lo que era acompañamiento, en fragmentos melódicos; en la segunda, el tema—que representa al protagonista de la obra teatral “Muerte de un viajante”—se expone en forma textual para ser progresivamente disuelto y envuelto en una nube schoenberguiana.
Francisco del Pino
El punto de partida de esta pieza es una vidala anónima incluida en el libro El Folklore Musical Argentino de la musicóloga Isabel Aretz, así como también una suma de materiales provenientes de un ciclo anterior de piezas para instrumentos de cuerda sola que incluye: Una furtiva lágrima, para viola; Lágrimas, para violonchelo; y Jardín de lágrimas, para violín. Al comienzo de la obra aparecen salpicados sobre un campo temporal no-medido diversos materiales, cada uno con un perfil melódico/rítmico y un tempo diferentes. A medida que la pieza progresa cada material es puesto en foco y desarrollado individualmente, hasta alcanzar un punto en donde una multitud de elementos escuchados previamente se entremezclan de manera caótica, como fragmentos de recuerdos en un sueño.
Francisco del Pino
“Copla: (Del lat. copula, unión, enlace). 1. Grupo de versos que responden a una estructura métrica y rítmica fijas, que alterna versos cortos con otros largos y que por lo común sirve de letra en las canciones populares. / 2. Pareja. Conjunto de dos personas o cosas que tienen alguna semejanza.”
Voz y piano no son, en esta pieza, melodía y acompañamiento: no hay ‘figura’ (porque no hay ‘fondo’) y, aunque sí haya un texto, ambos instrumentos se funden en un único entramado polifónico. La totalidad de las estructuras métrica, rítmica y armónica derivan de la manipulación de una secuencia fija de números y proporciones, que prolifera a partir de múltiples técnicas canónicas y de prolación. La forma global se articula a partir de la sucesión de cuatro secciones de duración decreciente.
Francisco del Pino
El nombre de esta pieza proviene del capítulo siete de la novela Rayuela, de Julio Cortázar: “[…] Y hay una sola saliva y un solo sabor a fruta madura, y yo te siento temblar contra mí como una luna en el agua”. La idea de reflejo, implicada en el título, cumple un rol clave en la estructura de la obra como factor de organización en los niveles macro y micro de la forma. Diversos pasajes están basados en las primeras siete notas de la parte de piano de Pierrot Lunaire de Arnold Schoenberg.
Francisco del Pino
Esta obra se compone de tres piezas que exponen distintas lecturas de “Capricornio”, melodía perteneciente al ciclo Tierkreis de Karlheinz Stockhausen. Cada pieza es el resultado de un proceso de 'filtrado' de la melodía original, donde -a lo largo de sucesivas repeticiones- algunos sonidos se suprimen mientras que otros permanecen intactos. Estos últimos conservan su lugar de ataque pero no necesariamente su duración, dando lugar a la aparición de configuraciones melódico-armónicas no previstas (u ocultas) en la versión original. Si bien no hay en toda la obra sonidos nuevos ni materiales añadidos, existe a varios niveles una elaboración de aquellos parámetros 'no anotados' en la melodía original: cambios de tempo como medio de articulación formal, fluctuaciones dinámicas, transformaciones tímbricas, etc. En la pieza II también se ve alterada la ubicación relativa de cada sonido en el registro. Más allá de la referencia a Stockhausen, la estructura de Tres versiones de Capricornio rinde homenaje a las ideas y al espíritu del compositor Gerardo Gandini.
Francisco del Pino
Esta pieza surge de la inquietud por trasladar al plano sonoro algunas ideas incluidas en el libro El pensamiento indígena y popular en América, del filósofo argentino Rodolfo Kusch. Allí se plantea la existencia de “un pensamiento latinoamericano que gira en torno al concepto del estar”, concepto que implicaría “una franca preferencia por la circunstancia” y que constituye la manifestación de un “estilo de ver las cosas” y una “concepción del mundo” opuestos al pensamiento causal y obsesionado por el quehacer y el progreso que define al hombre creado por la burguesía europea. A partir de esta premisa concebí la idea de una música fuertemente repetitiva que, en lugar de avanzar o progresar a partir de materiales básicos o motivos generadores, simplemente está: una música estática y fundamentalmente expositiva, que permanece girando sobre sí misma y moviéndose alrededor de unos pocos elementos que se repiten sin desarrollo o que son sometidos sólo a mínimas variaciones. La idea de estatismo y de preferencia por la circunstancia está presente también en el plano de la notación: la obra prescinde de una partitura general tradicional, para asignar a cada ejecutante una parte individual con sentido completo por sí misma y unas pocas instrucciones para ensamblar su parte con las otras. Así las cosas, los ejecutantes también están estando, en un espíritu que remite más a un encuentro de caminos que a la idea de una suma de partes.
Francisco del Pino
Esta obra se describe a partir de dos ejes. El primero es la presencia intertextual de modelos compositivos proveniente de la tradición: la forma se organiza en siete secciones que incluyen, además de una breve introducción y una coda, un canon, un tema con dos series de variaciones, una fuga y un solo de piano a la manera de un impromptu, e incorpora entre sus materiales citas de Schoenberg, Berio y Beethoven que son elaboradas con distintos grados de énfasis y reconocibilidad. El segundo eje hace a lo programático, y consiste en la idea de ‘música nocturna’ como el hilo conductor del relato musical: un canto nocturno y melancólico, que tiene a la luna como principal destinataria. Ambos aspectos confluyen en el título: la palabra Serenata es, a la vez, la cita de un género y un resumen descriptivo del carácter de la pieza.
Francisco del Pino
Esta pieza está concebida a partir de la sucesión de diversos modos de interacción entre sus ejecutantes. La forma, de un solo aliento, se organiza como un juego de alternancia, combinación y variación de las distintas texturas y modos de acción. La evolución del campo armónico es esencial en el discurso, siendo el trabajo con las alturas un medio para la exploración del aspecto íntimo y sensible del contacto con el instrumento. El carácter de la obra, globalmente estático e, internamente, en tenue pero continuo movimiento, sugiere posibles conexiones con el haiku de Juan José Saer del cual fue tomado su nombre:
Plantas inmóviles
antes de la tormenta.
Una sola hoja tiembla.
Francisco del Pino
Luna suspira fue escrita especialmente para un encuentro en donde se escucharían obras de diversos períodos y estilos dedicadas, en su totalidad, a la evocación de la noche. Tal premisa, y la proximidad en el marco de un mismo concierto con la música de autores como Scriabin o Chopin, ejercieron una influencia inevitable en el clima general de la obra, que toma libremente la forma y el carácter de un nocturno. En dos oportunidades pueden escucharse, de manera velada, sendas citas de la segunda parte del tango Malena, de Lucio Demare y Homero Manzi, correspondientes a los versos “tu canción tiene el frío del último encuentro/ tu canción se hace amarga en la sal del recuerdo”.
Francisco del Pino
Short bio (ENG)
[word count: 78 words]
Francisco del Pino is a Buenos Aires-born, Princeton NJ-based composer and guitarist. His music, which draws influence from both classical and vernacular traditions, revolves around process and pattern and is usually characterized by an extensive use of counterpoint. His debut album Decir, a song cycle on texts by Argentinian poet Victoria Cóccaro described as “stunning” (Bandcamp Daily), was released on New Amsterdam Records in 2021. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University.
Bio breve (ESP)
[90 palabras]
Francisco del Pino es un compositor y guitarrista nacido en Buenos Aires, Argentina y radicado en Princeton, Nueva Jersey, donde actualmente es candidato a Doctor en Composición Musical por la Universidad de Princeton. Sus obras, basadas usualmente en patterns y procesos formales, reúnen influencias tanto de la tradición clásica como de la música popular y se caracterizan por un amplio uso de técnicas contrapuntísticas. Decir, un ciclo de canciones sobre textos de Victoria Cóccaro y su álbum debut como guitarrista y compositor, fue editado por New Amsterdam Records en 2021.