anatomy of a military march

Formation: 3 percussion players
Creation: may-september 2008
Premiere: 30th april 2009. Albacete (Spain). NEOPERCUSIÓN
Duration: 18 min.

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Anatomy of a military march belongs to a group of pieces whose main idea is the construction of a musical discourse from the superposition of neutral musical objects or quotidian sounds. In the present piece, the departure point is a military march, which is “read” in slow motion from the beginning to the end through a moving window that repeats small fragments of the original material following the time movement, a kind of “walking loop”. This fragments are overlapped over themselves in a texture of several layers that swings between the recognizebility of the original material and the new discourse that emerges from its own saturation. It would be like observing microscopically an object while we run our sight through all its surface.

With clear influences from the realm of visual arts -the “accumulations” of Arman or the iconography of Jasper Johns- this saturation through magnification -of the object, of its temporality- tries to penetrate in its immediate functionality and the principles it represents. The “heroical” and patriotic energy of the military is here imposed over itself, overlapped, saturated… aesthetically neutralized.