relectures #3 – R. Schumann, 3 Fantasiestücke op. 73

Formation: violin (also posible cello or clarinet), piano and resonant book
Creation: march 2015
Premiere: 19th may 2015. Ensems Valencia. GUILLERMO PASTRANA (vcl.) MARIO PRISUELOS (pno.)
Duration: 9 min.

→ Complete score


Relectures #3

The present piece is the third piece of a series that tries to build a confrontation between musical pieces of the past and their contemporary relecture. The latter appears in form of a ruin of isolated fragments in which the ancient piece seems to resonate. Relectures #3 is based on the 3 Fantasiestücke op.73 (R. Schumann), whose original material is treated through several procedures of reduction, compression and selection, which are applied in a changing manner to constitutive elements such as rhythm, timing and pitch content.

The only presence of the original music is through a recording which the performers hear with headphones while playing, also attached to the book of the original score with a surface speaker, so that the original is sometimes heard with a very low volume through the resonance of the book. From here emerges a kind of “discourse of the absent”, where the relevance of the resultant material is pushed into a perceptual background, letting the real foreground of the aesthetical experience be constituted by other elements such as the memory of the unheard, the questioning of our hearing habits of past musics or the way in which every listener reconstructs for him or herself (“re-read”) the incompleteness of the original work.

→ “relectures” series