Instrumentation: Guitar / Electric Guitar and Bb Clarinet / Bass Bb Clarinet
Duration: a.c. 10:15 minutes
Year of composition: 2015
Premiere: November 19, 2015. Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (Seville). TRANSHUMANCES Cycle
OCNOS project:
Pedro Rojas Ogáyar (Guitars)
Gustavo A. Domínguez Ojalvo (Clarinets)
Commission: Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art, the Permanent Seminar of Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts of the University of Seville and the Department of Musicology of the Complutense University of Madrid
Observations: Dedicated to OCNOS Project
Program notes:
This piece was commissioned by the OCNOS Project for a concert entitled “Espadaña” within the interdisciplinary meetings that have taken place in Seville and Madrid from November to December 2015, with the title “TRASHUMANCIAS”.
Each composer was commissioned with a piece inspired by or that had as a reference a song by one of the sides of the Spanish Civil War. Specifically, “Memories of the Blood” is based on a Falangist romantic-epic song that at the same time comes from a German song from the early 19th century by Ludwig Uhland, a respected German philologist whose poems were frequently set to music by himself. Schubert.
Blood is synonymous with life but also with death and destruction. This work is a personal reflection of the composer towards the devastating consequences of a war (no matter what color or flag it represents), where the inner emptiness predominates in a soundscape in which silence and resonances are part of the sound framework.
This work was completed on the same day as the tragic events of the attacks in Paris, with which it has, unfortunately, an overwhelming validity, it serves as a small tribute to all the victims of this attack and to all those that occur around the world.
[… score made of silences, subtle resonances and choppy dialogues. Concise work and dramaturgy measure…]
Ismael G. Cabral (El Correo de Andalucía, 20-XI-2015)