Roberto Sierra
Professor and Chair, Composition
Department of Music
Cornell University
(Photo: SymphonyCast)
(Photo: SymphonyCast)
On March 30, 2015 AfriClassical posted:
We invited Prof. Sierra to comment on his composition Cantares. He writes:
Hi Bill, thanks for this!!
Here is what I wrote about the piece, Please feel free to extract whatever is useful for the blog:
When
I was asked to write this work my initial impulse was to compose music
that would evoke lost voices in time. I searched for texts that dated
back in history and memory, and the inspiration for the first movement
was drawn from a XVII century manuscript book of prayers that contains
the hymn Hanacpachap cussicuinin written in Quechua, and published in
1631 in Cuzco, Peru. This early syncretic attempt is fascinating and
triggered in my mind many questions about how this music may have
unfolded. At the end I decided not to reconstruct the sound or the way
the hymn would have been played, but rather create my own modern
reflection on a beautiful text and four voice polyphony written around
400 years ago. The text combines both the ideas and concepts coming
from the Quechua culture and the christian concept of the mother of God.
Canto
Lucumà traces its ancestry to Afro Cuban ritual music of West African
origins. The text consists of incantations that have been
phonetically transcribed into Spanish. The meaning of the words is
sometimes obscure, but what really interested me was how they sounded
and their fascinating rhythmic quality. The floating nature of music and
the use of extended vocal techniques of sibilant noise and percussive
sounds enhance the mystery already embedded in the original texts.
The
orchestral interlude is a meditation on the two previous movements and
brings together the intervalic structure that has dominated both the
melodic and harmonic content of the work. An interval sequence of a
minor third and a second is the seed that generates the musical fabric.
This intervallic sequence also determines the central note for each
movement. The idea of 3 and 2 also permeates the rhythmic cells used
throughout the work.
In Suerte lamentosa, a
1528 poem is superimposed to another XVI century text by the Spaniard
Bernal Diaz del Castillo; the telling of tragic events that occurred
during the conquest of the Aztec Empire. These narratives offer two
perspectives: one from the viewpoint of the invader and another from
those fighting the invasion.
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