Hi everyone! I'm so excited to be the featured composer at Dallas this year! It's a great opportunity to get to meet and work with people who believe as much as I do in new music and in sharing it with the public.
I'm writing two pieces for the festival, one each for co-directors Jordan and Ryan. I'll be sharing the instrumentation of the rest of their programs: one of the pieces goes with Le Marteau (wow, I'd be excited even just to get to hear this live!), and therefore I am writing for mezzo, guitar, flute, viola, and three percussionists... the other one is for a larger ensemble, namely the 'orchestra' of Kurt Weil's violin concerto (ditto about hearing this).
So, two pretty different pieces. The chamber wind ensemble (the piece for Ryan) is a 'festive fugue'. Upbeat, fun, a little flashy... I'll be done with it very soon. The other one is one of those things... I have thinking about it for months, and each step is a major effort.
I was just working on it, and made a big step. Feeling a little drained for the day, I decided to start my posts on this blog. First time I do something like this (talk, let alone write, much less blog, about a piece I'm writing), but it adds to the excitement.
So for today I'll leave you guys with the text of the piece. It's by my brother, who has written some wonderful texts in the past (one of them I already set to music). I'll tell you how I (we) got to this text in a future entry. But here it goes:
Aquel que al verme
supuso mi paso muy firme
y al irme
me auguró ventura,
no supo que yo a esas alturas
tornaba y no iba del alba al ocaso
(Nicolás García De Castro, Colombia, 2000)
It's dense in meaning (each word meaning several different things) so it's been hard to translate. This is my current version:
He who in seeing me
took my step for quite firm,
and as I left
bid me good fortune,
did not know, by that point,
that I turned, did not go, from dawn to sunset.
No comments:
Post a Comment