for voice, flute, and guitar, with a companion text by Holly Druckman. Performed at the Charlotte New Music Festival by Kayleigh Butcher, Molly Barth, and Dieter Hennings-Yeoman (Duo Damiana).

Secular Love--(m)orphia - for mezzo, flute and guitar

The Body’s Voice (2016) by Adrian Montufar
for flute and cello
Commissioned by the VIPA Festival for Nomos Group
Premiered July 16, 2016 in Valencia, Spain

Nomos Group
Javier Berbis, flute
Elena Solanes Lechiguero, cello

Program Note:
The title for this piece comes from one of Teju Cole’s photo captions on Instagram: “Walking is the body’s voice.” The Body’s Voice deals with the body as it expresses itself through movement. It uses the physical interaction between each performer and their instrument and plays with equivalent physical gestures between the two performers. The flute part’s movement is driven by breath and mostly internal to the performer. The cello’s movement is more like a choreography where sound is the evidence of motion.

Centering the bodies that are producing the sounds of a composition, both players and instruments, is a major focus of my music.

Recording Engineer: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Mixed by Sam Gillies

The Body's Voice - for flute and cello

for solo voice.

Premiered by Kayleigh Butcher on February 4, 2017 at Spectrum, NYC. 

I am thinking about touch: physically, but also emotionally and intellectually. Touching and being touched. The meaning and the force that touch carries. I am also working with a text. Not a lyric to be sung, but trying different ways of feeling, of touching and being touched by words, by a work of literature. Touch not as an abstraction but rather touch as feeling one’s way through the work of (in this case) making music.

This piece was written for Kayleigh Butcher.

Touch - for solo voice

for mezzo soprano and piano

Written for Kayleigh Butcher and Christopher Narloch as part of their "Schönberg Project", which presents Arnold Schönberg's Das Buch der hängenden Gärten--a 15-movement song cycle using texts by Stefan George--alongside 15 new one-minute pieces by U.S. composers.

I wrote this very short piece with a huge textual agenda behind it, and without a clear idea of how to transfer it to the music. To get closer to what I was getting at, here is a  bundle of thoughts that makes some sense in my head

I was struck by a sudden change in tone in one of the songs: 
“Whenever, resting blissfully in deep meadows […] do not think […] that the white sand outside the city is ready to sip our warm blood” (translated by Stanley Appelbaum).

In a dark year, a phrase used by Gérard Loiseaux to describe the method of sophisticated collaborating writers in Vichy France kept coming back to me: racolage feutré. According to Loiseaux, the most dangerous writers were those who argued in favor of Germany in a measured, refined tone. 

The word feutré means felted, and in a way the sound of the word reflects its meaning, at least in the beginning. The unvoiced F is as gentle a consonant as they come. But then it shifts: the T followed by the guttural R, on the accented second syllable, turns the felt harsh. 

Idyllic. Menacing. Refined. Dangerous. When people write about Schoenberg’s misogyny, they cite the influence of philosophers.

Feutré - after Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens

Flute and vocals improvisation project by Adrian Montufar. Recorded by Marie Abou Khaled on March 6, 2018 at the Goldsmiths Music Studios.

These improvisations are working versions of a text score cycle for improvising ensemble I am tentatively calling "Think of yourself as a dancer". Each piece in the cycle builds on the previous one. This is the second piece in the cycle.

A few months ago, I came back to improvisation after a long pause, and it felt amazing. I tried, for the first time, to incorporate the techniques I had used in vocal improvisation into my flute playing. This possibility might have seemed obvious, but, strangely, I had never tried it before.

Video: https://youtu.be/p2cYjJaQg9A

Vocal Flute Improvisation - Think of yourself as a dancer: TWO

Flute and vocals improvisation project by Adrian Montufar. Recorded by Marie Abou Khaled on March 6, 2018 at the Goldsmiths Music Studios.

These improvisations are working versions of a text score cycle for improvising ensemble I am tentatively calling "Think of yourself as a dancer". Each piece in the cycle builds on the previous one. This is the first piece in the cycle.

A few months ago, I came back to improvisation after a long pause, and it felt amazing. I tried, for the first time, to incorporate the techniques I had used in vocal improvisation into my flute playing. This possibility might have seemed obvious, but, strangely, I had never tried it before.

Vocal Flute Improvisation - Think of yourself as a dancer: ONE

“Affect me and know me better.”

Audio from a performance of Ray Gibson’s (https://soundcloud.com/rgibsonmusic) lovely text score INTERACT. Each instruction, like the one above, directs the performer to physically engage their instrument in a new way. The score echoes a ghazal, but one where the refrain has taken over most of each line. It is a text charged with intimate physicality, and approaching it felt poignant and even a bit ironic in this moment of generalized physical distancing.

I am executing the score's instructions on a sheet of parchment paper on top of a copper-cover coffee table. There are vocal sounds at the end. You can find the video here: https://youtu.be/o9S2NL6-AcA

You can see the score and find out more about Ray's music here: https://www.illuminatewomensmusic.co.uk/illuminate-blog/composer-ray-gibson-on-her-music-and-practice

Ray Gibson's INTERACT, performed by Adrián Montúfar

Composer, improviser, sound artist in training. Ecuadorian-New Yorker. I make music that centers the body in a few different ways. Latest: https://youtu.be/o9S2NL6-AcA
https://vimeo.com/337056006
adrianmontufar.com

I am pursuing "the accumulated forms of patience that guarantee, rather than merely decorate, our lives." (Teju Cole)

Adrian Montufar

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