Gerardo Lopez, flute solo.
Recorded at the University of Redlands, 27JUN19.

Jackson Pollock’s early surrealist work, Guardians of the Secret (1943), is displayed in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and serves as the inspiration behind Enigmatic Improvisation for solo flute and electronics, op. 16  (2019).  The painting exudes the heavy, mystical air of an ancient, shamanistic scene far removed from common, everyday experience, and is cast with a sense of foreboding that verges on the apocalyptic.  The shadowy background figures, armored sentinels standing guard in their protective display of the secret image, appear surreal and menacing in their wild depiction.  A lone coyote, the spirit animal of dark magic and trickery in some Native American cultures, rests beneath the enigmatic relic with a watchful eye. 

Given these elements, I crafted the fixed media background with a similarly dark and weighty intensity, to conjure an ominous, and sometimes violent, clamorous landscape that defies simple explanation.  Disembodied whispers, animal cries, crashes, and subsonic eruptions depict the nocturnal absence of reason in the first movement, entitled Guardians.  This gives way to the transparent, diaphanous textures found in the meditative Mythos, portraying the radiant luminosity of the mysterious, secret artefact in a loosely unfolding prolation canon.  The final movement, Emergence, proceeds with a dark grandeur.  It arises from a sense of transcendent epiphany, one that suggests for the observer an unexpected awareness and wonder for the titular secret at the heart of this work. 
-ARL, 24MAY19.

Duration - Approximately 13 minutes

Enigmatic Improvisation was selected as a Finalist for the Red Jasper Award for Music Composition in February 2022.

This work was also chosen to be featured at the 2020 Turn Up Multimedia Festival at the Fred Fox School of Music at the University of AZ, Tucson.

Enigmatic Improvisation for flute & electronics, op. 16 (2019) -- Original version

Harnessing the chugging, energetic sounds of contemporary postmodernism as a starting point, Andres R. Luz develops his artistic idiom from the legacy of music history stretching back to medieval and Renaissance stylistic practices, up to those of the present-day.  
Andres Luz has studied with Jeffrey Miller at California State University, East Bay (B.A. Music, magna cum laude, 2013) and taken private studies in electroacoustic music with Ian Dicke, as well as master classes with Hannah Lash, P.Q. Phan, Zae Munn, and Paul Salerni.  Andres Luz completed the Master of Music Composition at the University of Redlands in 2016.

In 2022, Andres Luz completed the Doctorate in Musical Arts in Composition at the University of Georgia (UGA), Athens, studying with Peter Van Zandt Lane, Adrian Childs, and Emily Koh.  Andres Luz also served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Theory and Electronic Music Composition at the University of Redlands and as the assistant of the Dancz Center of New Music at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music at UGA.

His music has been played internationally and notably by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Wind Symphony of the College-Conservatory at the University of Cincinnati.  Among his electroacoustic pieces, Andres Luz’s 2017 fixed media work, Premotions, Landscape at Twilight is featured on MUSLAB-Cero Records’ PLANETA COMPEJO album from Fall 2023.  Among the works for large ensemble, Dr. Luz’s dissertation composition, Bulosan: On American Democracy for Narrator, Wind Symphony, and Fixed Media (2021, rev. 2023), won the 2023 American Prize in Composition, College/University-Level Wind Ensemble Division and Runner-up among American Prize compositions featuring Social Justice content.  This work is featured in Ablaze Records’ first volume of the Wind Orchestra Masters series released in Summer 2024.  In the upcoming November/December 2024 issue of Fanfare Magazine, reviewer Ken Meltzer describes Bulosan as “an eloquent and moving work, one I recommend heartily.”  In another review by Colin Clarke, Bulosan is lauded as "expertly structured and emotionally powerful," while Natalie Szabo writes that the album documents a "masterful ensemble performance.  Five stars."

Andres Luz is a member of ASCAP, SEAMUS, Millennium Composers Initiative, and Society of Composers, Inc., and is published by Murphy Music Press and Post-Classical Music.

Enigmatic Improvisation for flute & electronics, op. 16 (2019) -- Original version

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