New Music Unlisted 6

Vocal works with ensemble

Torrente for violin and guitar
Daniel Alvarado Bonilla - 2021
(including J.S. Bach - Adagio from Sonate in C, BWV 1005)

Odradek Duo
Andria Chang - Violin
Julián Restrepo - Guitar

This piece was written in memory of my friend Samir Alejandro Yahuar (1984-2021).

Torrente

Bestiario pour guitare, piano et trio a cordes
Daniel Alvarado Bonilla (2019)

Commande de Radio France pour l'émission "Création Mondiale".
Score published by : Babel Scores 
https://www.babelscores.com/fr/DanielAlvaradoBonilla

-I. Enérgico
-II. Calmo, nocturno
-III. Fluído, alucinatorio
-IV. Calmo, misterioso
-V. Contínuo, como una toccata

Ensemble Almaviva
Pablo Márquez - guitar
Ezequiel Spucches - piano
Ana Millet - Violon
Lucía Peralta - Alto
Louis Rodde - Violoncelle

Enregistrement fait à la Seine Musicale (Boulogne Billancourt) le 12 septembre 2020.

Bestiario

Low-fi delirium for alto flute, bass clarinet, vibraphone and electronics
Daniel Alvarado Bonilla - 2022
Œuvre commandée par l'Ensemble Sillages et l'Ensemble der/gelbe/klang, avec le soutien du Ministère de la Culture - DRAC Bretagne. 

Julie Brunet-Jailly - alto flute
Hugo Clédat - bass clarinet
Jean-Baptiste Bonnard - vibraphone

Recorded by engineer Alexandre Chaigne at Music Unit Studios (Montreuil, France)

In Low-fi Delirium, most of the electronics consist of sounds that come from real "vintage" keyboard instruments such as the mellotron, the optigan and the Rhodes electric piano. In some ways this piece pays homage to the psychedelic music and delirious times of the sixties. 

The sounds of these analog instruments have always inspired me since I was a teenager and I have always thought of using them outside of their usual musical context (that of rock, pop or jazz). Although nowadays there are very powerful digital keyboards and softwares created to simulate these instruments, there is nothing, in my opinion, like the real machines – with their charming flaws and their analog sound qualities. The mellotron is an instrument in which each key triggers the playback of a magnetic tape which contains a real pre-recorded instrumental sound. It is in a way the analog ancestor of the digital sampler. The mellotron's pre-recorded sounds have a rudimentary "cheap" and almost “kitsch” sound quality. It is precisely this characteristic which, in my opinion, gives the mellotron its charm and potential! I wanted to use these sounds in order to establish an interaction, a dialog with the three acoustic instruments. This is how each instrument of the ensemble will be enlarged by its mirror or by its "low-fi" electronic alter ego. The pre-recorded mellotron sounds will be the electronic doubles of the wind instruments, while the bell or celesta type sounds of the Rhodes will weave a link with the vibraphone. Alongside these electronic instrumental sounds there are other “vintage” and “concrete” vinyl crackle noises, old clocks ticking, radio interferences...

Low-fi delirium

French Premiere. April 5th, 2015. Ensemble 2e2m. Pierre Roullier, dir. Shigeko Hata, sop.

Program Note:

Act is a work that is concerned with the way musical ideas are heard and seen, and how the form emerges from shifts in attention from one to the other. A theatre of relationships emerges in this musical context, whereupon each performer’s physical presence and sounds are weighed against poetic, spatial, technological and physiological circumstances.

                                                               ***

Initially, the soprano is silent, contrasting with an ensemble that appears unified as one mass. Gradually, however, sub-groups emerge. The way the players are spatially arranged divides the instrumentalists into four heterogeneous sub-groups; at other points, the two percussionists cooperate as a duo, the strings as a quintet, and the trombone and woodwinds as a quartet. There is a special trio that consists of the trombone, clarinet and baritone saxophone equipped with laryngophones (a sort of throat microphone, of military origins), thereby isolating vocal utterances that originate in the larynx. With this special tool, the utterance of these three players engenders a sort of argument with the soprano, and her singing becomes increasingly expressive. This animates the entire group, and the work gradually opens up towards an end which is familiar yet unresolved.


Act (2014), for soprano and 12 players, Ensemble 2e2m

Los Senderos se Bifurcan pour violoncelle et grand ensemble
Daniel Alvarado Bonilla - 2016

Cameron Crozman - Violoncelle
David Reiland - Direction
Orchestre des Lauréats du Conservatoire
Enregistrement Live / CNSMDP Salle d'Art Lyrique - 4 Octobre 2016

Dans Los Senderos se Bifurcan, la forme concertante m'a permis de travailler pour la première fois sur l'interaction, l'opposition et la convergence entre le soliste et l'ensemble instrumental. La structure de l'œuvre s'articule autour de quatre mouvements qui s'enchaînent. L'ensemble anticipe le matériau exposé par la ligne du soliste ou crée une sorte de réponse/conséquence à celui-ci. L'univers sonore du violoncelle est alors élargi, voire multiplié par le groupe instrumental. De même, l'ensemble peut établir une situation d'opposition, prenant un sentier différent et contrastant. En dehors de ces idées strictement formelles, il y a eu d'autres éléments qui m'ont accompagné pendant le processus (labyrinthique) de la composition de l'œuvre : la lecture de Borges, le chant d'oiseaux de la colline de Montjuïc à Barcelone, ainsi que le souvenir de mon grand-père, Ricardo Alvarado Pantoja (1928 – 2016), à qui cette pièce est dédiée.

Los Senderos se Bifurcan

(Culminating version, Oct. 21st, 2017 at the Gabriela Lena Frank Academy of Music -  subsequent tweaks expected.)

Please Me, Place Me is a work that calls into question 'who?' without further explanation.

Our soprano is at once in the process of storytelling and recollecting, both directing and reflecting, while at the same time communicating with the string quartet and you, the audience. Her identity is unknown, her experience of time is unsure, and she is grasping hold of what she can say with certainty. These words are those of Gertrude Stein: Stanza in Meditation, Part 3, no. 3. John Ashbery, speaking of this collection of poems, states:

'Perhaps the word that occurs oftenest in the Stanzas is the word "they," for this is a poem about the world, about "them..." Less frequently, "I" enters to assess the activities of "them," to pick up after them, to assert his own altered importance. As we get deeper into the poem, it seems not so much as if we were reading as living a rather long period of our lives with a houseful of people.'

The joy of making music is that there is never a 'me' alone. Music exists between people– and thus, I wonder who the 'me' is that I'm referring to in the title.

Tony Tony Tony

Please Me, Place Me (2017), for soprano and string quartet. Tony Arnold and Third Angle

Totem
pour contrebasse et électronique
Daniel Alvarado Bonilla - 2018

Louis Siracusa - Contrebasse
Enregistrement Live / Centquatre Paris - Festival Manifeste
16 juin 2018

Evocation d’une cérémonie tribale, presque onirique. 
La contrebasse est l’objet rituel. De celui-ci émanent les incantations, des éclats d’énergie et de lumière qui éclairent la nuit ; des rythmes lancinants et des sonorités percussives qui cherchent à nous conduire au paroxysme hallucinatoire.

Totem

Inferno (2002/2005) for amplified soprano, flute and trumpet, 12’
(this performance Gaudeamus Music Week '05) 
Jannie Pranger, sop.
Rik Andriessen, fl.
Willem van der Vliet, tr.

The connection in this piece rests in its treatment of the text (two lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy). Not only until the end is it regarded as simple, direct communication. For this reason it is always spoken in the language of the given country.

O cieca cupidigia, o ira folle, Che sì ci sproni nella vita corta, E nell’eterna poi sì mal c’immolle!
Perchè mi schiante? Perchè mi scerpi? Non hai tu spirto di pietate alcuno? Uomini fummo; ed or sem fatti sterpi.
O blind greed and insensate anger, Which incites us so in this brief life, and then Cruelly plunges us in the eternal!
Why do you break me? Why do you tear me? Have you no feeling of compassion at all? Once we were men, and now we are stumps of trees.

Inferno (2005), for soprano, flute, and trumpet

davidcoll