[in]certi(é)tude

"Nous tendons à vivre dans un monde de certitude, de solidité perceptible indiscutable, où nos convictions prouvent que les choses seulement sont de de la façon dont nous les voyons, et ce qui nous semble certain ne peut avoir une autre alternative. 
C'est notre situation quotidienne, notre condition culturelle, notre mode courant d'être humains." 

Humberto Maturana -  "L'arbre de la connaissance"  

[in]certi(é)tude [2014] • for prepared piano & electronics

je ne suis qu'une voix [2019] • for ensemble, electronics and AI generated voice

Ensemble C Barré
Conductor • Sébastien Boin
RIM • Charles Bascou

Co-production IRCAM & GMEM Marseille

je ne suis qu'une voix [2019] • for ensemble, electronics and AI generated voice

Karina Fischer • bass flute
Paola Muñoz • paetzold recorder
Dante Burotto • bass clarinet

Dedicated to the trio "movimiento paralelo", this work specifically explores the air component, inseparable from the very sound of its three wind instruments, which is produced when playing a note. Like a magnifying glass, the piece focuses on this aeolian sound, closely linked to the performer, using the instrument more as a resonator than as a producer of specific pitches. Within this sound, countless colours appear and are modulated through different articulations. These are generated by short, percussive consonants followed by vowels when it comes to attacks or by open vowels preceded by soft consonants for long sounds. As if it were a process in slow motion, the shape of the piece metaphorically stretches the act of producing a note, gradually making the heights appear towards the end. The three musicians equally operate in homorhythm to enrich the resulting sound, thus creating a meta wind instrument, produced by the union of their three voices.

al aire, libre [2023] • for bass flute, bass clarinet, bass paetzold recorder & electronics

Florentin Ginot • double bass
Pablo Garretón • recording

Desert bloom is a piece for double bass and electronics, which highlights the natural harmonics of the strings. These sounds, played quickly and rhythmically, create a sonic fabric that is both delicate and virtuoso. A wobbly pulsation frames this music close to caprice or baroque invention, to give it a dreamlike and repetitive, even psychedelic, character.
Double bassist Florentin GINOT, leaning over his instrument, dances with it, brushing against it, touching it delicately but with precision. It is an intimate performance, a close listening, which invites an attention which does not impose a direction, but rather which encourages the abandonment of a search for the consequence. We allow ourselves to sensitively listen to the sound in its present moment, losing the notion of time.

desert bloom [2022] • for double bass & electronics

Francisco Alvarado • electric guitar
Cécile Le Talec • objects

Under the trees in the garden of the St Étienne Church in Beauvais, like the lines of a drawing in space, appears Flux, a sculpture imagined by the artist Cécile Le Talec for this site. Around and through it, the greenery, the columns of the building, the church enter into its composition.

The sculpture is made up of stainless steel threads which give the illusion of having been led like weft threads between warp threads, as they would be called for a loom. Together, they form an extraordinary mesh. The city's drapery and textile activity will undoubtedly have inspired the artist. Flush with the ground, without a base or foundation, the sculpture evokes the light form of an organdi canvas or a large drape, which would have come to rest in this green setting.

Or would it, on the contrary, be a lifting of the ground? Throughout his creative residency in Beauvais, the artist collects sounds of the city, draws and writes in a notebook about the history of the site. She records the flocks of bells, the song of blackbirds and starlings, and sees the material thus brought together as a whole, in an approach of synthesis of the arts.

Cécile Le Talec thus invites the composer Francisco Alvarado to imagine, in turn, a second work: an original composition, created according to his musical and personal interpretation of the spectrographic form of the sculpture. This sound creation, inseparable from the work, will be played during the inauguration as part of a performance.

For the two artists, an invisible link seems to connect the line of the first drawings, the stainless steel wire of the sculpture and the acoustic wave generated by the music. As if the whole thing was moving and vibrating in the air until it produced a visual and audible sensation in us.

FLUX [2023] • for electric guitar, objects & electronics

Solo trio --> standard-modell (Antoine Alerini, Noam Bierstone & Joshua Hyde)
Ensemble --> Orchestre des Lauréats du CNSMDP
Conductor --> Laurent Cuniot

"… Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, ni dans les opérations de l’art, ni dans celles de la nature, et l’on peut poser en principe que, dans tout opération, il y a une égale quantité de matière avant et après l’opération ; que la qualité et la quantité des principes est la même, et qu’il n’y a que des changements, des modifications…”. 
Extract from “Traité élémentaire de chimie” (1777) - Antoine Lavoisier



and matter was (not) perfectly conserved [2015] • for trio, ensemble & electronics

"where the murmurs die" - for guitar & orchestra
[HEADPHONES HIGHLY RECOMMENDED]

Natalya Makovskaya - Guitar
Orchestre des Lauréats du CNSMDP
Philippe Aïche - conductor

where the murmurs die [2016] • for guitar & orchestra

trace - écart - for harp, electric guitar, cymbalum, double bass & electronics

Ensemble C Barré
Eva Debonne - harp
Cyril Dupuy - cymbalum
Thomas Keck - guitar
Charlotte Testu - double bass

Mónica Gil & Rudy Romeur - sound engineering

Premiered @ Festival Messiaen au Pays de la Meije 2017
Recorded @ GMEM Marseille

trace - écart [2017] • for harp, electric guitar, cymbalum, double bass & electronics

Wie die Zarten Blüten im Winter [2016] - for string quartet
Francisco Alvarado

Diotima String Quartet

YunPeng Zhao. VIOLIN 1
Constance Ronzatti VIOLIN 2
Franck Chevalier VIOLA
Pierre Morlet CELLO

Festival Musica 2016

---------

“Schönes Leben! du lebst, wie die zarten Blüten im Winter”
Friedrich Hölderlin

The winter flower (the image chosen by Friedrich Hölderlin as the beginning of his poem entitled “An Diotima”) has at least two meanings, in apparent contradiction, that inspired me for the composition of this piece. In one hand, as the poet puts it, the fragility and in the other hand, the resistance while being alone and facing the hurricane (“und in frostiger Nacht zanken Orkane sich nun”). The contrasting attributs within the very core of a single object are the central topic of this work.

We can find this concept at the beginning of the piece by the succession of musical fragments with different tempos and various intentions (intense, suspended, fragile, lively, etc.) then, while these fragments become larger and more stable, by accentuations, speed changes or timber variations.
Another way of translating this poetical image into a musical level, was the settlement of a discourse based on the overlapping, or the transition, of harmonic and in-harmonic sounds (from a spectral point of view). Thus, we can see different instruments proposing simultaneously various degrees of “harmonicity”, or just one instrument slowly modifying its timber by a certain extended technic, changing its harmonic composition.  
Finally, the conception and development of the musical material is also inspired by the idea of synthesis between fragility and resistance, using delicate and unstable ways of playing that, thanks to their persistance in time and micro variations, we can observe and understand from different angles.

Wie die Zarten Blüten im Winter [2016] • for string quartet

« ... What would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed … »

(Samuel Beckett)

FRANCISCO ALVARADO
corps et ombre ensemble s'engloutissent [2018]

Florentin Ginot - double bass

Ensemble LINEA
Adam Starkie - clarinet / bass clarinet
Marie Andrée Joerger - accordion
Victor Hocquet - percussion
Ieva Dudaite - prepared piano
Marco Fusi - violin
Elodie Gaudet - viola
Elsa Dorbath - cello

Claire Levacher - conductor

Éditions Durand

Premiered @ Opéra National du Rhin / Festival Musica 2018
Aide à l'écriture d'une oeuvre originale du ministère de la Culture 2018

---------------------------------------------

Taken from Samuel Beckett’s « textes pour ne rien dire », the quote « corps et ombre ensemble s’engloutissent » was an inspiration to stablish a body/shadow type of relationship, in three different layers in this piece. The relationship between the double bass player and its instrument, between the soloist instrument and the ensemble and finally, between the double bass sonorities and the musical material construction, through them.

	What most interested me in this Beckettian image is that shadow no long exists as a reflection of the body, damned to follow each given dictated gesture. By engulfing themselves, they are at the same level, trying to annihilate one another, “pills in the void”.

	I used this idea to elaborate the musical material. One could say that the double bass works as the body. Indeed, I started by composing the double bass line and by making spectral analysis of the sounds of this line (using informatic tools). I could extract notes, harmonic champs, rhythms, in short, a very rich musical reservoir that allowed me to write the ensemble part afterwards – the shadow. Nevertheless, during the piece, the ensemble will emancipate, proposing new sonorities that will be used by the double bass, gradually alternating roles. This ambiguity concerning the source, will be established from the beginning of the piece, that starts with an ensemble opening, that we may consider firstly as the “body”, but which is actually composed by sounds that the double bass will play later on, in a kind of anticipated consequence.

	The body/shadow relationship is also used to manage the instrumental density of the score, in the soloist, ensemble and tutti passages of the piece. Even if the double bass is clearly presented as the soloist, it is often delicately doubled by other instruments. It will melt sometimes with the ensemble or it will clearly play as the shadow of another instrument.

	Finally, the most visible body/shadow connection is the one between the double bass player and its instrument. Actually, we may have the impression of seeing two dancing bodies. Even if it is the player who drives the instrument, the last one, being considerably big, impose its rhythm, its cadence, a sound inertia.
As this implicit choreography evolves, one may ask the question: which on is the body, which one the shadow? And finally, which one is engulfing the other one?

corps et ombre ensemble s'engloutissent [2018] • for doublebass & ensemble

DISIRE for Soprano, Soprano Saxophone, Percussion, Piano, Violin and Viola.
Concert des étudiant en DAI - CNSMDP 2013

Raquel Camarinha - Soprano
Hiroe Yasui - Saxophone
Matthieu Acar- Piano
Noam Bierstone - Percussion
Constance Ronzatti - Violon
Thien Bao Pham Vu - Alto

Benjamin Attahir- Direction

Premiered at Royaumont's abbey in September 2012.

DISIRE [2012] • for soprano & ensemble

OPTICAL FLOW 1.1.1.1. 1.1.1. Perc.1, Perc.2, Hrp, Pno, 1.1.1.1.1 and electronics.
Premiered in April 2013 at CNSMDP, conducted by Robert HP Platz.

OPTICAL FLOW [2013] • for ensemble & electronics

www.franciscoalvarado.net

I work with sound. 

The desire to blur the boundaries between genres and find the delicate balance between familiarity and strangeness is at the heart of my recent works. In addition to orchestral and chamber music, I frequently integrate electronics into my compositions, often within music-theatre projects and films. 

I studied composition at the Universidad Católica de Chile, and later continue my studies with Stefano Gervasoni at the Paris Conservatory. Between 2013 and 2015, I participated in the Cursus 1 & 2 programs at IRCAM in Paris.

I address topics and questions of our time in collaborative projects with other contemporary artists. Notable collaborators include Maëlle Dequiedt, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Florentin Ginot, Alex W. Inker, and Rémy Reber, among many others.

I have received distinctions such as the Musica Festival Academy’s prize and the CDMC prize at the INJUVE academy in Madrid. My compositions have been commissioned by prominent institutions like the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the MUSICA festival, IRCAM, the Festival Messiaen, the Royaumont Foundation, Radio France, the CNSMDP, ensemble C Barré and United Instruments of Lucilin, among others. 

I held an artist-in-residence position at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis in 2017, at United Instruments of Lucilin, the ExperimentalStudio of the SWR, and the GMEM and between 2019 and 2021 and composer in residency at the Festival d'Autan 2025. Since 2024, I have been pursuing a PhD in stage composition within the SACRe program in Paris.

Francisco Alvarado

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