Recorded at Nichols Hall, at the Music Institute of Chicago, April 2021. Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, soprano. Emma Hospelhorn, flute. Matt Oliphant, French horn. Ben Melsky, harp. Jesse Langen, electric guitar. Tara Lynn Ramsey, violin. Michael Lewanski, conductor.

Triste y madrigal (2021) is the most recent of a series of works based on an Argentine melodrama from 1940 called 'Cita en la Frontera'. The piece is structured as two movements with a short tape interlude. The interlude features sounds from the movie specifically the orchestral music that accompanies the opening credits and dialogue from a climactic scene between the protagonist (Luisa) and a contentious young character (Chunguita).

Triste y madrigal

Recorded at the Wellesley Composers Conference. 
Tres Decals consists of an ascending melody over which layers of ornamentation take place. Both the melody and the ornamentation respond to a series of permutational strategies that remain mostly untransformed over the span of the work. Despite the fact that the piece came to be as the layering of rather detached technical moves, my associations as I write this program note point towards the autobiographical: as I finished the piece, I was two weeks away from becoming a father for the first time, my former office literally turned into a nursery decorated with…decals. As a consequence, I tend to map many features of Tres Decals with tropes of infancy: the plain melody with the lullaby, the superimposition of pulses with the music-box, and the pervasive bits of major scales with the pitch material of, for instance, crib mobiles. In other words, Tres Decals is built with what, I imagine, are the sonic "day’s residues” in the dream of an infant.

Tres Decals (for octet)

Quince Ensemble is Amanda DeBoer Bartlett (soprano), Carrie Henneman Shaw (soprano), Liz Pearse (soprano), and Kayleigh Butcher (mezzo soprano). 

Recorded at Wild Sound Recording Studio. June 2023 Recording Engineer, mixing and mastering by Steve Kaul 

Madrigales del Rio mvt I - Quince Ensemble - Madrigales del Rio - Tomas Gueglio -

Madrigales del Rio mvt II - Quince Ensemble - Madrigales del Rio - Tomas Gueglio -

Madrigales del Rio mvt III - Quince Ensemble - Madrigales del Rio - Tomas Gueglio -

Madrigales del Rio mvt IV - Quince Ensemble - Madrigales del Rio - Tomas Gueglio -

(After L'Addio: 0'00 / Felt: 3' 27'') After L'Addio / Felt (2014) is a two movement piece composed in collaboration with Ben. The premiere of this work took place in a recital in which a performance of Salvatore Sciarrino's "Addio a Trachis" preceded.  After L'Addio features varying levels of referentiality and filiation with "Addio...", from literal quoting to variation, to more esoteric and personal connections. Generally speaking, After is a frantic and highly tactile piece in which different levels of friction between hands and strings become syntactically relevant. Felt appears as the textural opposite of After in that the contact between performer and instrument is reduced considerably: the right hand plays with a felt pick for the entirety of the movement and the left hand features, for the most part, harmonics.

After L'Addio / Felt (for solo harp)- Ben Melsky

Nuntempe is: Ariel Elijovich, Manuel Moreno, Pablo Boltshauser, and Andrés Vaccarelli.

Canción en Duermevela (for guitar quartet)- Nuntempe Ensamble

In the Sight (a dream of the 9th) is a footnote, an accessory, to Beethoven’s 9th symphony. The opening three notes of the Ode to Joy provide the pitch material of a texture that shifts progressively from pontillistic to homophonic, from kaleidoscopically dynamic to suspended and pensive. The image at work here is of Beethoven falling asleep while composing the 9th, and dreaming: fragments and shards of his Ode to Joy appear half-digested in playful counterpoint, with legato melodies of lush highness juxtaposed with clunky clusters juxtaposed with feverishly virtuosic solos. In the Sight slows down as it goes, suggesting a curve of increased melancholy. It thus mimics the bittersweet emotional state of waking up from a dream so involved you need a few minutes to figure out that a dream was all that was.

In the Sight (for orchestra). Excerpt

1901: Un Oiseau is in two movements and revolves around ideas of threshold, similitude and distortion. At the onset, both flutes display almost identical pitch material set to slightly different rhythms. This resulting heterophony is colored employing a kaleidoscopic array of sounds that include the usual repertory of flute effects but also sighing, whistling and singing. The two initially very similar streams progressively diverge, carving more individual paths towards a brief contemplative drone that ushers a closing coda. The piece was written for and is dedicated to Argentine duo MEI Música para flautas.

1901: Un Oiseau (for two bass flutes) - MEI Música para flautas



Mil Panaderos for solo violin is a study exploring fairly limited amounts of material in a relatively systematic way. Some of its constitutive elements find origin in common “bravura” techniques of traditional virtuoso playing (rapid scalar passages, fast arpeggios, explosive jétés…). These are filtered through not-so-traditional performing techniques (i.e. varied left hand pressure) and formally explored in a “rapid-fire” combinatorial motivic layout. The music wanders, as a consequence, switching constantly from gesture to gesture never being able to fully stage its virtuosic temperament and ends, quite foreseeably, on a question mark. 

Mil Panaderos (for solo violin)- Marco Fusi (live @ Fulton Hall. April 17, 2013)

Tomás I. Gueglio Saccone is an Argentine composer currently based in Chicago

Tomás Gueglio

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