Arrangement for voice, flute, clarinet, marimba, violin, viola, violoncello and doublebass.
Performed by the Thürmchen Ensemble with Truike van der Poel (mezzosoprano)under Erik Oña.
Recording: Deutschlandfunk, Cologne.

La harpe de mellodie, Senleches/Oña (arr. 2004), for voice and ensemble

Truike van der Poel, mezzosoprano
Caspar Johannes Walter, violoncello
Deutscher Musikrat, Edition Zeitgenössische Musik
Erik Oña, WERGO 2007

Fünf Lieder 2 (1996/2003) for voice and violoncello

Fünf Lieder 1 (1996/2003) for voice and violoncello

Schola Heidelberg with Nenad Markovic (trumpet) under Walter Nussbaum
live performance

Almost simultaneously, I was asked to write a sextet and a piece for twelve voices and trumpet. The first would be premiered in Buenos Aires and the second in Heidelberg. the Argentinean piece had to relate somehow with 4'33" from John Cage. the various ways in which the silence of this piece could be interpreted attracted me first. I soon remembered another silent event that had haunted me in the past, and of which I had almost no remembrance until then. In the eighties a seventeen years old girl was murdered in an Argentinean province, apparently at the hands of the son of a governmental official. For a long time it appeared as if the lawyers of this man, with the help of his father's powerful connections, would help him evade justice. This was during the early democratic government that followed the military juntas. People were tired of abuse and distrustful of power, and they went out to the streets to denounce injustice. The thousands of demonstrators carried no signs nor did they sing or shout slogans, they just marched in complete silence. Silence, that in Spanish is often associated with consent, became a sign of strong resistance, it underlined, it made impossible to ignore, the presence of all those bodies, resisting.
Of all musicians, singers and brass players are the ones that produce sound with the less mediated use of their bodies. I wrote „Ein Mißverständnis von Stille“ trying not to hide this bodily presence. Choosing among words that posses the softest German consonant 'h', I wrote a poem following a strict method that related the color of the vowels following the 'h's. This poem was than put to music replacing some of its sounds with sounds produced outside of the body (with fingerbones, with the fingernails), and drawing from the formants of its vowels harmony and melody. I also found appropriate the atmosphere created by the absence of a clear understanding of the text.
—Erik Oña (2002)

Ein Missverständnis von Stille (2002) for trumpet and twelve voices - LIVE

Thürmchen Ensemble with Truike van der Poel (mezzosoprano)under Erik Oña
Recording from Deutschlandfunk, Cologne.

The arrangement of Galiot’s Le Sault Perilleux came about as part of a wider project of the Thuermchen Ensemble focusing on “musical extremism”. The project was conceived as a sort of counterpoint to a general trend in concert-organizations that we perceived as tending towards explanation or simplification by verbal means of the listening experience. The late fourteenth century in the south of France came immediately to my mind, as one paradigmatic moment in which music went to the antipodes of such position. Concentrating in itself, music became “extreme” giving birth to a highly refined rhythmic and phrasing language whose subtlety was soon forgotten and only reencountered in the twentieth century in pieces like the Studies of Nancarrow. 
Paradoxically, extra-musical considerations pointed me towards the direction to explore for the arrangement. At the time I was re-reading Roland Barthes’ “Le grain de la Voix” and probably a misinterpretation of that text together with the lyrical content of Le Sault Perilleux —an admonition about the dangers of courtly love and intrigues— made me think of a stereotyped French atmosphere of raspy Edith Piaf voice, of long nights of cigars and drinks, and of indeterminate amorous experiences. I decided to give that tone of voice to the whole ensemble, and only temporarily let the original piece emerge from that smoky ambiance. 
-Erik Oña (2004)

Le sault perilleux (2004) Galiot/Oña, for voice and ensemble

Bernhard Haas, organ
"Der Strukturalismus in der Orgelmusik"
Edition Zeitklang, WDR 
Recorded at the Philharmonie Essen in 2011

Since its Greek origin, this plural noun carries both anatomical and musical meaning. In antiquity the predecessor of the organ (hydraulis) was played during gladiatorial spectacles. At least by this immediacy, the instrument and the application of the body (and its organs) must have been in some sense closely related, and the sound of the instrument must have worked as a strong reminder of our corporeality. 
Intriguingly, by the eight century the organ had assumed a prominent place in the liturgy of the western church, to which it remains strongly associated to this day, a migration from the body to the spirit. If asked how could the organ be the voice of both body and spirit, one would probably first think of its potency: the potent voice of the spirit, and the potent voice of the body, at least a gladiator’s body. But the instrument naturally evolved other tones, and it also speaks with mysterious, subtle, and fleeting voices. Nevertheless, the conversion was not total. Against all odds something raw survives at the organ’s core: the fixedness of some ranks, the artificial vibrato of the “Tremulant”, the background noises of stops, keys and pedalboard. The organ is played with the four limbs, engaging the whole body, and this fact is somehow exposed, subtly betrayed, despite the player usually being out of view. 

Organs tempt with the promise of orchestration. But they are quite informal instruments, at least compared with the standard orchestral instruments. Each instrument is unique. If one decides not to write for a particular instrument, the problem then arises of how to define the organ for which one is writing, while maintaining the timbrical result predictable.  In Órganos a matrix of timbral distances is defined together with a notation that should allow predictable results, flexibility, and the possibility to satisfactory adapt the piece to instruments of different quality. 
Órganos tries to be idiomatic but not in the sense one could read from the repertoire of the instrument. It attempts to be idiomatic in its exploration of the interaction between body and instrument. 
The organs in our body, their connectedness, their cycles and their relative phases, serve as a metaphor for processes generating the musical form.  
- Erik Oña, February 2010

Órganos (2010) for organ

ensemble resonanz with the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo (Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams) under Sian Edwards
Live Recording, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik 2006, May 2006

Lokaler Widerstand (2006) for piano four hands and twelve strings - LIVE

In Pet, a very simple music-theatre is developed out of the movements needed to perform the piece. Synchronicity, and the loss of synchronicity, binds the violoncello, the double bass, and the percussion, as well as the independent movements of the right and left hands of the strings players or the combined action of the two percussionists on a single instrument.

Pet oscillates inside the vast passage between sound and noise. The tuning, the register, and the notes themselves derive primarily from the harmonic series of the symmetrically arranged strings G, D, A, in the Cello and the Bass and secondarily from the harmonics of the remaining strings: C in the Cello, and E in the Bass. The percussion is mostly a distorting resonant box.

Pet is also a kind of homage to Morton Feldman, I wrote it in Buffalo, still under the spell of a discovery: the only rest in  Feldman's "Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety" happens right after the "appoggiatura" number 61 of the 90 that conform the piece. When Feldman wrote it, he had no way to know that approximately ten years later, himself would die at age 61.
- Erik Oña (1994)

Pet (1994) for violoncello, double bass, and two percussionists - LIVE

new ensemble under Ed Spanjaard
Live performance
Instrumentation: 
flute, oboe, bass clarinet, guitar, mandolin, piano, harpsichord, percussion, harp, vn, va, vc, db

In Lame Butterfly, the sound world of the plucked-sting instruments greatly influences the sonority of the whole ensemble.
The musical fabric is layed out in duos, hypo-duos (one single instrument takes on a dual role on some musical level), and hyper-duos (goups of instuments are fused to create two independent groups, two simultaneous musical entities).
The instruments' location on the stage, the movement of the conductor’s hands, the name of the piece itself, it all refer to a somewhat sadly imperfect symmetry that was present since the beginning, in the musical ideas for the piece.
-Erik Oña (1996)

Lame Butterfly (1996) for ensemble - LIVE

Nouvel Ensemble Moderne under Lorraine Villancourt
Instrumentation: fl, ob, 2cl, bn, hn, tpt, ten, perc, pno, 2vn, va, vc, db

Ivan Lermolieff was the pseudonym with which Giacomo Morelli wrote about theory of art. Morelli —who died in 1891 with the rank of Italian senator— was able to correctly attribute authorship of masterpieces by concentrating on  inconspicuous details. Indeed, his books extensively catalogue earlobes, fingernails, shapes of fingers and of toes as painted by major Renaissance artists. By the end of the nineteenth century, both his unorthodox method and his somewhat spectacular attributions, won his theories considerable ascendancy among European intellectuals (as Freud admits in his well known essay on Michelangelo’s Moses, Moreli’s ideas even fertilized the conception of psychoanalysis).
 
“Per Ivan Lermoliev” grew out of a concern with details. From a reduced core of materials, various parts of the piece differentiate themselves by “concentration” or “distillation” of minute traits. On a more global level, an exchange in formal weight occurs. Successive introductions, that by being conjoined lose in part their preparatory character, and successive codas, also partly deprived of their cadential sense for the same reason, frame a shorter, non-directional, and rather static central section.
-Erik Oña (1991)

La harpe de mellodie, Senleches/Oña (arr. 2004), for voice and ensemble

Erik Oña - composer

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