Cosmofonia
While remaining open to the entire heritage of past and present music cultures of the world,
western music since plainsong to the present, the traditional musics of India, Japan, Indonesia and Africa,
folk traditions from around the world, as well as the world music (con)fusions of today,
I believe that my music has its own necessity and its own path of developement.
Since 1989, I have been dedicated to the compositional research of a musical language that has close connections with the late twentieth-century European avant-garde
and, at the same time, with north and south Indian and Japanese cassical musics, ancient Greek music theory, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance polyphonies.
From the point of view of structure, my music departs from an investigation in the field of time organization, which includes
rhythm centered in the use of ratios and number, methods of macroformal planning, and the idea of circularity, both static and in progressive spiral transformation.
It explores polyphony, monody combined with drone,
harmony based on specific selections of intervals, and the concept of total chromatic symmetric or asymmetric harmonic fields, among other principles.
Instrumentation has combined any world instrument, from the European violin to the Australian didjeridu, from digital keyboards to the shakuhachi,
just because the world of today encourages geographical and cultural dialogue.
My vocal music has explored polyphonic choral writing, chant, and overtone-singing techniques.
The interaction of music with archetypal symbolism and mythology means to me a search for true spiritual meaning through and beyond music.
It is not a personal symbolism, but a symbolic knowledge that comes from ancient cultures,
as studied by scholars like , Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Marius Schneider, amog others.
Several of my compositions are imbued with ideas that originally come from the study of the music, art and religious concepts of traditional India:
Marriage of Heaven and Earth, incorporates north Indian tâbla as a concertante instrument together with the English horn and oboe,
Agnistoma and Sacrifice are entirely sung in Sanskrit and structured according to patterns of Rig Veda recitation,
Pralâya is the spiral cosmic dissolution of the Puranas, Sol das Almas for guitar solo is composed on râga purvi,
Numen and Sun Door ... at World's End use texts from the Upanishads and Gâyatrî Mantra respectively.
Through studies in symbology and comparative religion and mythology, I have come to the idea of composition as cosmology and cosmogony:
the act of creating music--and art in general--is a repetition of the creation of the world.
This idea, as it was clearly exposed by religious studies scholar Mircea Eliade in his writings on creation myths, is one of the basic premises of how I see music and my work in composition.
Music is the order of sounds: the mutual relationships and ways of interaction of sounds, as in the Greek concept of kosmos.
Sounds must be organized do acquire the status of music.
The musician creates sound relationships by putting them together in a musical piece, a composition or improvisation. Creative methods vary.
If we take a moment to define what are the musical characteristics of bebop jazz, or of South Indian râga, or of a classical European symphony,
we become aware of the musical principles that make each be recognized as exactly what they are: bebop, râga, and symphony, and not something else.
These musical principles and relationships form an universe of sounds; they are the natural laws of this sound world.
Music is a cosmology, seen as the rationale of its creation.
And a cosmogony, seen as the process of creation unfolded by this rationale.
In this cosmogony, the creative cycle of music includes several shaping moments,
ultimately completed when the music is played and becomes physical sound during its performance,
or, perhaps, at the moment of perception, as the music formed in the listener's mind.
Looking at a piece of music or at an entire musical style as an ordered universe of sounds--a cosmos--brings the issue of music cognition:
how does this universe of sounds make sense to us and others, how do we/they know, understand, and experience it?
How do the principles that originated it translate themselves through the music so that the listener can get a notion--and therefore make sense of them--through aural perception?
The concept of composition as cosmology is, however, more prescriptive of the organization of sounds in music than descriptive or interpretative, such as musical analysis is.
In most of the cases, musical analysis ideally attempts to describe the universe of sounds in terms of how it was made,
bringing light to its creativity process and cosmology as intended or prescribed by the composer.
However, in other cases, analysis "takes a life of its own", and becomes a description that has nothing to do with the music's creative process, and is only valid as the proof of its own analytical method.
An example of this could be an analysis of a modal composition according to Set Theory.
Therefore, it is useful to distinguish my idea of cosmology of music from that of musical analysis.
While it is a fortunate thing that analysis allows us to see one and same object from different interpretations, prospectives and angles,
I am more interested in a study of music that sheds light onto the creative process that originated that object,
rather than a study in which this process is dismissed by an approach that is alien to the object's nature.
One more note about the concept of cosmology of music has to do with it as a double form of musical knowledge.
There are two aspects to the cosmology of music: the scientific and gnostic. Both are cultural.
The scientific aspect of the cosmology explains how the music is made. It is like a natural science of music, its Physics.
It describes the structural, concrete, "physical" relationships--certainly mathematical--between sounds, such as principles of tonality (in tonal music),
pitch organization, rhythmic organization, morphology, etc. Research in composition is usually done in this realm of musical order, which I call the scientific cosmology of music.
However, music is not only a science. As an art, it cannot be just the object of an excluively scientific approach, much less scientificist.
The gnostic aspect explains how the music is a consequence of contents and meanings that initially do not pertain to the structure of music,
but that can be conveyed by the structure of music. This includes any content that relates music to the knowledge of a spiritual truth (gnosis).
Such contents actually take part in the shaping of a composition or a musical style, and account for the symbolic dimension of music I mentioned above.
Examples of the gnostic cosmology of music are the role of astrology in James Woods' Stoichea, or of sonic theology in Giacinto Scelsi's string quartets.
Some of my compositions, such as Sacrifice, Luna, Agnistoma, Sun Door...at World's End, Pralâya, and others,
are especially eloquent in this search for a meaningful spiritual content, the gnostic cosmology in my music.
The music structure in those works is in-formed by ideas and conceptions related to ancient cosmologies and archetypal symbolism, with an emphasis on contents from ancient India, but not limited to them.
I have frequently explored the mandala and the spiral as time organization principles, sometimes also determining space (harmony/pitch organization).
The elements of circularity, interdependence, complemenetarity, symmetry, and progressive transformation,
thus constituting their gnostic cosmology, make these compositions become the symbols (the mandala and the spiral) in musical manifestation.
As it remains in this orientation, my music is a "cosmofonia": an imitation of nature or the cosmos, searching to retain and emanate the imanent sacredness of the world and of music.
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