Curvatório

Orchestra

✉️ If you wish to perform the piece, please contact me

Duration: ca. 10’30”

Year: 2017

Piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 3 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, 3 percussionists, harp, violins I, violins II, violas, cellos, double bass

Commissioned by Casa da Música (Young Composer in Residence 2017)

Premiered by Orquestra Sinfónica da Casa da Música conducted by Baldur Brönnimann

The pleasing graphics of various types of mathematical curves led me to choose them to be present in the work, replicated in the sound movement of the strings, always in glissando. This ceases to be a mere coloristic effect and becomes a structural element—it emancipates itself from superficiality. Instead of a scale of notes, a scale of curves that undergo vertical dilations, altering the way we feel them.

In the strings, we have mostly entrances that refer to a new approach to imitation and give shape to a large construction of parametric architecture. In the woodwinds, harmonic blocks appear in staccato – a mathematically discrete writing. They are raw blocks with individual sounds and sculpted in time: almost as if we were extracting pieces of rock at a given moment. The act of composition is almost always an act of addition. Although I technically added these blocks, my sensibility tries to imagine that I am a sculptor of time because that is the auditory sensation that this process provokes in me.

Denying any struggle or transition between the concepts of discrete and linear, they overlap as if they were a “politexture.” As for the trombones and their arrangement, there is a play on their historicity. Whether it is the idea of the pompousness of monarchical entrances or the angels playing in the heavens, their character in this work is not festive, but one of atonement.

The title has a phonetic similarity to purgatory. Perhaps my unconscious suggested it in homage to a culture that bows down.