This piece was composed to be performed at the end of my wedding as a surprise for my wife, Teresa. The wedding was celebrated in the Museum of Archeology of San Fernando. This museum hosts Phoenician sculptures and ceramics. The musical composition and the lyrics take advantage of such evocative scenario. For example, it includes a quotation of the Seikilos Epitaph, an ancient Greek melody (1st century AD). There are also some quotations of my own musical work.

Voice: Myself

Cello: Alvaro Serrano

Date: July 5th, 2006 (a rehearsal two days before the wedding)

This is a symphonic work that I made for the Orquesta Joven de Andalucía (OJA, Andalusia Young Orchestra) when I was one of the two resident members of its Composition Seminar (under the supervision of the composer prof. Javier Darias). All sound records that I have for these pieces correspond to a rehearsal (an almost first sight reading, indeed). Although both movements have different compositional approaches they evolve to the same point.

Orchestra: Orquesta Joven de Andalucía

In this second movement, my aim was to combine the technique of mobile clusters -with multiple divisi in the strings as introduced by Ligeti in Atmosphères (1961)- with a minimalist basso ostinato. When the cluster texture become rarefied more consonant moments emerge briefly. Since this effect demands a strong precision in the orchestral performers, was slightly beyond of what could be obtained in a first reading. The following audio is a MIDI simulation of what I wanted.

The Celestial Choir is a web-based composition with both deterministic and random components. The former is constituted by a set of 1001 sounds obtained from the light-curve of the same number of stars. The random component is added by the interaction with the web user. An explanation about how the choir was built can be found here.

In the recording pipeline...