Commissioned by the Picasso Museum Barcelona as part of their late sessions “El museu vist per… ESMUC” on March 24th, 2010
El museu vist per… ESMUC
“El museu vist per…” (“The museum seen by…”) was the title of a series of monthly artistic sessions held at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. For each session, different artists were invited to create and present their unique interpretation of a guided tour, drawing inspiration from Picasso and the museum’s collection. In 2010, the museum invited eight composition students from the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC), to create new music inspired by their experience of the museum’s collection.
Based on that premise, we created four groups of two composers each to collaborate in a musically guided tour, where each piece would be inspired by a specific room/period of Picasso’s career and played in the same room where the paintings are exhibited. To accompany the visitors, we collaboratively created promenade music as transition between rooms.
As part of the assignment, I co-created with the composer Èlia Navarro, the aleatory piece “Las Meninas” for flute, clarinet, tenor saxophone, mezzo-soprano, and viola that would be played in the rooms 14-16 where Picasso’s “Las Meninas” were exposed together with other works from the same series.
Picasso’s “Las Meninas” (1957)
In August 16th 1957, Picasso drew his first known sketch of what would become, later in December of the same year, his re-interpretation of Velazquez’ “Las Meninas“.
During the following five months, Picasso focused on analyzing and recreating the different characters and elements that conformed Velazquez’s painting, until creating the final composition, generating a total of 58 paintings in the process.
In 2010, at the time of the session, a large part of those 58 paintings were exposed in the biggest room of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.
Las Meninas (2010), an exploration of aleatory music
With the same idea of exploring individual elements that would finally form the final piece, we decided to develop a piece of aleatoric or indeterminate music.
Aleatory music, also known as chance music or indeterminate music, is a style where some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work’s performance is left to the determination of its performer(s). The score might provide material but leave aspects like the order of sections, specific instrumentation, duration, or improvisational details up to the performer’s choice during the performance. This approach introduces unpredictability and variability, making each performance potentially unique and challenging traditional notions of compositional control.
The work was based on general principles for its structure, dynamics, and tempo, and a set of guidelines for how each player should interact with one another, what material to play, when to play it, and how to move across the space/room. While each individual player had the power to select between different materials, it was essential for the group to collectively participate in active listening to create a coherent piece.
