SHADOWS OF HALLUCINATIONS AND DEATH (1988/89)
For cello and orchestra
Photo by Ioh Hindioh
The composition is an homage to selk’nam people, a tribe that inhabited Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego (Spanish for Land of Fire), and whose last survivor died in 1998. Nowadays erased from the repertoire of humanity, this culture is still alive only through very few recorded documents and some cave paintings. Voluntarily, I did not want to exhume these musical fragments for writing the piece, but rather take these fragments to create a new language that could have belonged to them. I wanted to create a relation to the auditory space, the harmonic and timbral universe in which the emotion of the sound is the main concern. From this extra-musical (or extremely musical!) idea, the dialectic that establishes the structure of the piece is born. Beyond wanting to bring attention to a mystic and philosophical reflection, I have wanted to highlight lyricism and poetry over emotion.
Opposition and complement principles between the soloist and the orchestra are present throughout the whole composition. The orchestra many times is an image, a shadow, just like the hallucination the soloist has. By becoming autonomous, the shadow emerges from the imaginary world into the real world. This work reproduces, through the solo/orchestra dialectics the shape of a reinvented ritual.
