Mauricio Sotelo
Wall of light black
Short instrumentation: 1 1 1 1 - 1 1 1 1 - perc(2), pno, str(1 1 1 1 1)
Duration: 16'
Dedication: für Sean Scully
Solos:
saxophone
Instrumentation details:
flute
oboe
clarinet in Bb (+bass cl(Bb))
bassoon
horn in F
trumpet in C
trombone
bass tuba
1st percussion
2nd percussion
piano
1st violin
2nd violin
viola
violoncello
contrabass
Sotelo - Wall of light black for saxophone and chamber ensemble
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Mauricio Sotelo
Sotelo: Wall of light blackOrchestration: for saxophone and chamber ensemble
Type: Studienpartitur
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Work introduction
The multifarious influences characterising Sotelo’s work particularly include contemporary painting and flamenco singing. This includes Wall of light black, which he dedicated to Sean Scully, the American painter of Irish origin, with whom he has a close friendship and shares a number of commonalities of artistic interpretation resulting in their 2003 collaboration on the Sonetas del amor oscuro – Cripta Sonora para Luigi Nono, a kind of multimedia requiem for Sotelo’s erstwhile teacher Luigi Nono, to which Scully contributed the visual images.
For Wall of light black (the name is borrowed from the eponymous 1998 work by Scully), Sotelo was inspired by the painter’s “vibration” between black and colour surfaces of various tones of grey and red, which he took up to make complex colour mixtures and shimmering, agitated colour images.
But this outward correspondence was not the only significant aspect to Sotelo; just as important to him was the concealed proximity of his way of composing to Scully’s working method; he painted over his prearranged colour surfaces many times, only gradually achieving the ultimate colouration. Sotelo’s score, in its temporal progress, attains a similar process of “painting over;” in the course of a great build (Sotelo speaks of a “spiral-shaped” progression from slow structures to faster and faster ones and which steers, so to speak, from afar towards a “gravitational centre”), Sotelo rhythmically “writes over” a temporal grid, a kind of basic yet increasingly rhythmical scaffolding, the rhythmic patterns of the flamenco playing a special role.
One of them is the seguidilla, a subspecies of the highly expressive Cante jondo or the Bulería, which belongs to the more straightforward cante chico. Yet Sotelo is not at all concerned about folkloristic exoticism; first and foremost, he is interested in the flamenco’s structural elements (which he has been analysing for years and uses in his music as the basis for new correlations).
Sotelo’s undertaking was similar in Chalan, a piece for tabla, percussion and ensemble, premiered 2003 by the musikFabrik in Cologne. Proceeding from the rhythm of the tabla in Chalan, Sotelo developed a sonic conception in Wall of light black in which the ensemble sound gradually changes toward the sonic image of a sole, imaginary tabla in the course of the piece.
Andreas Günther
Translation © Grant Chorley
(The text may be used or reprinted only with the author’s express permission)