Como llora el agua…

"Como llora el agua" is an emblematic work for guitar in the catalog of the composer Mauricio Sotelo. Fascinated by the impact of listening to this work, the Spanish cellist based in the United States, Ignacio Alcover, has created an extraordinary version for solo cello, so that cellists can also enjoy the performance of this music. We reproduce below the text by Sotelo written about the original version for guitar: "The greatest difficulty for a composer approaching the guitar is, without a doubt, the 'manualness' of the instrument; the dependence, in the production of sounds, on the 'positions' of the left hand. It is almost impossible to write correctly for guitar without having played it with one's own hands, if one has not felt the intense vibrating of its strings on the fingertips and, of course, if one has not also experienced its limitations.

The compositional process in this work begins with the search for a Scordatura (modified tuning) that, away from conventional sonority, would form the harmonic center of the entire composition (C, G, D, G#, B, D#). That is, a kind of gravitational harmonic axis or 'Solar Chord' within a system of "infinite suns" (Giordano Bruno). The Scordatura forces a reinvention of the instrument's manualness. Therefore, the path begins by 'caressing' the open strings - arpeggio espressivo - and the fingers gradually trace, braid, weave a sonic spiral over the fretboard. In this centrifugal movement towards a new sonority, the left hand must 'learn' again to walk on the guitar's neck, must learn to orient itself, to position itself, and it is the right hand that 'teaches' it to enter a space that is no different from that ancient "song of moaning" of the flamenco sonority. The right hand crosses fields that remind us of the aroma of the Toques por Soleá, por Bulería, por Tarantos, or por Seguiriya."