Haladhara Dasa: INVITATION TO COMPOSE, ALONE OR IN A TEAM, WITH THE WAVE-CONSTELLATION PROGRAM FOR COMPOSITION

This invitation is written by Haladhara Dasa. You might want to click on the images in order to enlarge them. Please click on the "seguir leyendo" texto at the bottm of this entry to read the whole invitation.

INVITATION TO COMPOSE, ALONE OR IN A TEAM, WITH THE WAVE-CONSTELLATION PROGRAM FOR COMPOSITION

After personal research and experimentation with this composition program I became convinced about how important will be to share it. I saw promising possibilities of going in different creative directions at the same time, but being myself the only one working in that area at this time, made me to open this invitation, to any person who wish to know and develop this program.


A wonderful activity is to compose; with the employment of this program one can compose a work in its entirety, knowing just from the beginning where it will end (without eliminating the possibilities of surprises and unknown discoverings in the course of the compositional tasks, always manifested naturally) but this program permits that two or more composers can work inside the same composition, bringing elements of the big scale architecture and everything else in between down to the small scale. And without stylistic conflict.


My invitation consists in to inform about all the details of this program to those interested and to ask for their collaboration in one or two of these possible alternatives: that each person realizes its own individual composition, (I can bring counsel if you wants to) and the other is that at least with me (or you can select your own partner) to realize a team composition. Probably this second alternative will prove to be the better for those who are beginners and afterwards you can use it by yourselves.


A colleague asked me about what is the aesthetical need or anyother in compositional team work. Is true I can point that the aestehetic of mixing elements in big/small scale which come from persons with different sensibilities can be an area of interest, but that is not my motivation for compositional team work. Is very simple: as I composed several works using this program, everytime I became confronted with the same situation, that of ascertatining a vast, wide panorama, beautiful in its possibilities, impossible to reach with just two hands and with human time, very limited one. How many times I said to myself, “while I am writing this another person could be writing this other thing which is needed to do next for future combination and then go to the next level or stage of work; or that somebody could be checking the calculations recently done and hearing them to suggest some modifications”, etc...Sometimes I took a decision while I knew the other possibility was as good as the chosen one: “¿what will happen if another composer takes that choice and walks on this path?”. Certainly we´ll have 2 scores diverging at one point or in some cases from the beginning in spite of having the same basic WAVE program. Alterations in orchestration and/or textures and we´ll have two personalities, two different “brothers”. Many, many, many times this kind of questions and situations appeared to me in the course of the same composition: the option of compositional team work was a natural outcome.

Not to work on MY composition but to work on THE composition.

Finally, my personal approach to solve and develop some musical parameters were giving birth to more and more sound structures with the obvious need to be named, labeled somehow to be formalized and recorded in the dictionary which began to grow and is good to go from time to time. But if an-other composer-s is-are working with this program it will happen that his creative side will cristalize in new sound substructures (I called them wave-subprograms and constellation-subprograms), the dictionary will continue to grow (so the language becomes more sophisticated), the composer who arrives later will find a very rich body of words, concepts, structures, musical developments which ignite his/her imagination and not only will begin to compose but will provide the same way the previous ones were doing. This is the HYDRA project, the name taken from the mythical being of several heads.

A characteristic of this program is that just from the start, after some minutes of work and you have already the beginning and the end of the whole composition. This is called TOP-DOWN composition. That creates a great feeling of confidence in the composer. Like going travelling, you get out from your house, you have the ticket, gives to the pilot and he brings you to your destination. That´s the same with the WAVE-CONSTELLATION program.

No need to continue publicizing this product. All of you understood something I said about. Sincerily I hope to find some persons to work with.


Other matters, practical ones, like if they will be concerts, recordings, videos, lectures or any other external expressions can be talked about but after knowing the program and work on it personally. I am a composer and althought I made presentations, publicity, etc., this stage is a second one.

Hope to hear from any of you, soon. Thank you very much.

Yours,

Haladhara Dasa

COMPOSER.

Faces of Circomper: Fernando Fernandez

Kindly translated by Jimmy López

1. How did you get started in music? Why did you choose to become a composer?

I got started in music relatively early when I was eight years old (I think so, I can't remember well) at the Conservatory of Trujillo. My father is a musician and he had already started to teach me the basics of music theory; I started studying clarinet, then the trumpet and then what is called early education followed by a higher degree in composition.

I think one does not chose to become a composer just like one does not decide to dedicate oneself to any other intellectual or cultural activity. There is an impulse, which forces us to develop ourselves in a specific area. The main issue is to determine what conditions/characteristics we have and find the proper way to develop them.

2. Which composers do you admire and/or have influenced you?

All the so-called historical composers because of the access to information with which we can count on. We would have to consider that every creator, known or unknown, has made contributions, which have developed a path so that each subsequent generation might find ways to follow these paths. Ginastera was one of the composers during my first studies in whom I found elements that interested me because of their sound and effect as well as their use of certain musical resources. More than influence or admiration the fact remains that he showed different possibilities to confront sound matter.

3. How would you describe your compositions? What are the characteristics of your compositional language?

As a search to convey certain aesthetic approaches -in truth it is really complicated and difficult to describe the nature of my compositions and language- in any case, in some works I try to use contemporary elements and some elements of our folk music treating them differently, tonally or atonally. I think that extra musical explanations do not make justice -or might under or overestimate- the true nature of music.

4. What is more important for you when composing: emotion or technique?

Emotion and technique or technique and emotion complement each other, never excluding each other from the compositional process.

5. In which piece are you working on right now?

Right now I am revising a cycle of works for solo instruments (strings)-(woodwinds) / guitar duo -I prefer to call it this way due to organizational reasons. And I am also developing a couple of works for voice/piano one with text from Girondo and the other of Coyné.

6. What in your opinion is the role of composers in our society?

Our role is still of very little significance at all different social scales, from the ruling class to the common man; however we should be considered as professionals who contribute and enrich our perceptual capacity to perceive reality in a different way, to open the doors to diverse and innumerable sensorial possibilities and, with it, a possibility for a better quality of life.

7. What do you think is the future of our music?

In times of globalization, if we make our voices heard in a convincing way, our music, with its own characteristics, will find a space to show a great number of possibilities which will integrate our aesthetic and stylistic proposals and could be used as it was done with western music and later on with some -at the time - exotic elements of oriental music. I quote Robert Hughes, "local but not provincial. The anguish of being provincial and peripheral is that you are condemned by the center to not being capable of judging your own work. When you accept the judgment of the center without having your own, you are being peripheral in addition to being provincial. Think locally and thou shall become universal".

Faces of Circomper: Sadiel Cuentas

Kindly translated by Jimmy López.

1. How did you get started in music? Why did you choose to become a composer?

I got started in music at 15, after watching a couple of friends play the acoustic guitar at school. Until then I had wanted to be a filmmaker or a novelist. I became fascinated by watching my friends play the guitar, so I started to learn immediately thanks to my great friend Alvaro Torres, who lent me a guitar and started teaching me a few chords.

After finishing school my dream was to go to Berklee School in the United States and study electric guitar. I played in a few bands, but I didn't have the faintest idea of how to reach my goal. After a couple of years, and as a means of preparation, I started studying classical guitar. My teacher Jorge Caballero (senior) was great at making arrangements, which interested me very much, and I asked if he could teach me. That is how I got in touch with Enrique Iturriaga with whom I started studying harmony and counterpoint, and it was thanks to Enrique that I started to learn how a composer thinks. Finally, I got into the National Conservatory of Music in 1995.

I chose to be a composer because I was passionate (and still am) about musical creation. I suppose it is, in addition, an emotional need to express myself. During my education as a composer I have been discovering many new things which make me interest myself even more in this job and which, I belief, define my profile better within this profession. One of them is the discovery of the existing parallels among narrative and musical discourse. Another important is the recent, and a little silly discovery that I do not depend on anybody's approval to write music. I can write whatever I want.

2. Which composers do you admire and/or have influenced you?

I think that my greatest influences have been The Beatles, Pink Floyd (or rather David Gilmour, the guitarist) Bach, Beethoven and Lutoslawski. Recently, I have discovered that Blues influences my melodic writing, with its constant use of dominant seventh chords and melodic turns that these chords generate. Some of that can also be found in Bach. In fact, I don't like Beethoven as much as I like other composers, but I have dedicated plenty of time to studying his symphonies and piano sonatas, and I have learned a lot, especially due to a particular analytical focus that I learned from Dante Valdez.

I have almost dedicated myself to copying Lutoslawski. I was really interested and intrigued by his expressive language, while at the same time I was trying to understand how did he organize his music, what was it that set it in motion. I studied his scores in order to understand how did the "chain form" worked, and after learning the technique I started to apply it to my own works. I have also imitated Lutoslawsi's work based on small motifs. I have set aside his work through intervals and his harmonic technique. Concerning motivic work, I imitate more Bach, and in the harmonic arena I am making a more general use of jazz chords, in addition to chromatic clusters.

I must also mention that since 1999 I have the privilege to work with Carlos Espinoza and Hugo Alcazar, who are two of the greatest jazz musicians of our country, and from whom I learn a lot on a daily basis. I guess that's why I have so much interest in the harmonic language of jazz.

3. How would you describe your compositions? What are the characteristics of your compositional language?

I have mentioned a lot about that in the previous paragraph. I would only like to add that, at the moment, I am experimenting with pantonal techniques and with mixtures between classical forms and "chain-form" technique. In particular, I have just finished the second work in which I have combined sonata form with chain form, making use - in addition- of harmonic characteristics proper of sonata form, that is, basing the structure and discourse of the music in the classic harmonic structure of sonata form.

4. What is more important for you when composing: emotion or technique?

For me the most important is technique. But not because I consider it more important in the results, but just because I take emotion for granted. I believe all human beings feel emotions of the same depth and beauty. We need the training to be able to materialize these emotions in a musical product.

5. In which piece are you working on right now?

I am working on a sonata for cello and piano and a couple of songs for chamber orchestra and mezzo-soprano based on texts that I wrote myself. The texts are not too bad, but it brings me great satisfaction to put them into music.

6. What in your opinion is the role of composers in our society?

In reality I think it is the same role that I would propose for every other job. To satisfy the needs of the market, open new markets in order to diversify our culture, contribute to the free flow of information for all human beings equally.

With satisfying the demands of the market I mean that, our society being a great consumer of music, there is a great work offer that corresponds to the demand of some specific services. For example, there is a need for composers, arrangers, producers, instrumentalists and music teachers. We, as composers, can contribute in all those fields.

When I talk about diversifying the market I refer to the fact that, according to my own perception, the Peruvian musical market is too small in respect to its diversity of genres. This impoverishes the amount of musical information that circulates in our society and with that, our general creative possibilities are being cut short. I believe that creativity is the ability to join pieces of information in a novel way. The less the number of pieces available, the less the possibilities of obtaining new combinations. In my opinion, we live in a world on the dawn of the economy of information, and I believe that the excessive homogeneity of our musical market does not play in our favor in this new world.

When I talk about a contribution to the free flow of information I refer to the role of all people in our society. Information generates material wealth, when it flows in a society and the society has the possibility to respond to it, information generates more information and greater wealth. Information in Peru flows, but only to a limited extent. Only a minority has access to the basic infrastructure and the majority of relevant information is in English. I believe that if we want to enter to the world of information economy we must solve current conditions. It corresponds to the state to create the necessary infrastructure (with projects like the OLPC, for example), but it corresponds to us, the people, to make contributions so that information may really flow within all of our society. Each professional can contribute in his own field.

7. What do you think is the future of our music?

At the moment there is a great amount of young composers who are creating a truly impressive body of work. I think that the immediate future is working toward having all these compositions premiered, video recorded and uploaded on the Internet with no exceptions.

On the mid-term I honestly believe that working conditions are going to improve a lot for all of us. Some improvement can already be noticed in relation to the 80?s, for example. I believe there?s great potential in the Internet, because it will allow us to have access to international markets. This could be especially interesting when offering services.

On the long run? on the long run I believe the world will be in constant change and I think we must be very flexible not only to be able to continue being relevant to society, but also to continue being connected with our surrounding world and avoid ending up ostracized. I believe contemporary classical music composers, at least to the extent which I have been able to notice, have the tendency to be a little conservative. In the next decades we will see astonishing technological and social changes, and in an extreme scenario we could be witnesses to the moment in which the composer will be replaced by the computer in most of his functions. Good or bad, there is no turning back. I believe we must be prepared to be very, very flexible in every sense.

Martín Portugal: Danza

Sadiel Cuentas: Toccata

Theo Tupayachi - Keros

Video producido por Circomper. Esta obra obtuvo el primer puesto en el concurso de composición Premio Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia 2007.

Violín: Carlos Johnson
Violín: Joo-Hyun Kang
Viola: Fabio Catania
Cello: Claudio Santos

Diana Rodriguez - Larevamprien para Cello y Piano

Video producido por Circomper. Esta obra obtuvo el segundo puesto en el concurso de composición Premio Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia 2007.

Cello: Claudio Santos
Piano: Patricia Costa

Sadiel Cuentas: Ostinato

María Elena Pacheco, Bruno Feiertag: Violins
Carlos Costa: Viola
Sigrid Strehler: Cello

Performed at the 2006 Lukas David Festival in Lima, Perú.