Humet: Niwa

QUATRE JARDINS ZEN

(Four zen gardens) 2008

Resonance and silence are the generative elements of this suite for three percussionists. Also, the use of heterophony –ornamental variation on a single melodic line–, becomes the composition’s main principle of construction, capable of providing rhythmic variety, strong contrasts and basic material for transitions between major movements. The vibraphone, enriched by the extensive use of bells and cowbells, becomes a kind of solo instrument that develops a highly expressive argument. The other instruments, all of a resonant metallic colour –except for a rain-stick– generate a symbolic continuum and constitute the emptiness on which an architecture of sound is raised, of great tonal coherence.

JARDÍ DE HAIKUS

(Garden of haikus) 2007

This work for an unusual ensemble –piano trio and percussion trio–, was the first to explore a form consisting of a kind of polyptych; its ten short movements comprise an organic whole with its contrasts, transitions and developments. It is not, therefore, a series of independent miniatures, but a premeditated conjunction, a genuine cohabitation between different compositional processes, always very condensed, that engender mysterious moments, fragments of intense lyricism, and flashes of playfulness.

PÈTALS

(Petals) 2009

The longest winter night:

plum petals fall and finally

the western moon.

Written for a far more classical ensemble than previous compositions, Pètals consists of three interconnected movements, each built on a line of the last haiku by poet Bankoku (d. 1748). The text chosen is especially significant because it belongs to a genre with a long tradition –the so called Japanese death poem; the last, intense and outstanding, literary statement before the final breath. The first movement transforms “the longest winter night” which the poet alludes to, into vehement music, full of vertical sonorities, which, in spite of the brightness of the harmony, act like spikes between which melodic ripples appear. In the second movement, the composer connects the beautiful image of the falling petals of a plum tree with the tradition of lamento from Western music –a rhetorical figure common in the Baroque, characterised by a descending melodic line. The piece ends with a reference to circular time, ecstatic –repetitions on the same note– with extremely precise contrapuntal writing and a visionary moment: the distant high sound of the strings before the last breath.

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