published on
soliloquios del viento (2016; rev. 2017) by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
version for sextet and electronics
October 19, 2019, TRANSIT Festival 20-21, Leuven, Belgium
Ensemble Interface
Bettina Danielle Berger, bass flute
Hugo Queirós, bass clarinet
William Overcash, violin
Christophe Mathias, cello
Anna D'Errico, piano
Joao Carlos Pacheco, percussion
Maurice Donnet-Monay, conductor
Electronics: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Audio Engineer: Simon Vander Beken
Mix: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Video: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Remastered by Jason Thorpe Buchanan June 1, 2021
Many thanks to the contributors of source material for the electronics: Matt Evans (tenor saxophone), Victor Lowrie (viola), Kirsten Ashley Wiest, Cindy Giron, Jake Bellissimo, Javier Rodriguez, Jason Thorpe Buchanan, Diego Jiménez Tamame, Miggy Torres
soliloquios del viento was commissioned by Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles, written in August of 2016 and premiered by the Talea Ensemble & EXAUDI on September 9, 2016, conducted by James Baker. This fourteen-minute work is a meditation on eight poems of Pablo Neruda, reflecting love, distance, and despair. Six singers are set against eight instrumentalists whose fragile and often voiceless sonorities gently color and obscure the murmuring of the text and pointillistic vocal material. The Spanish text is predominantly unintelligible, with the content of Neruda's words instead conjured by the composite texture. He writes of two lovers, their romance characterized by abrasion – a rendezvous between two scorched, ascetic souls, who consume and destroy one another, entangled yet divided by both sublime transfiguration and inexorable chaos. This revised version for sextet and electronics was completed in May 2017 for Ensemble Interface’s premiere at the 2017 VIPA Festival.
Neruda’s texts evoke not only the conflict between darkness and light in both persons, but through this lens, the experience of being confronted with the subjectivity of another’s consciousness. That otherness is manifest in lurid, destructive passions, revealing mutual incoherence, frailty, and sophism beyond endurance. Each poem seems to present discrete, parallel scenarios, some in which each is awoken by their confrontation rather than destroyed – in others suffering to the point of intolerable anguish and desolation. Eroticism and sunderance run throughout Neruda’s powerful imagery, his lover depicted as an enemy with whom he pleads for voice – who has disgraced their love. For the poet, love is the sole means with which two people may “weather” one another. A source of both euphoria and utter devastation, there is a vastness that is evoked in his texts, an attempt to span immeasurable time and distance. Each braves the other, an intimacy and corrosive embrace that both breaks and absolves each person.
Original Version commissioned by the Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles for six singers (s, ms, ct, t, bar, bs) and eight instrumentalists (b.fl, b.cl, t.sx, pno, perc, vln, vla, vc).
More information at jasonthorpebuchanan.com
- Genre
- Contemporary Concert Music