Four-hands piano and electronics. (2018)
Las vueltas que da la vida, is Spanish for the twist and turns of life. In 2015, I had the pleasure to meet Nina Young and Sara Gibson at the National Composer Intensive program in LA organized by LA Phil. Three years later, Nina became a teacher at UT Austin, where I finished my DMA in composition, and her first guests was Sara Gibson and her companion Thomas Kotcheff, the piano duet Hocket. I got to write music for these folks and it was a blast.
Guajeo (wa-HE-o) can be defined like a typical two or four-bar long melodic/harmonic pattern present in the Caribbean and Afro Cuban related music. It is also known as montuno, and sometimes tumbao. It is traditionally played by the instruments in the rhythm section (usually Cuban tres or piano) and serves as one of the fundamental parts of this music.
I had always wanted to write a piano piece influenced by salsa and montunos. These patterns are the core of this music and its implicit syncopation always interested me. For the electronics, I sampled one bar from four of my favorite salsa songs and I transformed them in many ways (I bet you won’t guess them). These samples are stretched, chopped, transposed, frozen, compressed, granulated, down-sampled, and whatnot. My premise was to explore the possibilities of sampling and the blend of cultures and musical practices through the piece. My colleague, composer Monte Taylor, called this experiment “Trip-hop salsa,” that denomination is somewhat accurate.
Although, originally written for the piano duet Hocket, this recording was done during amazing three weeks of Ensemble Evolution at Banff with the fantastic pianists Laura Farré-Rozada and Melissa Coppola
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