Something in between Charlie Mingus and Charlie Kaufman

Something in between Charlie Mingus and Charlie Kaufman is an eight-minute music composition for chamber orchestra. It was conceived from my personal interest in creating a sound narrative that could generate different atmospheres, colors, contrasts, agreements, tensions, and resolutions. György Ligeti's Piano and Violin Concerti had a major influence over the piece regarding pitch, mood and form organization. I adapted his technique of interval signal to differentiate the sections of the work as well as to establish some chromatic balance - the alternation of diatonic pitch sets related chromatically. I also had strong musical influences from Gustav Mahler, Henri Dutilleux, Helmut Lachenmann, Alban Berg, and from all my previous compositional work. Basically, the narrative of the piece is based on Ligeti's notion of states, events and transformations, as he explained in some of his collected essays, published in 20011. My work attempts to present states that are transformed into new states. The music is formally divided into four sections: (a) Prelude, (b) Fusions / Convergences, (c) Static Layers, and (d) Postlude. The first part favors the idea of dialogue, multitudinousness, polyphonic contrasts, and very dense textures. The second section gives more prominence to soloistic figures, moving in and out of the complex diffuse texture. The third part investigates the idea of stasis - a very cheerful idea also developed by Ligeti - and aims to slowly create a very delicate atmosphere, contrasting the first two sections. The last part combines all the previous elements, now transformed, developed and merged continuously, leading to a brief coda concluding the whole piece.