İstanbul

This week I'm publishing ZOOM IN and İstanbul, two quartets that are, I think, the best music I've composed until now (but hopefully not the best I'll ever compose!).

In İstanbul I explored the Uşşak tetrachord, with which I originally fell in love thanks to Erkan Oğur. It has a wonderful sonority and it makes me feel beautiful, unknown emotions.

In composing this, I had a couple of important breakthroughs. I somehow broke some arbitrary, subconsciously self-imposed walls I had. Walls with which I separated things that aren't really qualitatively different, but are different degrees of the same scale. Rhythm vs. form, melody vs. polyphony, note-collection vs. thematic material.

Before this, my construction of form was always a planned thing. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, I still do it (Mini-drama in a koi pond, for instance), but I wanted to develop the ability to feel form intuitively. So this is why I had to build a bridge from rhythm to form, melodic breaths that get longer and longer until they become sections. There's a little theatrical instruction in the score to make this even more apparent, the players all take a deep breath between the sections, so that they and the audience note how these breathing events grow further apart from each other.

In general this breaking of walls and replacing them with continua is the beginning of something I feel I need to do. I call it holistic music because I can't come up with something better. Music that can't be broken up into different and independent parameters: in which you can't separate the scale from the motifs because they are the same thing, and in which you can't separate the pitch-class set from the orchestration or the register. I think that taking things to the extreme in this direction is not really desirable, variation is basically keeping some parameters the same and changing others, so a system in which this is not possible would basically be development-less. Anyway that's where my personal exploration of music is taking me at the moment, and I'll just go with the flow. Also, if you see the increasing sizes of the paragraphs in this text, that's more or less the idea of the form of İstanbul :)

The score and the parts can be downloaded at Scribd, IMSLP or the Internet Archive.

Mini-drama in a koi pond

While on holiday, my father took some beautiful pictures of koi fish at a pond in the hotel. The pictures inspired the first 4 bars of this little piece, the rest of the music flowed naturally out of it. The piece is light and watery at the beginning and at the end, and it has an über-romantic core. This expressive and dramatic centre is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it's also honest, heartfelt music (from the deepest regions of my tortured soul! lol). I really believe one can mock something, and at the same time, sincerely feel it with passion. This is a little piece that attempts that.

The score and the parts can be downloaded at Scribd, IMSLP or the Internet Archive.



EDIT:
I've become aware of some embarrassing mistakes in the score and in the piano part:

In bar 19 the first note on the left hand of the piano is C natural, the natural mark to prevent confusion with the C sharp in the right hand is missing.

In bar 20, in the piano part, the last note on the bass clef is B flat.

In bar 21, the first chord of the right hand is D flat, E flat, A flat, B flat. The flat symbol for the A is missing.

I'm sorry for any problems caused by this and I'm preparing a new score and parts with all the corrections. At the moment I'm working with the 'Ensamble Nuevo de México' who will perform the piece, I'll publish the revised score after that in case more typos come to light. Sorry again.

Zimbabwe

This is the first post with the "music for musicians" label. I've always loved the idea of chamber music as a social event where the players themselves are the audience, and I've been thinking a lot of composing music specifically to make it fun to play, composing for the musicians instead of composing for the audience. My plan is to compose "games" for chamber ensembles and some sorts of "solitaire" for piano.

Meanwhile I decided to publish this piece I composed some time ago and that actually fits perfectly into this idea: I originally composed it for an ensemble I played at, I made it for myself and my fellow musicians. It is very loosely based on Mbira Dzavadzimu music, and some of the ornaments are Balkanic (...ish).

The score and the parts can be downloaded at Scribd, IMSLP or the Internet Archive.

Happy Zenkov

(This is a bit of a rehash from the original Kromata post.)
Happy Zenkov was probably my first good composition. I think what makes it work is that for the first time I wasn't thinking of mixing this and that, it was a natural and intuitive invention that certainly has some Balkan and Irish things but not in an artificial way.
I came across the Zenkov rhythm in Kesslari's Doumbek Madness. The meter is 21/8 divided in three phrases 9/8 (2+2+2+3), 7/8 (2+2+3) and 5/8 (2+3). So there's some vague fractalness to the rhythm that becomes really comfortable once you get used to it.

Kromata*:
Alex Daniels - Accordion
Polen Iñaki Pérez - Flute
Charly Daniels - Darbuka
Axel Tamayo - Bass Guitar

* The Attribution for Happy Zenkov should contain this list.

Kromata

Kromata was my first serious band. It was also the place in which I started to experiment with the idea of world-fusion. It has been inactive for a while now, we have all moved on to different projects and stages of our lives, but I think we all loved the experience. In my case, this band was my kickstart into composition and music in general.

The members were*:

Alex Daniels - Accordion
Polen Iñaki Pérez - Flute
Charly Daniels - Darbuka, Congas and Bodhrán
Axel Tamayo - Bass Guitar and Double Bass

We recorded two demos, one in 2005 which was sort of home made, and one in 2006, in a studio. I really like the 2006 demo, we recorded it after a two month season of weekly playing in a nice bar called Zaza, so we had the momentum in our favour. These two demos had been gathering dust in my hard drive for some time, I thought they'd do better out in the open.

I was thinking of uploading each demo in a separate post, but while doing some research on the copyright status of the songs, the list sadly became thinner and thinner :( As I want to remain out of any copyright trouble I'll only upload original pieces and pieces in the public domain. So a single post will be enough.
I particularly regret leaving out our rendering of Autumn Leaves. It had beautiful solos by Axel and Polen. I might have time later to edit the theme out and publish only the solos.

From Demo 2005:

· Basasón.
Basasón is a composition of mine which mimics cuban son. Polen's solo was amazing!

· Rights of Man.
A beautiful irish Hornpipe.

From Demo 2006:

· El Tigre (The Tiger).
We got this from an Ibro Lolov record called Gypsy Music from Bulgaria. The tune is marvelous. I'll post in the future about ARC, which is my favorite world-music label.

· A Camello.
This is another of my compositions. It's the sort of calculated fusion I try not to do anymore, basically a strange mixture of Balkan and Cuban music. My solo was nice (I think), but Cha's incredible conga solo takes the spotlight :)

· Happy Zenkov.
I consider this song one of my best things I've done. It was the first fusion I made not thinking of mixing this with that, it was a natural and intuitive invention that certainly has some Balkan and Irish things but not in an artificial way.
When we were rehearsing this, I remember the moment we overcame the technichal dificulties and could focus for the first time on the music and the feeling, as one of the happiest moments of my life. :'-)

Listen to and download the demo at Archive.org

* The Attribution in any of these works should contain this list.