The Sieved Dark (2011-2013)
Exploiting the experience, energy and hopes of Andrés Gomis, to continue to learn.
For solo saxophone and ensemble.
Instrumentation: Soprano/bass saxophone, flute, clarinet, trombone, percussion, violin, viola, cello.
Approximate duration: 15´.
Premiere: Andrés Gomis and Espai Sonor Ensemble, slated for 2014.

Soonest Mended (2010-2011) [fragm. partitura]

I would be unable to gaze attentively at daily things other than through poetry.
This constant has meant that I have approached her also in a search for models for reflection which help me develop different techniques for my work.
As I compose, I am pleased to accept the healthy play of influences from composers of different times, but looking outward unblocks me and enables me to exercise my imagination on another constructive plane, secure, save epigonal relations.
My travelling companion this time was John Ashbery’s poem Soonest Mended*, from the book The double dream of spring.
Soonest mended comes from the English expression “Least said, soonest mended”.
I once read Ashbery declare that he usually builds his poems from a melody which arises within him and from which, little by little, words are born.
Obviously with Soonest mended I travelled the route the opposite way.
The ideas of the process of constant evolution or, on the contrary, of a continuum built with unrelated fragments, does not satisfy me completely. I prefer to seek a fluidity which builds a direction with pulses of different nature and tendency.
Attentive listening would be ideal but I prefer even more that it be open.
There is no conflict, because we seek our own points of distraction.
Ultimately, although it is at the very moment when things happen that eternity may be revealed to us, one may hardly be ready for such things.
The work is dedicated to Xavier Güell.
* The double dream of spring, John Ashbery 1970.
(Carlos Bermejo, Madrid 2011)
For ensemble.
Instrumentation: Flute, B♭ clarinet, oboe, percussion, violin, viola, cello.
Approximate duration: 17´.
Premiere: Ensemble Recherche, Madrid 2011.

Koe (2006-2007) [fragm. partitura]

Shizuseka ya
Iwa ni shimiiru
Semi no koe
(Basho 1644-1694)
Serenity
Incrusted in the rocks
Squeals of cicadas.
(Antonio Cabezas García)
Glazed truce:
The sound of the cicada
Drills the rocks.
(Octavio Paz)
Quietude:
Penetrating the rocks
Songs of the cicada.
(Octavio Paz)
The voice of the cicadas
one
with the rock.
(Miguel Angel Bernat)
All these versions are true, and excellent.
So, how to translate Koe?
Squeal, sound, song, voice?
How to delimit the sublimity of an instant?
Impossibility.
Alert intuition.
Time acts as the factor creating the ideal conditions to unite and distinguish what is perceived and who perceives it.
Duration is transformed into a memory impelling what already was toward the now. And the past will end up living with itself as present.
This memory, founded on movement, may also cease to exist at any instant.
The risk of precipitate loss of everything is assumed, at each point of repose, on each exteriorisation of a force and course of material.
Yet what wishes to be heard is liberated.
Perception seeks to reinvent itself in the veiled tension produced on introducing a narrow register in an instrument like the piano where an infinite arena is nearly always sought.
Multiple nuances, represented as mosaics articulating a mesh where only tendency will be pure.
Active intuition is entrusted with re-establishing the true nature of the forces configuring the score.
The work is dedicated to Yukiko Sugawara.
(Carlos Bermejo, Madrid 2007)
For piano.
Approximate duration: 19´.
Premiere: Yukiko Sugawara, Madrid 2007.

El rumor de la luz (2005-2006)
A single gesture. A single sound field. Multiple projections and interferences.
For string trio.
Approximate duration: 15´.

Mientras tanto (2002-2004) [fragm. partitura]

As Cage says: “it is of the nature of the plan that it fail”.
The gestation time for this work was that of an obsession.
A similar approach is required during different periods.
Some fundamentals coincide once more in essence, but most transform thanks simply to a recurrence and also to a tendency which treats forgetting as a process.
Voluntarily I sought an articulation plan for various components, with the creation of different segments, groups and areas of action.
There is a need for developments, transformations, proliferations, but also for interruptions, precipitations, a rupturing of bases and return to the beginning.
A given point of the work might be connected with any other.
With different surfaces which vibrate upon themselves, where there are options for all sorts of problems (musical, instrumental, structural) but also for collapses to successively liberate feelings, not just creating the design of a given strategy but also allowing uncertainty, and the simple pleasure of deleting things, to assume their true weave.
Ultimately, the residual time of that Mientras Tanto (Meantime), apparently not definitive, configured all the material not just with different starting dates but also with different speeds, tendencies, corporealities … longings.
The failures too formed part of the plan, which was not a principle of organisation but rather a possibility to shift.
To enter and exit, move among things and contemplate their movement.
Words and description. Structure and proof.
Finally, an assertion: “The composer makes plans … music laughs” (Morton Feldman)
(Carlos Bermejo, Madrid 2004)
For trio.
Instrumentation: alto saxophone, percussion, piano.
Approximate duration: 20´.
Premiere: Accanto Trio, Stuttgart 2004.

La Oscura Violencia del Sol (2004)

“The OBSCURE violence of the sun
Breaking in the burning
Battlements of the air.
Birds.
Copy the invisible weave
in the scant matter.
Form.
Forms waking the morning.
Their luminous intensity.”
(Jose Angel Valente, La oscura violencia in Al Dios del lugar, p.45, Tusquets editores, Barcelona 1989.)
For accordion.
Approximate duration: 14’.
Premiere: Esteban Algora, Barcelona 2004.

Der Gefangene (2003-2004)
Exploiting the multiple similarities and differences between the oboe and the clarinet, varying degrees of reverberation are defined between fields of unisons.
Dedicated to Eduardo Spinelli.
For duo.
Instrumentation: B♭ clarinet and oboe.
Approximate duration: 13´.
Premiere: Il Suono Mobile Ensemble, Stuttgart 2004.

Pese a todo (2002)
Trio dedicated to Jimmy Herrera. Different harmonic fields slightly transformed in time.
For trio.
Instrumentation: soprano saxophone, electric guitar, cello.
Approximate duration: 12´.

El giro de la rueda (2001)
Development of the idea advanced in Dibujado en el cielo, with a smaller ensemble.
For large ensemble. (24 instruments).
Approximate duration: 20´.

Dibujado en el cielo (2000-2001)
Four orchestral groups divided in the space configured by various definitions of the matter of the sound.
For orchestra, divided into four groups.
Approximate duration: 15´.

La alegría (2000)
Made in the Stuttgart Musikhochschule electroacoustics studios using the Pro-Tools and Audio-Sculpt programmes and in consultation with Marco Stroppa.
Electroacoustic work.
Approximate duration: 13´.

Si el horizonte múltiple (1996)
To define time through the performer’s breathing, the birth of any work.
For bass flute. (Amplification possible)
Approximate duration: 14´.
Partial premiere: Julián López Elvira, El Cruce Gallery, Madrid 1996.

Nace quizá (1995- Rev. 1999) [fragm. partitura]

I decided some time ago to buy a clarinet that was on sale, reduced.
I envied the way visual artists could work directly on the material, and so wanted to try for myself the different possibilities for work on a new score.
It was fascinating because I am not a clarinetist but, despite my deficiencies, using the instrument so directly from the outset changed by usual relation with composition. I no longer felt like a conjurer, and became something much truer: a mere craftsman.
I was intrigued at that time by the idea of working on self-forming structures, taking my example from extra-musical sources, particularly the model Gaudí built for the Güell colony Crypt, and Alexander Calder’s mobiles.
This material, self-forming in space, is transferred into acoustic elements with the use of a very specific group of clarinet multiphonics. Not any would do and I deliberately chose some which are particularly unstable, hard to control, varying greatly in their configuration depending on the different actions taken on them: fingering combinations, changes of embouchure pressure, varying emission from the air column, different spatial modulation of the instrumentalist’s internal resonance, extreme dynamics etc. The corporeality of the material itself is what defines its “gravitational forces”, its inherent tendencies.
On the other hand, paradoxically, the fields of rhythmic mosaics on which these multiphonics act are almost always perfectly defined, suggesting an idea of control so that a highly productive contradiction arises in nearly all the work: those rhythmic elements tend to become fixed while the very nature of the multiphonics tends toward an unpredictable self-configuration.
The instrumentalist’s work is at once fundamental yet highly complex and must accept that paradox, of creating movement via multiple impacts between forces which tend to interrupt and almost simultaneously project the sonorous continuum and, additionally, having to incite a state of alert, realising that what is written down merely sets limits, to attain a reality which is filled with infinite perspectives, appearances, possibilities born in each attempt … perhaps.
(Carlos Bermejo, Madrid 2000)
For bass clarinet. (Amplification possible)
Approximate duration: 13´.
Premiere: Iván Solano, Finnish Ibero-American Centre, Madrid 1999.

Borrarse (1994- Rev. 2000)
“Erase,
Only in the absence of any sign, the god sits.”
(Jose Angel Valente, Borrarse in Al Dios del lugar, p.19, Tusquets editores, Barcelona 1989.)
For wind quartet.
Instrumentation: alto flute, bass flute, B♭ clarinet, bass clarinet.
Approximate duration: 10´.
Premiere: Musikhochschule Stuttgart Ensemble, Stuttgart 2000.