Materia Salvaje

Performed by Javier Collado at the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music on November 30, 2016.
Later performed by Evan Clark at the Colwell Playhouse, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, March 31, 2018.

In the work Materia Salvaje, I explore the semantic possibilities of the word “salvaje”, the Spanish word for “savage.” The violent, the untamed, the grotesque, the primal, the radical, and the excessive, struggle for dominance in the piece, thus establishing a polarity between the organic and the inorganic, between that which follows from an idea of nature, and that which is unnatural, the product of human excesses. The work begins with breaths that gradually fill the instrument with sound. Inhalations and exhalations collapse into growls and moans that give way to a clear-sounding note. Melodies intertwine with short repeated notes that resemble birdsongs, giving the impression of a constant flux between tempi. As these gestures come to completion, the work introduces a recording of verses by Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, whose Cántico Cósmico fuses quantum mechanics, cosmogonies, theology, and the grueling history of Latin America into an epic song cycle of Homeric proportions. The verses I extracted for my work explore a particularly violent scene where a pregnant woman’s womb is pried open by counter revolutionary forces in Managua. At its closure, the stanza leaves us with the unborn child at gunpoint, suggesting a bleak cycle of inherited atrocity, of coming into a world whose matter organizes into its own annihilation from the outset. As the saxophone explores a wide gamut of harmonic possibilities, the recorded voices of the poem are manipulated so as to slowly remove the traces of the human, leaving an irreducible grain that can now barely be mapped into the anthropomorphic. Only the birds remain at its closure. Erratic flapping wings and melodies guide a return to the beginning, to breath.

What I sought to investigate in Materia Salvaje was not only the possibilities of a sound that slipped through the cracks of convention. I sought, fundamentally, to devise a musical language that came to terms with the body’s pain, with the sounds that inhere in torture. In this black hole of suffering, language no longer seems to suffice. There are no words. Cardenal, however, forged a language from this very moment, and his work led me to pursue a question whose answer I seek in my practice and in the years that follow as a graduate student of composition. If there is no language, is there at least a sound? What could be gained or lost by inhabiting this threshold where the flesh becomes word and becomes sound, or perhaps something in between? I envision a future in music where these questions cultivate works that constantly bring to the fore the limitations of communication while simultaneously and relentlessly imagining its possibility.