ENSEMBLE
OTHERNESS
:: ABOUT THE WORK ::
DADDY
:: ABOUT THE WORK ::
Otherness (2014)
for flute / bass flute, clarinet / bass clarinet, violin, viola, violoncello, piano and percussion

Program Notes:
Moving to a foreign country forced me to deal with the idea that I am “the other”: I am a non-citizen, an alien, “the international student”, “the Brazilian girl”, “the female composer from Brazil”. It was strange to see my whole identity become so intensely bound to the country in which I was born.
Some thoughts about being uprooted, culturally inadequate, socially disempowered and artistically overlooked set the tone of Otherness. In this piece I worked with materials that were radically different and tried to manipulate them to find points of similarity, either via physical gesture, timbre, melodic shape and/or rhythmic patterns. The idea of being in someone else shoes, as a way of understanding different perspectives and later on being able to incorporate and/or transform these perspectives, colored the way I treated the instruments in this piece, as well as some decisions about form.
:: SCORE ::
Click here if you'd prefer to download the score.
:: AUDIO FILES ::
Full piece:
Recording: live performance of the premiere, at the Harvard Summer Festival, in 2014. Performed by Talea Ensemble.
Daddy - I. Sylvia Plath (2017)
for flute, clarinet, violin, violoncello, piano (optional disklavier) and electronics

A few words about Daddy:
In Daddy I used Sylvia Plath's homonym poem as motivation. I am very interested in the intersection between music and language, and have been experimenting with the idea of creating works in which I "remove meaning from language" and "add meaning to music".  I disagree with some that say that "music is a language" , but the attempt to make music become language interests me very much.
On one hand, I tried to obscure the meaning of Sylvia's words: I used an old recording of Sylvia Plath reciting her poem, transformed it into MIDI data and played it back into the disklavier. I wanted to convey the idea that her voice is trapped inside the piano, using the rhythmic and melodic patterns of her speech, but removing the meaning of the words.
On the other hand, I tried to re-convey the meaning of her words by using music. I used fragments of Die Walkurie and Tristan und Isolde and associated this with Sylvia's conflicted emotions when she realizes that her deceased father was a Nazi; I did spectral analysis of her voice saying "daddy" and orchestrated it; I used Klezmer tunes and associated them with Sylvia's self identification as Jewish, and the people who lived in the same village in which her father used to live; I created recurrent sonic environments in which I tried to convey affects that the poem might trigger: rejection, disgust, disappointment, vindication...
The electroacoustic component of Daddy is triggered by the pianist, who uses a MAX patch to trigger sounds that will be played by three speakers: one of them hidden inside the piano, and the other two placed on stage.
:: SCORE ::
Click here if you'd prefer to download the score.
:: AUDIO FILES ::
Full piece:
Recording: live performance, at Banff Center for Arts & Creativity, in 2017. Performed by ICE, conducted by Steven Schick.