Instrumentation: solo clarinet

Duration: 8’

Commissioned by: José-Luis Inglés

Year: 2021

Programme notes

De un profundo hálito de tierra (tr. from a deep breath of earth) arouse from a tight collaboration with the clarinetist José-Luis Inglés, aiming to create a dialogue between contemporary classical music and the “cantes mineros” from the Levante of Spain (the south-eastern coast).

The cantes mineros (tr. mining singing) are a kind of flamenco singing usually associated with the region of Murcia (although it is not the only place of where we could find them). The recurrent themes in these cantes are death, sadness, pain and suffering due to the vicissitudes the mine, but there are also traces of protest and the consciousness of belonging to the proletariat.

This form of cante features exclusively voice and guitar, following a very simple structure which alternates interventions of both players. Despite its seemingly simple origin, I find a high content of self-controlled virtuosity in these kinds of cantes. Guitar may be the most obvious, through the use of very fast arpeggi and other figures, but the voice has also a great variety of colours and microtonal content. There is room for interpretative freedom by the players and they do not follow any measures nor periodic accents marking rhythmic structures. This fact makes the cantes mineros a true music of momentum, a spontaneous dialogue between voice and guitar.

De un profundo hálito de tierra presents all these features in a veiled, non-explicit manner. It evokes typical gestures of the guitar or the microtonal inflections of the voice. The listener will find quotes from specific cantes, such as the “Levantica”, but merged with clarinet techniques that enrich the timbre of the instrument. Also, reminiscences of the hard themes of the cantes mineros are captured in De un profundo hálito de tierra, being reflected on the musical material or the character of the piece; a character of a music born from the bowels of the earth.