Humo del Mar

About

The name Humo del Mar comes from a physical phenomenon that fascinates me: when the outside temperature is very cold, the sea, whose water is warmer, can give off a mist due to the thermal shock. It is a very simple phenomenon, but it struck me because of the poetic vision it evokes. Ethereal sounds, stretched temporalities, instrumental breaths resonating through the notes, chords circulating from one register to another… these are some of the musical ideas that inspired me before starting the conception of this piece.

Humo del Mar is made up of five sections and offers a journey between waters, mists, and skies. The work explores the full palette of timbral colors offered by the wind quintet and develops the unique sonorities of each instrument. Various effects, such as breath sounds, create links between instruments with very different timbral qualities.

On the harmonic level, I developed a system combining polar notes (two to five per section), changing and evolving chords, as well as free notes. The polar notes form the structure of each section, defining the extreme and most perceptible notes. The changing chords are combinations of intervals chosen according to the desired tension in each subsection: some chords are more consonant, others more dispersed, some cover the entire spectrum of registers, while others are concentrated in a specific register. Multiphonics and harmonic sounds play a key role in this work: they allow me to work with complex combinations of notes and to modify the timbre of the chords according to the desired character. Finally, the free notes react to the chords and mainly use microtonality to alter them; for example, in this piece, I consider glissandi as free notes.

Regarding rhythm, I adopted a similar approach to my harmonic system. First, I designed the overall structure intuitively, taking into account elements such as points of tension, moments of release, “dead times” where the music is suspended in contemplation, and flows of energy. Then, I calculated the proportions of these structural elements to generate a series of rhythms with similar proportions, but transposed to a much smaller time scale (for example, in the first minute, you can hear a series of musical interventions with a total duration of five seconds, which reproduce in an accelerated way the proportions of the first ten minutes of the work).

The second level of rhythmic organization is based on repeated notes, which are perceived very clearly in some rapid interventions, but also exist in a more underlying form (for example, the bassoon rhythm is sometimes regular and slow in certain sections). Finally, the third level consists of free rhythms, which react to the main rhythmic patterns and repeated notes, and which participate in the construction or dissolution of rhythmic density by adding appoggiaturas, short notes, etc.



Clara Olivares, March 2020