1 IMMERSION, ABSORPTION, CONNECTION. Composer Edgar Barroso presents a retrospective collection of works that explore his interest in contemporary sci- ence and technologies, social customs, spirituality, and more, using a variety of ensemble combinations and extended techniques for an array of textures and tonal colors. Commenting on prevailing social activities, Over-Proximity, a work in which the voices compete against each other’s seemingly disconnected phrases, addresses the hyper-connectivity and personal comparisons affected by social networking. The composer examines duration and perspective in works including Sketches of Briefness, Metric Ex- pansion of Space, and Aion, illustrating temporal relationships and the subjectivity of time. Scientific concepts inspire much of Barroso’s music, from the study of variation and change in Morphometrics to Echoic, which features the gamelan’s unique timbre and resonance spectrum. Barroso emphasizes balance, harmony, tranquility, and resolution in works like ACU and Ataraxia, while Noemata and Kuanasi Uato emphasize discord, struggle, and instability, evoking the hardships faced in his native Mexico. 2 KUANASI UATO Commissioned by the International Cervantino Festival, the name of this piece comes from an expression in the Purepecha language, Kuanasi Huato, which means “hill of frogs.” and describes the shape of a series of hills that look like many overlapped frogs. Kuanasi Huato is also the origin of Guanajuato, the name of a city in the center of Mexico, my native country. Because of the geographical characteristics of the city, one can only access it by going through tunnels that cross those hills. The transitions between the outside of the city and the arrival to it is quite unique. As a colonial city, it gives the sensation of going through a passage that leads to a different time and space. Therefore contrast between the old and the new, the abstract and the defined, along with constant and rapid changes are very important features in the piece. The sonic materials have a very different nature in terms of quality and behavior, nonetheless they constantly collide with one another, inhabit different sound spaces that radically change. Through- out Kuanasi Uato, sound itself starts molding the interactions between these materials until they sync with erratic flows of events. This struggle of having independent materials that then coincide in space, creates an overlapping of forces that allows a vocabulary of gestures to emerge. This piece is a sort of melancholic homage to the city of Gua- najuato, where I did my undergraduate studies and spent some of the most amazing moments of my life and where I have dear friends and family. INNATENESS IS MODULAR There is so much knowledge that exists in nature at birth. A great amount of the complexity of our language, habits and personality is produced by the mind rather than learned through experiences. This piece is constructed thinking of all the inherent information we have when we are born, and how these unique characteristics modulate our life in time. In a way, only with time we get to know ourselves in modules (stages in life). The piece is inspired by the concept of Plato, which states that we knew everything before we were born and just forgot all about it. Innateness is Modular begins with a “given,” “raw” material with a high energy profile and a lot of potential to expand and de- velop. It is a “sonic innateness” from which all the piece is constructed. Similar to our own development, this piece becomes the result of unfolding its own innateness in different modules. We are given with a certain essence, a personality that we really didn’t choose, but one that will unfold throughout our lives, revealing an important part of who we are. 3 MORPHOMETRICS Morphometrics is a field of knowledge concerned with studying variation and change in the form (size and shape) of organisms. This piece is about using some of the methods of morphometrics and applying them to sound struc- tures. These includes the measurement of lengths and angles (pitch and gesture), landmark analysis (spacialization), and outline analysis (dynamics and timbre). The first method is removing translations. These are needed in order to compare shapes (sounds). The sounds need to be fitted into a frame of reference that places them in the same sonic space. The second method is to use the “centroid” – that is, the “centre of mass” of the sounds. This centroid is calculated for each new sound and translated to the original sound. The result of these comparisons and translations generated a graphical score and served as a guide for the structure and shape of the piece. NOEMATA Disrupt, crack, break, interrupted, corrupted, decadent, unbalance, confusing, disorderly, disturbing, unruly, unset- tling, upsetting. All of these terms are quite common in two contexts that are very familiar to me as a composer and a person. The first context is when talking and thinking about contemporary art and music, where these words are the standard vocabulary in an academic setting. However, these terms started to appear in many of my day-to-day conversations in contemporary Mexico, where I’m a native and where all my family and many friends live. The pres- ence of drug cartels, along with the constant threat to be blackmailed or kidnapped, and the sense that nobody can realistically protect you or your family is quite unsettling and invariably creates anxiety. Like in a prehistoric jungle, the only possible thing to do is to hope that you, or someone you love is not the next victim. Therefore, I decided to reverse these terms from my compositional process in Noemata. It begins with breathing, the most basic function in human beings where it also indicates the level of anxiety. Nonetheless, soon after the begin- ning, relationships between the four instruments start flourishing: they become more and more aware of each other until common rhythms and gestures start emerging. At the time I did this piece, I prefered to treat sound as a force that needed reconciliation, continuity, shape, flow, stability, the opposite of the conventional jargon in contemporary music. This is the reason why Noemata has plenty coincidences, shared common rhythms, gestures and negotiations among the instruments, even erratic and conciliatory dialogues appear. Composing Noemata was an inner exercise of reconciliation. 4 METRIC EXPANSION OF SPACE The metric expansion of space is the increase of distance between distant objects in a space that is constantly ex- panding, like the universe. Even though the universe is expanding, it is not expanding into anything outside of itself. I imagine this expansion as very violent and extreme. The materials in Metric Expansion of Space are continuously growing, in a way in which a sort of force is relentlessly trying to stretch the limits of the instrument and the per- former. Trying to broaden the frontiers results in an endless effort where energy has no place to go, instead it returns to its own center, the core of the sonic vitality. With an obsessive, obstinate, rhythmic structure and with spasms of volatile activity that revolves in its own velocity, range, and capacity, the accordion becomes a machine that receives a non-stop stream of forces coming from the player embodiment of sound intention. Within the score, these bursts of energy can be located in several nearby moments in time with a very precise proportion-based compositional strat- egy. The piece uses amplification as a continuation of the idea of continuous expansion, aiming to expand the space and reach the limits of the instrument and the player. ACU Soon after a fascinating conversation with immunologist Dr. Nicolas Chevrier about the ways in which the body deals with infections, I became curious about how acupuncture may influence the immune system and the well-being of an organism. During the creative process of ACU, I decided to use acupuncture as a metaphor to build an electroacoustic piece with acupuncture concepts such as: the free flow of Qi, or vital energy; the pressing points that tonify where a deficiency is found, the draining where there is excess, and the permanent search for free flow. In this piece, the sound material is always restless, always looking for a sort of restoration of the (sonic) flow that never -really- comes. Sound in ACU is permanently transitioning from different types of energy qualities and spaces. Therefore, space plays a key role in the development of the piece, since every speaker is considered a “pressing point” which is part of the sound embodiment of ACU. Originally, ACU is a an electroacoustic 8.0 piece where the sound treatments and the spacialization relationships create an eve-changing “sonic organism” that breathes and moves in space. 5 ENGRAMA Engrama (for string quartet) is the first part of a modular trilogy that explores two concepts: memory and balance in re- lation to the escalation of violence in Mexico in the last few years. Strictly, Engrama is a hypothetical means by which memory traces are stored; it refers to the exact moment where the brain decides to create and classify pleasurable or traumatic memories in our lives. Engrama is related to with changes that happen in people’s brains when they realize that they are being the subject of a violent act; and the way in which our brain stores that very first moment where an experience can lead to sequels and traumatic memories. For the construction of Engrama, I heard and read several interviews of people in Mexico who have been kidnapped, and selected words or phrases that were common in many of them. Expressions like, “… it all happened very fast” or “...it was like if everything was under water”, were key to generating the sonic material and behavior of the piece.