PABLO ORTIZ

Pablo Ortiz was born in Argentina in 1956. His mother was an amateur pianist, and she instilled in him a deep appreciation for the 19th-century romantic canon at an early age. In subsequent years he developed a crazy love for early music and tango, this time on his own. He has lived in the US for the last three decades. Vocal works represent a considerable part of his output, but he has also written orchestral, chamber and electroacoustic music, as well as music for films and music for the theatre. His work has been recognized with commissions from the Guggenheim, Koussevitzky, Gerbode, Fromm and Terezin foundations. In 2008 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is now working on a collection of songs setting Thomas Hardy’s poems from the turn of the century, interspersed with appropriately anachronistic tango interludes. His long and fruitful interaction with Paul Hillier could be described, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, as “one of those ‘English’ friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with dialogue”.

GALLOS Y HUESOS, SERGIO CHEJFEC

The poems that constitute Gallos y Huesos are by the Argentinean writer Sergio Chejfec, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1956. From 1990 to 2005 he lived in Venezuela, where he published Nueva Sociedad, a journal of politics, culture and the social sciences. He currently lives in New York City and teaches in the Creative Writing programme in Spanish at New York University. He is the author of several novels, essays and a book of poetry. The novels usually feature a slow-paced narration that interweaves a minimal plot with reflection. Memory, political violence, and Jewish-Argentine culture and history are some of the recurring themes in his work. His books have been translated into French, German, Portuguese, and English (the latter published by Open Letter Books).

Gallos y Huesos was published in Buenos Aires in 2003. The poet writes: “The scene that the poems describe is marked by repetition: the meal in solitude, chewing the meat and gnawing the bones, to leave the bones in the sink in the kitchen, and permanent allusions to the physical and moral virtues of fighting roosters, and to the scenery and ambiance of the pits, obviously death. One of the points into which the poems delve is the morphology of the rooster. Do they have a back? What is neck and what is head? The text suggests that it has arms and not wings. The poems are organized as variations on leitmotifs.”

And the composer adds: “The almost obsessive, repetitive quality of the poems makes me think of the different shades of grey in a barely lighted kitchen, when one stumbles into it in the middle of the night to drink a glass of water. In the music, areas of increased luminescence marked by the precise attacks of the harp or the high voices alternate with darker, less defined zones. Still, the boundaries between them remain somewhat vague throughout the piece.”

NOTKER

“I came across the texts in Notker thanks to Paul Hillier, who showed them to me in 1994. I was fascinated by the clarity with which Notker the Stammerer teaches ways to remember ‘extremely long melodies’, and the candid description that he offers of himself as a ‘toothless man of stammering speech’ when he talks about his own accomplishments. Coming from someone who died in 912, Notker’s comment was unexpectedly modern: I had the feeling that we could have been friends. I chose to set texts from the Prologue to the Sequences (In nomine Domini, incipit liber ymnorum Notkeri), from ‘The Life of Charlemagne’ (especially various kinds of musical references and instructions) and quotations from some of Notker’s own sequences (Virgo plorans, Qui to Virgo & Clare sanctorum). Finally, I wrote some organ solos to frame the vocal sections. The piece was written for and is dedicated to the Theatre of Voices and Paul Hillier.”

© Pablo Ortiz 2015