Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Aire para Soro or 'Air for Soro' was commissioned by the Orquesta Sinfónica de Chile, and especially composed as a Hommage à Enrique Soro (1884-1954) for performance by the Chilean National Symphony Orchestra conducted by José Luis Domínguez - as part of a concert event in Santiago, Chile celebrating the life of Soro curated by Chilean musicologist, teacher and composer Luis Merino. Enrique Soro Barriga was not only a distinguished pianist, conductor, teacher and composer, but was also widely recognized as a great improviser on the piano and credited as composer of the first 'Chilean' symphony: Sinfonía romántica (1920). Aire para Soro attempts to capture some of the individual spirit of this iconic composer, and just like his own Tres aires chilenos (1942), fuses Chilean folk music with contemporary classical music composition. The rhythmic foundation of the work is none other than the 'Chilean' cueca (a poetic-musical form, and Chile's national dance), but in striking contrast to its general embodiment, Aire para Soro adopts the basic cueca rhythmic cycle along with 8 variations (selected compound duple meter, or dotted quarter-note subsets of the 6/8 meter) and their 64 possible permutations. In order to then generate a sense of 'improvisation,' the rhythmic sequence of the entire work has been organized according to the disposition of True Random Number Generators (TRNGs are nondeterministic and aperiodic, and based on atmospheric noise, as opposed to Pseudo-Random Number Generators, or PRNGs, which are deterministic and periodic, and based on algorithms that use mathematical formulae). The chaconne-like linear structure adopts the novel harmonic concept of 'equal and complete' from American minimalist composer and music theorist (also former student of Morton Feldman) Tom Johnson, eloquently presented in his publication Other Harmony: Beyond Tonal and Atonal (2014). The combinatorial pitch series is based on 24 chords belonging to Forte 3-7 (0, 2, 5), and is not only expanded vertically with the establishment of polychords generated via the juxtaposition of the original Forte 3-7 chord with its inversion (a minor second apart), but is also given an improvisatory characteristic with each chord individually accorded with a two-octave polymodal scale. The result of this compositional methodology is a scale with not only a unique ascent and descent, but with unique pitch content in each of those two octaves, generating a sense of 'organized' or 'notated' improvisation, which once more contributes to a correlation with the idiosyncratic aesthetics of Soro. Other such features that promote this trait include the use of the Plain Bob Minor (60 cycles of a six-digit pattern) bell ringing sequence (combinatorial melodic patterns utilized in bell ringing), appearing in the piano and harp accompaniments, not to mention the improvisatory-like melodic expansion of principal melodies aleatorically transformed by True Random Number Generators. The structure of the work is inspired by the common quadripartite architecture associated with the cueca (the second percussion solo even presents an opportunity for almost every member of the orchestra to perform the traditional cueca clapping, or 'palmas de cueca'), which is bound by numerical relationships (based on the "observation of the elements of nature, the stars and the human body") and the (8×) multiplication table.