Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

Iluminación or 'Illumination' was commissioned by Colombian soprano Angela lnés Simbaqueba (Bogotá, Colombia), and sets a text by Spanish poet, storyteller and playwright Agustín García Alonso (1947-). The work adopts an 'organic,' or intuitively-driven invention of a basic theme and associated set of melodic variations in conjunction with a formal compositional approach utilizing a harmonic progression based on the theoretical writings of Russian composer, music theorist, and composition teacher Joseph Schillinger (1895-1943) as presented in American minimalist composer and music theorist (also former student of Morton Feldman) Tom Johnson's publication Other Harmony: Beyond Tonal and Atonal (2014). Schillinger's principal theoretical writings include Kaleidophone: New Resources of Melody and Harmony: Pitch Scales in Relation to Chord Structures (2003) and Encyclopedia of Rhythms: Instrumental Forms of Harmony (2003), as well as his monumental two-volume work (published posthumously) entitled The Schillinger System of Musical Composition (1978). In Other Harmony Johnson says the following about Schillinger: "His most illustrious student was George Gershwin, who in fact studied with Schillinger exactly during the period when he was writing Porgy and Bess. Schillinger was not a mathematician, but he had a good mind for organizing permutations and combinations, and he understood the usefulness of isorhythmic processes. Of course none of these things were discussed in the composition programs of the universities and conservatories at the time, and in fact, they are rarely mentioned in composition courses today either." In the book Johnson discusses Schillinger's final three 'Chord Structures Classified into Families' presented in Kaleidophone, explaining that "the first four chords (the first family) are the four ways that one can construct a five-note chord if the intervals between adjacent notes consist of three major seconds and one fourth," while in the second and third families "the subsequent six chords are constructed with two major seconds and two minor thirds as adjacent intervals" in the former and "adjacent intervals of two major seconds, one minor third and one major third" feature in the latter.

Work Details

Year: 2022

Instrumentation: Soprano, piano.

Duration: 4 min.

Difficulty: Advanced — Professional

Commission note: Commissioned by Angela lnés Simbaqueba (Bogotá, Colombia)

The composer notes the following styles, genres, influences, etc in relation to this work:
Agustín García Alonso (1947-) Joseph Schillinger (1895-1943) Tom Johnson’s publication Other Harmony: Beyond Tonal and Atonal (2014) Kaleidophone: New Resources of Melody and Harmony: Pitch Scales in Relation to Chord Structures (2003) Encyclopedia of Rhythms: Instrumental Forms of Harmony (2003) The Schillinger System of Musical Composition (1978) Combinatoriality