PREMIERE AT TAMPERE BIENNALE 2022

 

My composition El sueño (Dream) will have its world premiere at the Tampere Biennale on 7.4.2022, at 19:00 in the Old Church of Tampere. The work will be performed by Eva Alkula (kantele), Janne Tuomi (percussion), and Juha Sipilä (synthesizer).

 

El sueño was completed in 2019 and I composed most of it in Spain, in the Mediterranean coastal landscape. The Mediterranean plays
an important role in the thinking behind the piece. It’s the first time I’ve used concrete sound in my work. Now I felt I had to record the night sounds of the Mediterranean – the wind howling through the shutters of our apartment and African musicians playing in the feria.
These materials, which were recorded on CD, have been processed on a synthesizer, for which I have also composed my “own" music.

 

Apart from the Mediterranean, another major influence on the work is the plight of refugees. On 25 May 2019 I wrote the following for the opening page of the score: “In 1492, after the conquest of the entire territory of Andalusia from the Moors by the forces of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Granada, the Sephardic Jews – those who refused to convert to Christianity – were expelled from Spain.
They fled to North Africa and to various parts of Europe.

 

El sueño (The Dream) owes much to the melody and mood of the Sephardic Jewish lullaby ‘Durme, durme’. A mother lulls her child to sleep and reads the Torah to him. The melody of the lullaby appears only once in the work in a recognisable form, but in its various modifications
it forms the pervasive mournful undertone of the work.

The Mediterranean also exists as a kind of pedal point in the composition. Its shores, which are now popular tourist destinations, have witnessed – and continue to witness – the immeasurable human suffering of refugees over the centuries. Adults and children from all over Africa brave the sea to escape violence and difficult living conditions. Thousands of them have drowned in the waves on the way.

 

Our approach to refugees is not determined by the direction in which people flow, or by the ethnic group to which they belong.
The directions and ethnic groups change over the centuries, but the causes of displacement remain the same. In addition to natural disasters,
they include human ignorance and greed. The consequences are disease, war, a lust for power, and religious fanaticism.

Against this background, I hear the old Sephardic Jewish lullaby as a distant expression of goodness and love.”

 

When I wrote the opening words of El sueño, I had no idea that in a few years millions of Ukrainians would be forced to leave their homes as a result of a senseless war.