Title of Poem or Text Le Navigateur du Soleil Incandescent
Program Notes
The text Le Navigateur du Soleil Incandescent by the Portuguese poet Al Berto, articulates itself in two emotional levels: one melancholic, rather lyrical, in which Al Berto portraits love, the longing for love, the fantasy of a longing; and another in which Al Berto portraits solitude: for Al Berto, solitude is the solitude of terror, a state of revulsion and despair. It is on this level that the text is most autobiographical.
Based on the original text, I worked out, with the poet, a sequence of fragments, which articulated in a chronological form in relation to the initial text give shape to the plot of this work. The result is a sequence of monologues in which the character, the Navigator, surrenders himself to the despair/melancholy of the absence of a love that will save him from his solitary destiny.
Before the elaboration of the musical discourse, my work passed through the decoding of "images", "crystallized residues" retained in the memory after the reading of Al Berto's text. All this traces that remained from the reading of his texts are retrieved before they dilute or transform themselves, or simply disappear in the memory. The emotional reading of the original text led me to a rather concrete perception of a possible musical discourse, starting the necessary mediation processes between the dimensions of time and space.
The cycle Le Navigateur du Soleil Incandescent was started in 1998 with the planning of the work for counter-tenor, soloist chorus and orchestra, and went through several phases. During the first phase the nuclear material was worked up and its evolution was planned in a way that was still quite abstract: the material and its "DNA" are structured before the actual design of the work. This phase does not present, yet, the image of the work's form. In this work phase I give more importance to the planning of the structure, to the construction of the sound material, which although it already reveals its own identity and partially defines qualitative aspects of the form, is not yet presented as a musical discourse. In other words, the musical sense or musical context of the material is not yet represented in this phase. As Ramon Barce puts it "... The vision of the work is outside of its own creative moment", which corresponds to the initial level, the first contact with the idea and to its "rationalization" in a still rather abstract frame. This means that there are two moments in the achievement of the work: a first moment where the planning is still rather vague, very frail, without clear contours, and a second moment, where the planning gains structure, when the elaboration of the material which will constitute the work is started, i.e. the codes upon which the work will be built, and which represent the image that comes before the image of the work's form. The material developed, essentially, through the expansion of its concrete musical characteristics, contributing, from the beginning, to the expressive quality or identity, which will be present in the final achievement of the work. In this case, the unity principle does not search a super control; on the contrary, it tries to create nuclei, formants, which will manifest themselves differently as they interact with each other.
The second phase of the work's creative process, the Achievement, corresponded to the materialization of the musical idea; this is the phase where the individuality of the creation emerges. It is here that, from the same material that defines the cycle, the individuality of this piece emerges.
