Bartokian mutations

Infos :

BARTOKIAN MUTATIONS on MARE NOSTRUM THEMES   (Op.110)

Teo Aparicio-Barberán   

The Spanish composer Miguel Asins Arbó has been one of the most prominent of his time, especially in terms of his music written for cinema and his magnificent music for band. The use of popular melodies in many of his works for his band has allowed some of them to remain known to the public many years later. The symphonic poem "Mare Nostrum" is one of them. The harmonies used by this composer are solidly rooted in the tonal system, although Asins Arbó shows a perfect knowledge of all the compositional resources that allowed him to enrich the speech to the very limit of tonality, finding a fantastic balance between tradition and modernity.

I was always curious what would have happened if any of these popular themes had had a different structural and harmonic treatment. In my desire to seek this fusion of contrasting aesthetics, I thought that perhaps Béla Bartok would be the ideal composer to "lend" us some of his compositional procedures and what better result they would offer in music for wind instruments.

Béla Bartók is undoubtedly one of the most important composers of the first half of the 20th century and one who has attracted more attention from music analysts due to the originality of his proposals. Possibly the most important element to highlight among these is the axle system. It establishes the relationships of the note chosen as the tonic and the relationship with the dominant notes within a circle of fifths. The interval use that comes from the Fibonacci number series (1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, etc.) is also curious. At a structural level he was one of the strongest defenders of the golden section as a fundamental pillar in the organization of the materials that appear in many of his works.

Well, with all these ingredients I have written BARTOKIAN MUTATIONS on MARE NOSTRUM THEMES, a work that combines both aesthetics and allows both aesthetics to be combined in a work that does not have a pre-designed general structure but that does look for points of tension within a route pre-designed.

The composer

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