“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want
to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all
the friends I want to see.” – John
Burroughs
New York Times. May 17, 2013.
Ritual Reaches: Playing the Backside of a Violin, Using a
Guitar Like a Cello.
By Corinna da
Fonseca-Wollheim.
The woman onstage
appears to be struggling. The sounds that are coming out of her are wordless,
labored and worrying. A wheezing inhalation. A whispered scream. Choking,
gagging, strangled croaks. A high-pitched whine that remains trapped behind her
closed lips and masklike face.
Many composers today
explore the border between music and sound. But the work of Julio Estrada, the
subject of the last Composer Portrait of the season at the Miller
Theater on Thursday evening, teeters on the threshold between
sound and something else.
In works like
“miqi’cihuatl,” for female voice, which here received a mesmerizing performance
by Tony Arnold, the thing on the other side of sound is not silence but a
primordial state of consciousness, in which emotions manifest themselves in a
physical form that is viscerally understood long before it is expressed.
On paper, Mr. Estrada, a
Mexican composer and mathematician who recently turned 70, cuts a forbidding
figure. His Modernist credentials include studies with Nadia Boulanger in
Paris, a residence at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany and theoretical
treatises on the relationship of rhythm and pitch. Because of the tortured
complexity of his obsessively notated scores (partituras in Spanish), some
musicians refer to them as parti-torturas. But Thursday’s survey proved that
while Mr. Estrada’s music is undeniably difficult to play and listen to, it is
also wildly entertaining to observe.
