TENSIÓN TRANQUILA (QUIET TENSION)
for oboe and electronics

Commissioned by Colectivo E.72 in Pamplona, this piece was composed over a year of work that heavily relied on collaboration and the exchange of ideas about instrumental techniques with oboist Pilar Fontalba. Tensión tranquila is the first in a series of works for solo or featured instrument through which I aim to explore musical ideas and instrumental techniques that focus on the inner essence of gesture, its simplification, and its extreme amplification. The title refers to the character resulting from working with the material based on this principle.

In Tensión Trnquila, there is a rather unusual idea compared to the music I have composed in recent years, as its nature is not linked to a pre-existing sound, whether “natural” or “artificial.” Instead, it emerges precisely from an instrumental gesture taken to the extreme, relying on the “physicality” of the performer’s action on the oboe: a very slow glissando, broad in range, steady, and extremely long. (The first instance lasts more than 2’20” and spans a major seventh; the second glissando occurs within a major sixth interval and lasts at least 42 seconds.) This gesture is multiplied and reflected in various ways within the electronic part through different real-time processing techniques. Like the stone that precedes the sculpture, in a way, these two glissandos helped me pre-sculpt the form of the entire piece.

On the other hand, Tensión tranquila also brings together some ideas already present in the music I composed previously, particularly in the electronic part: these are techniques through which I attempt to establish a link between sound objects derived from reality. The methods of manipulating these objects—through compositional craftsmanship that also includes the use of computer tools, as in earlier pieces—are present here as well, and at times are reflected quite evidently. They maintain, at various moments, close ties with the structure of the original sound objects and their perceptual qualities. Some of the basic objects, however, result from pre-compositional elaborations (specifically, I used cross-synthesis techniques to process a sample of sounds produced by various birds, blending the original sound object with different manipulations of it). This transformed their "natural" nature into something "artificial." Other basic concrete materials stem from the envelope of a sound sample of a crystal glass and its resonance, as well as the sound produced by breaking it. Additional sounds come from the oboe itself, especially whistle tones and noise-like sounds. The various interactions between the instrumental part and these materials, and the resulting processes, do not always maintain their seemingly opposing characteristics; at different moments, the oboe itself assumes various guises derived from the concrete objects.

At the end of the piece, the oboe’s glissandos reappear, superimposed on the percussive sounds of "glass" and their resonance. This time, although shorter, the nature of the gesture and the overall spectral composition are amplified once more. This amplification is not only due to the overlapping and complementarity of the described instrumental and electronic sounds but also because, in this instance, the glissandos are performed by the oboist on several multiphonics. By their nature, these multiphonics contradict the standard instrumental technique required to produce glissandos. These glissando multiphonics are not achieved through electronics but exclusively through innovative instrumental techniques developed by Pilar Fontalba.