ensemble mosaik

Written for a solo percussionist, ensemble and video, this new piece by Manuel Rodríguez-Valenzuela was initially planned as a live performance. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, “time. cage" will be presented as a concert film exclusively produced for MaerzMusik 2021. There are 2 different parts, “time” and “cage", each of them divided into smaller movements and all of them intertwined together:

.cage

I liked it the idea of having the solo percussionist caged in a small room full of amplified instruments, built and designed by myself. At first it was a practical decision, a closed room would mostly stop the natural sound of the instruments and therefore not mixing with their amplification and effects. But then it became clear to me that caging the soloist had much more to do with the need of communication from the point of view of isolation. For that I imagined a bird singing from its bird cage to other birds. Each movement of this „cage“ part is dedicated to each of the musicians, as if the soloist was having a dialog with each of them. It seems birds sing for “vanity", it is so they appear to be fit and healthy to other birds …

time.

In the last years, time and its perception became an important topic in my life. I experienced a sudden contrast between the high-speed and the very slow motion, and since then my music seems to focus on this contrast. It looks like our brains trick us in different ways to deal with all the amount of information that technology brings to our daily lives. Some researchers think our hunger for time and information may modify our brains so we start to perceive different layers of time simultaneously in the future.
In this part I focus then on the perception of time in our high-speed society, but also from the context of isolation. For this my idea was to record audio and video material of the musicians playing an arrangement of an old jazz song, and with this, then "compose" and edit short pieces using different time effects (slow motion, fast forward, reverse, repetitions and so on).

Manuel Rodríguez Valenzuela