Anatomia de um Poema Sonoro

Programme Note

Anatomia de um Poema Sonoro was conceived as a phonetical deconstruction of the text. The succession of the musical events flows in a way more or less direct to the text that cross the whole score. In Anatomia there is a concrete transfiguration of the language in music. The words provide the sonorous and rhythmical material of the piece and, simultaneously they become itself loud poetry. The music is sometimes an instrumentation of the text and, other times the text is music. With the exception of the poem from Kurt Schwitters "An Ana Blume" the text used in the piece is based on the poem by Jorge de Sena entitled "Amor". Senas' verses emerge transformed in sequences of spoken and whispered words where the original text is intercalated with sentences coming from itself although forming a parallel text without its' original sense. This is the way that a nonsense verse is brought into existence from Senas' poem and transforms itself in what it remains: sounds and rhythms; a text released from its' semantical sense and for this reason loaded with a new and different meaning of sonorous and rhythmical dimensions. The quotation of three sentences from "An Ana Blume" by Kurt Schwitters ("Blue is the colour of your blond hair. Red is the colour of your green bird. You yours you to you me to you you to me - Us?") is the symbolic culmination of the text as rhythm and as sound.

The composing processes I have used in this piece are shaped by the text and by its' particular relation to the instruments. This aspect conducted to the creation of a new musical vocabulary that allowed a smooth path between music and text: often a direct connection between noises and consonants, between tones and vowels. The sonorous synthesis of the text leads to the music and the resynthesis of music leads to a new text.

Luis Antunes Pena