DISCORDANCIA (2019)

Instrumentation:

electric guitar (contains bowed guitar), piano, percussion, cello, and fixed electronics

Duration:

12 mins.

Program notes:

Discordancia (Discordancy in English) is a piece that deals with the concept of gender identity crisis. I’ve always been fascinated by the construct of human identity in social contexts, and I felt that a parallel could be drawn from the gender perspective to the identity of the performer. So I started writing a piece where identities could be interchangeable, where harmonically the piece itself would “struggle” to find where it belongs and morph constantly.

This idea is manifested in different levels on the piece, the cellist, for example, begins the piece by playing hand bells. This is an almost poetic way of posing a question to the audience: Why the cellist is not acting the way we he/she should be as a performer? Later things will get more mixed when the cellist will give the bow, as a morphing gesture, to the guitarist. From this point on the identity of the guitarist will be forever changed and he/she will only bow the guitar. As a final gesture, at the end, all of the performers are going to end up together at the piano. At this moment, I would like to think, that all of the performers identities have been changed to some degree, except one.