As if Making a Confession

As if Making a Confession draws texts from three poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, as well as one by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is a dramatic piece that features elements from different worlds including opera, theater and chamber music. There is a continuous interaction between singing and reciting, and this is translated musically into a delicate relationship built between and around pitch and noise. Melody and harmony blend with sounds that become structural to the piece, sustained by a polyphonic rhythmical texture that is essential to the musical discourse. Within a diaphanous sound world, there is a constant dichotomy between pitch and noise, English and Spanish, chamber music and opera, tension and release. The work was written for the Plural Ensemble (Spain) as a companion piece to Elliott Carter’s A Mirror on Which to Dwell, and it was premiered at the National Auditorium of Madrid with soprano Caroline Stein and the Plural Ensemble conducted by the composer.