El guardador de rebaños / xiv

In homage to Alberto Caeiro

This piece is inspired on the essence of the thought of Alberto Caeiro, the stoic, naturalist heteronim of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. "O guardador de rebanhos" –"The keeper of the sheep"– is a cycle of 49 poems. This piece casts poem number XIV into music that aims to translate Caeiro's disinterest in rhyme as a human artificial device as well as his love of nature as it is, devoid of human meaning. The following are the first two lines of poem XIV of "O guardador de rebanhos": "Não me importo com as rimas / Raras vezes há duas árvores igais uma ao lado da outra". In English: "Rhymes do not interest me / Seldom are there two identical trees side by side". Almost twenty years after having read this poetry for the first time, I realize that its essence is at the core of my current musical practice of translating natural sounds into music.

Performeres: Citlali Rosas, clarinet; Teresa Navarro, soprano; Fernando Carmona, piano; Jesús Sánchez, violin; Claudia Cosme, cello; cond. Christopher Luna-Mega