Javier Alejandro Garavaglia

Arte Poética (Stanzas III to VII) for quadraphonic tape (1996)

Genre: Acousmatic Music

Duration: 13:00 minutes

This is the third and last piece of a cycle that I have been composing since the beginning of 1995, about the poem "Arte Poética" by the Argentinean poet Jorge Luis Borges. As in the former pieces of the cycle, I have tried to describe musically the meaning of the poem, which contains the essence of Borges philosophy. The main difference between this piece and the other first two is that this time the 5 last stanzas are put together, without almost a trend between them, sometimes one after the other, sometimes simultaneously.

Some materials and processes are taken from the earlier two pieces and varied here, always following the text of the poem. The most important material however, which had the most important part also in the first two pieces, remains to be the human voice, which is treated in almost every sound of the piece in many different ways, from the very rapid and easy recognition to combinations with sample-and-hold, FM, AM, filters, transpositions, mutation, convolution and granular processes, that make the recognition difficult or sometimes impossible.

All sound processes were made using Csound and SoundHack. The final quadraphonic master was mixed with ProTools. at the ICEM of the Folkwang Hochschule Essen – Germany.

The following text is a free translation of the stanzas III to VII of the poem "Arte Poética" from the original Spanish:

To see a symbol in the day or in the year,

About the days of man and about his years,

Converting the ignominy of the years

in a music, in a rumor and in a symbol.

To see in the death a dream, in the twilight

A sad gold, so is the poetry

Which is immortal and poor. Poetry

Comes back as the dawn and the twilight.

Sometimes in the afternoons a face

Looks at us from the bottom of a mirror;

Art must be like this mirror

which reveals our own face.

Some tell that Ulysses, tired of wonders,

cried with love as he saw his Ithaca

Green and poor. The Art is this Ithaca

of green eternity, not of wonders.

It is also like the infinite river

That flows and remains and is a crystal of the

same inconstant Heraclites, who is the same,

And also another, like the infinite river.

Channel distribution (according to the German typical clockwise distribution)