Album Notes

By Kurt Gottschalk

There is no one voice for the orchestra. It can be a mass of shimmering strings, it can be outfitted with courtly brass or defined by bold percussion. It is, of course, the voice of the composer, the vehicle for arguably the grandest statements of Beethoven or Mahler or Ellington. A piano is a piano, a string quartet a string quartet. The orchestra is whatever shape, size and configuration its master deems it should be.

In the hands of the inventive composer Julián De La Chica, the orchestra becomes a force of 16 synthesizers. And while his Symphony No. 1 was created under the lock-down conditions of the Summer of 2020 with himself as the only musician, it is very much an orchestra.

“This work is the result of my exploration during the pandemic times, during my isolation” De La Chica says. “Before the pandemic, I was working on string quartets for a film, and due to government restrictions, the project was aborted.”

De La Chica began reworking his string quartets on synthesizer, then building from them, adding parts, adding voices and working those voices against each other, creating timbral relationships and dissonances the way a composer for acoustic orchestra does, but with the flexibility of creating entirely new sounds. His orchestra includes small noise-making devices and a variety of keyboards and synthesizers, some with multiple voices, some with electronic alteration. It’s an orchestra of one, but of many.

“It's not just about multiple keyboards playing something,” he says. “It’s also an exploration of the architecture of sound. For example, there is a construction between several organs, to achieve a particular sound.

“When I achieved that musical "chaos," I realized that the name of the work must be symphony,” he continues. “The patriarchal canons of the West, absolute music and its genres, governed by the Central European School, dictate the current meaning of what a symphony is. However, we cannot forget that symphony is a word that denotes and came from: balance and harmony. What is it then to write a symphony today? I thought. Well, maybe we don't have the symphonic ‘symphony’ orchestra available to record, but we do have a synth orchestra in an all spectrum of a digital world.”

The results are dark and hypnotic, evocative, sometimes cinematic. The four cycles (De La Chica avoids the term “movements”) work as a whole, but there’s no apparent narrative through line. Oddly, the one redemptive moment comes in the second cycle, which creates a fascinatingly discomfiting false promise. As music for a time of isolation, it works spectacularly well. As a musical offering of hope, somewhat less so.

Like the music, Henrik Langsdorf’s cover illustration suggests a story without telling it. It’s strangely tangible while being wholly alien, somehow both urban and cellular. When De La Chica saw Langsdorf’s work, he was inspired to write to the artist and ask to use a piece of his.

“Alien” might not be the right word. Upon further consideration, it might not be otherworldly so much as it is of two worlds. Langdorf’s work draws from his life between New York City and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Maybe something in that consciousness between worlds appealed to the Colombia-born De La Chica.

According to Langsdorf, the image—which bears the utilitarian title collage a0548—shows “buildings, unmoored from their spatial context float inside and outside of bubbles, which can be protective and isolating at the same time. Orientation is lost, and what is left of urban structures is drifting in an undefined space between loneliness and solitude.” There is no up or down. The image is dizzy with decay. Like de la Chica’s Symphony No. 1, it was created in response to the global pandemic.

“Symphony means ‘harmony,’ ‘balance,’ ‘consonance,’ and this music, came from this particular time: the pandemic,” De La Chica says. “I’m using this word for my exploration of the glory of chaos, where our society is an experiment, a transfiguration of the models and our priorities.”

Our societal priorities, in De La Chica’s eyes, have been transfigured. In Langsdorf’s eyes, buildings themselves are transfigured, undermining their purpose. This is music of uncertain times. Let us hope for something more heroic, but no less enigmatic, from his Symphony No. 2.