Commemorative Book dedicated to Miso Music Portugal
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Miso Ensemble and Miso Music Portugal (1985-2025), the book Sentem Sem Som Cem Sons Sempre was released last December...
Read more
When Miquel Bernat contacted Pedro Lima in 2021 to compose a piece for this CD, most of the other pieces had already been completed. Thinking about the overall balance of the album, Bernat asked for a slower piece. (As is typical of much marimba music, most of the other pieces thrive on speed and the rearticulation of notes—a way of counteracting the rapid decay characteristic of the marimba's sound.) Bernat suggested that Lima explore the sound obtained by playing with a bow on the instrument's blades, in order to achieve more sustained sounds with a softer attack.
A BIGINT exploratory process then began, in which Pedro Lima collaborated with João Braga Simões, one of the percussionists from Drumming. They explored not only the (already known) sound of the bow on the marimba keyboard, but also the possibility (highly unusual, if not unprecedented) of playing with the bow on the resonating tubes located under the keyboard, obtaining a sound close to white noise. The piece plays with these different timbres, combining them with more conventional sounds (played with drumsticks) and electronic sounds (some played live by the percussionists themselves, others worked on in the studio).
The use of pipes also reflects the composer's fascination with “the fact that the marimba is constructed in a way that is opposite to our world, with wood (earth) on top and metal structures (buildings) underneath.” This idea of the marimba as an “inverted city” and its tubes as a kind of mysterious ‘underworld’ also serves as a pretext for “meditating on and celebrating artificiality, the digital [and] the industrial,” dimensions naturally reinforced by the presence of electronics. This explicit invocation of a poetic and extramusical imagery is common in the approach of Pedro Lima, a composer trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with a strong connection to opera, text, and drama.
This connection is clear, for example, in the chamber operas Reel Woman (2018) and Dois Estranhos a Comentar Qualquer Coisa (2021), the latter also with his own libretto. Even his instrumental pieces can have text, as is the case with Talking ‘bout My Generation (2019), written for the Remix Ensemble during his residency at Casa da Música. Fake Nature Makes Me Cry will be a slightly more abstract exercise, but even though there is no explicit text, there is clearly a latent subtext and dramaturgy.
