New pieces by mentee composers in October at Budapest Music Center

More about the concert and ticket purchase HERE.

Kharir IV by Francisco Domínguez Robles (ESP)

"Kharir" (خرير) is a term that in classical Arabic means the voice of water, a very characteristic sound in Arabic art. The work is part of a cycle composed also by three other pieces in which I explore several "voices" from or related to Arabic music.

My interest in Arabic music began with my fascination for the traditional music of my homeland, Castilla-La Mancha, music that has always been with me and has always been very close to me since I started in music through it. When I researched the roots of this music, I found that they have a marked strong influence on Arabic music, especially the so-called Andalusian music, Hispano-Arabic music that flourished in Al-Andalus during the Middle Ages and that is still practised in the North of Africa. When I heard Andalusian music for the first time, I felt it was also very close to me, even though it was sung in a language so different from my own. Gradually, I went deeper into the Arab musical world and discovered many other types of music that fascinated me, which is why I decided to start writing the Kharir cycle back in 2016.

In Kharir IV specifically, I have worked on the music "Al-Ghayta" (الغيطة) traditional music from North Africa. This kind of music owes its name to double-reed wind instruments, also called al-ghayta. To perform this music, the instrumentalists use circular breathing, so that they can produce a continuous sound, without pauses; moreover, each one of them plays the same melodic line as the others, but with slight deviations, which often results in intervals of about a half-tone between the different instruments. Another feature that strikes me is that there are often subtle differences in tuning between the instruments, resulting in beatings when they play the same tone. All these characteristics create a unique sound, which I find fascinating and which I wanted to capture in my piece.

Wind by Balázs D. Kecskés (HUN)

The work was written for 13 wind instruments, the orchestration of which is the same as that of Richard Straus. It helped a lot to find a connection to the apparatus that the Strauss work, as well as some similarly composed pieces - e.g. After studying Mozart's Gran Partita, I began to deal with Péter Eötvös's composition Windsequenzen (Wind Sequences) for wind instruments. The piece, inspired by the Japanese landscape and Japanese gardens, impressed me not only with its special tones, but also with its title, which plays with the double meaning of the word “wind” - wind as well as wind instrument. In the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, the motif of the wind appears many times. I have chosen one such biblical passage as the title of the three movements in my piece now speaking. Through his compositional work, not only did I get closer to the motif of the wind, but my relationship to the apparatus of purely wind instruments also became personal.