Altazor

“As soon as you leave your homeland,” says composer Hilda Paredes, who comes from Mexico and has been living in London for a long time, “you become a citizen of the world.” Her work not only establishes continuity between the past and the present, but also denies any separation between the musical cultures of the northern and southern hemispheres or the Old World and the New, repeatedly building bridges between the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica and European-American modernity. The complexity of her sound world is rooted in this dual cultural identity and reflects diverse influences from both worlds.

But Paredes does not look only to the past. She takes a keen and compassionate interest in the social conditions in her country, using her works to address themes of migration and the search for a better life.

In addition to tradition and the current reality of life in her homeland, Hilda Paredes's work is rich in references to literary and visual works by her contemporaries and to Mexican cultural history. The first work on this album, the monodrama “Altazor” for baritone, eight soloists, and electronics, can also be seen in this context. It is based on an epic poem published in Madrid in 1931 by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, the founder of the literary movement “creationismo”, a variant of surrealism. The musical language depicts this disintegration of consciousness and language of the poem fragments with a broad spectrum of instrumental and vocal techniques that are subjected to live-electronic processes.

Two further aspects of Hilda Paredes’s creative output can be seen in the two ensemble works on this album: “Epitafio” was written in response to a death in the composer’s family, and “Siphonophorae”, whose compositional idea and formal structure are borrowed from a fascinating phenomenon in the world of marine life, was inspired by a work of visual art.