I’ve been teaching music since I was 16. I believe music is an essential element of learning and I’ve worked in workshops with children and teenagers to help them doing their first steps in musical composition, as well as showing what is going on in Contemporary Music.
Stargate Prohaska
I am currently working in Stargate Prohaska, a production from Theater/Oper Bonn where 20 teenagers will develop and perform a Musiktheater inspired on the figure of Eleonora Prohaska. This project is part of Beethoven2020 events in Germany.
The project stands with the Team with Eva Eschweiler [music educator], Angela Merl [stage director], Susanne Röskens [stage director], Carina Eberle [Dramaturg] and me as Composition Coach and 20 teenagers between 14 and 20 years old, who have a couple of experiences standing on a stage.
My mission is to give them inputs in Contemporary Music and notions of Music Theory, but mainly to discuss with them what does it mean to compose Music nowadays. Our workflow is based on improvisation and little exercises done with objects and instruments or tape-based electronics, where simple formal procedures like repetition or variation are confronted; later on this improvisations are discussed and analyzed in group, so we get to be aware of our subconscious way to organize or search music elements.
Stargate Prohaska was going to be on stage on the 13 of June, but due to the current situation, the premiere is postponed; also our rehearsals and conception-Meetings. That means from March to nowadays, we are working with our composers-performers via Zoom Meetings, which it’s been a very challenging aspect for me: composing on group, with distance, without instruments to use, with internet delay, etc.
It’s almost practicing
On Summer 2018 I wrote the piece “it’s almost practicing” for young pianists.
The piece –around the idea of practicing Bach’s first Two-Part Invention– introduces a theatrical-performative elements, due to the use of objects like a Metronome or a Book as Musical Objects, as well as extended techniques.
It makes a lot of fun working in this piece with my pupils. Soon I will share a recording of the piece!
Ensemble TMC
On May 2017, Ensemble TMC –which is an Ensemble of pre-University music Students and their teachers– performed my piece “They are not talking about us” in the beautiful city of Segovia. I was invited to visit them and talk with the students who were going to performing the piece.
The conversation went around how did I get to the idea of being a composer, in an environment where there were no references at all, as well as what do I want to say with my music.
The Students in Ensemble TMC had a lot of questions regarding to the instrumental techniques I was using in my piece, and about the inclusion of noises in a Classical-Concert context, which brought as to talk about composers like John Cage or Helmut Lachenmann.
I really enjoyed the stay in Segovia and it fascinated me to see how involved were both students and teachers in the performance of Contemporary Music.
Composing for Prepared Piano
On March 2016 I was invited to teach a workshop in Teruel Music School about composing music for Prepared Piano, with children between 8 and 12 years.
The Workshop consisted in about 4 hours, and it ended with a performance for their parents of the pieces they composed with me. We had two groups divided on the ages who made one piece per group.
The Methodology consisted in first watching some Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes” and the piece “Waterwalk” to discuss is that music at all? “It is music because there is a piano there”.
The second step was to take time enough to prepare the piano and observe what was happening with the sound, and how should me place the objects and then play. This was accompanied by writing and drawing our impression of the sounds to remember it later.
Both groups had already decided a topic in which their composition should be inspired: air and water. The Composition process started with some ideas about what do we do with our elements in terms of structure and we took the inspirational elements to built a structure and organize the sounds. At the end everybody did a graphic-notation of the piece, based on some basic ideas I brought. The pieces were performed twice, to be aware of the interpretation possibilities of the graphic-notation.
It was a very nice experience both for me and the kids, and it was very funny how after the concert a lot of parents came to see our prepared piano and experiment themselves.