tracks

Mil Maneras 1
Mil Maneras 2
Interiority 1
Interiority 2
Interiority 3
Interiority 4
Interiority 5
Vitrales

notes

ALBUM NOTES

This recording documents my through-composed works for guitar. The instrument’s intimate sound was combined with electronics and spoken text and was used in site-specific installa-tions. The CD revisits this music, featuring new performances by Oren Fader.

The first pieces presented are the result of ongoing collaboration with artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. Our multimedia installation Mil Maneras was featured by the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway (2003). That material was expanded and exhibited as Threads of Memory at the Dak’Art Biennale de L’Art Africain Contemporain, Senegal (2004). In Dakar, multiple video projections and sound were installed among machinery left dormant in an abandoned textile factory. Initially, the piece resonates within the ambience of the space and then it alludes to perpetual rhythms once heard in the textile shop. This installation and Campos-Pons’ artist-lecture at the factory inspired the local community to convert the abandoned space into an art center.

Interiorità o Luna Sulla Collina (Interiority or Hillsided Moon) (2003) is a permanent outdoor installation commissioned by La Marrana di Montemarcello, La Spezia, Italy. The work comprises a nocturnal experience in which visitors encounter a constellation on orbs displaying video imagery, projecting sound and revealing illuminated inscriptions of a text by Peruvian poet César Vallejo. The work is nested in a bucolic enclave facing the marble caves of Carrara, visible across the Ligurian valley. Prior to creating this piece, commissioner Gianni Bolongaro took us to see the tomb paintings in the Etruscan necropolis in Tarquinia. The music is suggestive of the lyre player and dancer frescos depicting the Etruscan vision of the afterlife, portrayed in some panels as a vibrant and seductive continuation of our present existence.

Vitrales (1999/2003) is the earliest composition in the present series and is the piece that opened the way to a new relationship with the guitar. It incorporates timba rhythms I heard in Cuba with algorithmic processes and expanded ideas from the jazz language introduced to me by composers George Russell and Bob Brookmeyer. Parts of the piece were drafted using computer software I designed but the final version was made by hand, often with the guitar in my lap to feel how fingers dance in what for me is a new musical world.

I am extremely grateful to Oren Fader, my collaborator for these recordings. Oren’s artistic brilliance and dedication made the experience of revisiting these works a pleasure and process of discovery.

Neil Leonard, 2014

credits

Composition – Neil Leonard
Guitar – Oren Fader
Recitation – Benedetta Piantella Simeonidis, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
Sound Design – Neil Leonard

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