Javier Alejandro Garavaglia

Arte Poética (II. Stanza) for quadrophonic tape (1995)

Genre: Acousmatic Music

Duration: 11:00

Arte Poética (II. Stanza) is based on the second stanza of the poem Arte Poética by Argentinean poet Jorge Luis Borges. The purpose of the work is to describe musically what it is said in these four verses, hereby free translated from the original Spanish:

To feel that the vigil is another dream,

That dreams that it doesn't dream and that the death

Which our flesh is afraid of, is the death

Of every night, which is called dream.

In the original, Borges makes a constant use of the alliteration of the letters "s" and "ñ" in the words "sueño" (dream), "soñar" (to dream) "sentir" (to feel), "sueña" (dreams). For this electroacoustic piece, these letters were taken out from the spoken text (digitally recorded with the composer's voice) and were treated usign several types of different DSP processes, such as transposition, filtering, frequency modulation, convolution, etc. The entire spoken text was also used in the same way, combined with the letters (convolution of both), or frequency modulated with sine tones. The work is the second of a series of three, all based in the poem.

The work was completely produced and composed at the ICEM of the Folkwang-Hochschule ESSEN (Germany) using Csound and SoundHack 0.7 by Tom Erbe. It was mixed with Sound Designer II and ProTools 2.0.

The piece got a mention award from the „Tribuna Nacional de Música Electroacústica „ in Argentina in 1996. Its has been performed in Hong-Kong, Germany, the UK, Argentina and the USA.

Quadrophonic distribution (according to the typical German clockwise distribution)