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Miguel Farías: "Mambo Lines"

2,536 views · Published 13 October 2013 · 13:43 · Indexed 2 October 2026

Channel: NewMusicXX · 2013 · Music

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Miguel Farías: "Mambo Lines" (2011). Ensemble de la HEM de Genève, Cond. Jean Jacques Balet. Dedicated to: Dámaso Pérez Prado. Visual image: "Psychological Morphology" by Roberto Matta. 

Composer's program note: "Mambo Lines is the first piece where I did a deep work on the idea of "multidimensionality of musical objects", an idea that I've been trying to develop in recent years. I worked on different compositional aspects, always linked to the transformation of musical objects towards structural characteristics, creating multidimensional objects or musical figures or, as I try to exemplify in a simple image: showing the six faces of a cube at the same time. 

I am really close to the rhythms of South American folklore, especially Afro-Cuban, afro-ecuatorien, Colombian and Chilean music and culture, and this last time, I added these materials musical figures as multidimensional objects or ideas in my artistic research . It is interesting to see these patterns as material generators music, these general characteristics are based on the continuity and continuity accents inside.

For "Mambo Lines," I took the most used characteristics in the mambos of Perez Prado, for example, a melody going up or going down, that I turned into a structural aspect: The progressive transformation of a state to another."

The piece is based on the juxtaposition of layers of different musical parameters, always related and extracted from Perez Prado's mambos: there are different processes that operate at the same time in layers of `harmony, melody, rhythm, densification, and complexity of timbre, independent development of the timbre ( orchestrating phonemes that build the word "Mambo"), etc. The starting point of all my layers is a chord, at the other side, the arrival point against it, is the arrangement of two mambos "Perez Prado" (arrangement based on quotes and temporal transformations, spectral analysis of recordings and orchestrations).

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