El Muro
Score title
El Muro
Composer
Ricardo Lorenz
More about the composer
Date
Instrumentation
Library copy
Program note
El Muro was composed with the generous support of The American Bandmasters Association/The University of Florida Commissioning Project. The title is Spanish for “the wall.” At a purely musical level, the walI imagined is a ten-minute long sound structure made up of tightly woven riffs, each suggesting a different style of Latin American music. Some of the styles I suggest are the Colombian cumbia, the Peruvian huayno, the Mexican son, the Cuban montuno, to name a few. My goal was to personalize these styles and to incorporate as many of them as I could without compromising the musical logic of the work. I accomplish this by deriving the riffs from variations of single folk sounding tune heard at the beginning of the work. I pace these riffs and make them interact with more abstract musical elements so as to create drama, build tension, and keep listeners guessing what comes next.
At a conceptual level, El Muro is my response to how I feel about walls, whether these walls exist in reality or in our minds. I should mention that I was raised in a South American city where most homes are surrounded by walls topped with barbed wire. To put it simply, I was raised a land of makeshift fortresses. This is how I learned early on that walls not only exist to delineate space but also to keep people away. In my own imaginary way, El Muro humanizes those people that walls keep away by connecting them to their longstanding cultural traditions. As an adult I learned that these traditions breed soulful, exciting and sometimes even influential music capable of making even the most sturdylooking wall tumble down.
At a conceptual level, El Muro is my response to how I feel about walls, whether these walls exist in reality or in our minds. I should mention that I was raised in a South American city where most homes are surrounded by walls topped with barbed wire. To put it simply, I was raised a land of makeshift fortresses. This is how I learned early on that walls not only exist to delineate space but also to keep people away. In my own imaginary way, El Muro humanizes those people that walls keep away by connecting them to their longstanding cultural traditions. As an adult I learned that these traditions breed soulful, exciting and sometimes even influential music capable of making even the most sturdylooking wall tumble down.