Pianist Ana Cervantes commissioned 18 composers to write short piano pieces to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Pedro Paramo, an important proto-magical-realist novel by Mexican author Juan Rulfo. My Murmuring in Comalawas written for this project. 12 of the pieces, including mine, were recorded on compact disc and presented at the 34th Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato, Mexico on October 17, 2006. I wrote about the Cervantino Festival some months ago in my memorial entry for the Mexican composer Ramón Montes de Oca Téllez (1953-2006), who died shortly after this last festival.
After the premiere in Guanajuato, Ana has given subsequent performances throughout Mexico: at Irapuato, San Miguel Allende, Abasolo, and San Francisco Del Rincón. She will perform it again tonight at 7:30 PM in the auditorium of the Centro Veracruzano de las Artes (CEVART), Independencia 929, esq Emparan, Centro Histórico in Veracruz, Mexico. Commissioned works by other composers on this concert, from the U.S., U.K., Spain, and Mexico, include Jack Fortner, Anne LeBaron, Tomás Marco, Arturo Marquez, Stephen McNeff, Hilda Paredes and Eugenio Toussaint.
My program note for the piece:
Rulfo’s striking sonic palette (groaning wheels, rattling windows, falling rain and murmuring ghosts), echoes the complex narrative unfolding, where we rarely know whose voice we are hearing initially. Just as sounds imply someone making them, we recognize the voices peripherally, like registering a ghost image. We discover whose voice it was rather than whose voice it is. We must resist the temptation to steamroll through these difficult passages because these veiled voices are so crucial to our understanding. Equally striking is the novel’s non-linear conception of time. It flowers slowly in multiple directions. This is a lovely analog to music, which is surprisingly multidirectional: we listen ahead and backward simultaneously, constantly reinterpreting each new musical gesture by placing it in its previous context and anticipating its direction.