WORK INFORMATION

Twittering Machines

    INFORMATION

  • Composer: Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez
  • Country: México
  • Format/s: Duo
  • Instruments: Flute, Piano
  • Year of composition: 2003
  • Approximate duration: 13:00
  • Description: The ideas the Swiss artist Paul Klee expressed concerning the structure of art have fascinated me for a long time. Klee, himself a part-time musician, compiled many of the technical features of his work in a number of volumes of inspiring pedagogic value. Like several other composers, I have always felt attracted to what Klee could have called "Twittering Machines": the unpredictable mechanisms whose systematic—yet imperfect—behavior is not unlike the "processes" we often find in musical structures. I love to observe clockworks with missing or erratic parts; or a spider who laboriously tries to climb a wall, or one of those precarious robots built by Rodney Brooks, whose "function" is not to fulfill a task but, simply, to "exist". They are all twittering machines whose image, interestingly enough, often ignites my musical imagination. My musical "twittering machines", an uninterrupted chain of short variations, try to be be tangible, yet always imperfect, musical "mechanisms".
  • Commissioned by: Comisionada por el U.S./Mexico Fund for Culture.

    • PREMIERE DATA

  • Premiere location: Boston Conservatory.
  • Premiere date: 19/11/2003
  • Premiere performers: Asako Arai, flauta; y Frank Corliss, piano.

    • MORE INFORMATION

  • Commercial recording: Without Borders - Sierra, Heras, Gutiérrez, Grier, Lavista y Luna. Asako Arai, flauta; Cristina Valdes, piano. Albany Records, ALB1101.
  • Location: Contactar al compositor a través de su correo electrónico: carlossg@esm.rochester.edu
  • Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzjHmbf0uPQ
  • Additional Information: https://www.carlossg.com/twittering-machines-2003