Ficciones by Mario Lavista Orchestra - Sheet Music

SKU: PR.620878560

UPC: 680160432356.

I owe reading the works of Jorge Luis Borges not only the title of my “Ficciones” for orchestra, but the discovery of “Simurg”, the immortal bird that nests in the branches of the Tree of Knowledge, an imaginary being engendered by the fantasy of men. In the “Mantiq-al-Tay” (Colloquium of the Birds) by the Persian mystic Farid al-Din Attar-(XIII century), the Simurgh is the symbol or image of divinity. The argument of this allegory is as follows: The faraway king of all the birds, the Simurgh, lets fall a magnificent feather in the center of China: tired of their age-old anarchy, the birds resolve to go in search of him. They know that their king’s name means thirty birds; they know his palace is located on the Kaf, the circular mountain that surrounds the earth. They embark upon the nearly infinite adventure. They pass through seven valleys or seas; the name of the penultimate is Vertigo; the last, Annihilation. Many pilgrims give up; others perish. Thirty, purified by their efforts, set foot on the mountain of the Simurgh. At last they gaze upon it: they perceive that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each one of them and all of them. In the Simurgh are the thirty birds and in each bird is the Simurgh. My work is not programmatic in the sense of “Till Eulenspiegel” by Richard Strauss. It is a musical composition related to text, but the text has not been “set to music”. It is, yes, a very free illustration of this beautiful Sufi legend like, but is not intended to be a synthesis of the poem. There in the poem the idea of mirrors, mazes, identity (the Simurgh is each of the birds and every one of them is the Simurgh). These 'pictures' are also present in my work, but it is presented in the form of mirrors, labyrinths and harmonic circles. In Ficciones I worked with a kind of harmony that constantly pass me these 'images'. I wanted to use a single chord that undergoes a series of transpositions and transformations throughout the work. I wanted the whole harmonic tissue was clearly related to that single chord, that is, with chords that bind identical structure form a circle or closed harmonic cycle. There is also the presence of the number seven: the birds go in search of Simurgh have to overcome seven valleys. In my work the rhythmic principle is based on the number seven and the second part of the piece is organized based on a metric of seven. – Mario Lavista.