UC Santa Barbara

This paper explores referentiality as a way to overcome the excessive inward focus of New Music compositional thought. My reflections are placed in relation to abstraction and representation as a basic opposition that has operated throughout music history. In Part 1, I argue that not only “real world sounds”, but borrowed music as well, can be used to articulate musical discourses that belong to the realm of representation, and I illustrate the sampling and sequencing techniques that have allowed me to achieve such goal. In Part 2, I demonstrate that any concert is a visual spectacle in itself and I explore how both the performer’s physicality and the concert space can be expanded by technological means to articulate audiovisual narratives that are connected with aspects of our contemporary society. In Part 3, I illustrate how the concepts exposed in the first two parts informed my compositional process in “El libro de los flasheos (The Book of Trippin’)”.