My grandpa used to braid esparto grass for hours under the shadow of the fig tree” made its world premiere at Georgia State University’s Kopleff Hall this past Monday, with Associate Professor Chaowen Ting conducting the GT Symphony Orchestra (GTSO) for the opening night of the 2024 GTSO concert season.
The Technique spoke to Pilar Miralles, a student conductor from Spain, who was commissioned by the Spanish Embassy in D.C. as part of their Spanish Young Music Talents program, to compose a new piece and debut it with the GTSO back in March. Miralles concurrently started research as a doctoral candidate in the Arts Study Programme of DocMus Doctoral School at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, this past summer.
“It was a bit of a bad moment because I was applying back then to doctoral studies in Finland, and it was very difficult to get into the program. I’ve been trying for two years, and now I got in finally, and I was like, ‘How can I think about proposing an orchestra piece right now?’” said Miralles. “But I just said yes, because it was a very good opportunity…the piece is actually connected to what I was thinking about in the [doctoral] research project.”
Her research, titled “Composer asleep; The creative (non)practice of not-doing,” reimagines the concept of rest as an activity in itself and the effects that such a mindset would have on a psyche that is used to surviving in a productivity-driven society of constant demands, abundance and consequent depletion. She evaluates her own work, which could be from a non-productive role for the pure purpose of creation.
“Even when we rest, it’s considered something that you do to be more productive, that’s why I say that it’s instrumentalized, because you rest for something else and not as an end in itself, for the sake of just resting. So I was thinking about ideas of how to question the meaning of rest from my work as a composer, and I decided to pose this question of, ‘How can I create from inactivity?’” Miralles said.
This effort introduced a paradox into her job as a composer: how can someone consciously remove the demand of creative work from the act itself? While many may not be able to associate with the technical challenges of musical composition, there are similarities in this philosophy that can reflect back to anyone’s life and work.
“[It] was a bit connected to this rural background of my family and the fact that in the countryside, there is still this certain sense of natural rhythms of activity and rest, in opposition to this 24/7 existence that we have in the cities. So that was a bit the original inspiration of this [title],” Miralles said.
Looking at the program, Miralles’s work stands out from the GTSO’s repertoire based on its title alone. She explained this artistic choice as a recent interest of hers in putting music in a more specific context to what the piece itself conveys. Despite the long title, the piece itself takes up just five pages of the orchestral score but has an 18-minute runtime; Miralles herself called this “quite an extreme thing…there’s not much material written down.” Instead, “the conceptual part was the thing that took the most effort [and time]”.
She described this piece as intertwining with her recent research exploration. As a result, it experiments with the bounds of classical symphonic sound. The lack of an extensive musical score is a direct reference to the concept of recovery in rest.
While Professor Ting, also Director of Orchestral Studies, held a baton on the podium at the front of the stage, she did not play the role of a traditional conductor for this piece. According to Miralles, the conductor’s role in her piece was simply to mark certain moments of change, while the rest was left up to the improvisation of individual musicians.
“Music, overall, is all about creating expectations, going up and down and creating these curves of direction. But in this piece, there is no direction at all. There is no expectation of anything happening other than what is happening at the moment,” Miralles said.
The audience’s expectations were certainly subverted. The piece began with a solemn choir of brass instruments, both heavy and piercing. The strings periodically filled up the background accompaniment, softening it into a tranquil sound. This routine stretched on, with no clear structure or melodic pattern to be heard.
“The way I would describe it is that nothing much happens. So, instead of creating this temporal experience, it rather opens a space. Precisely because nothing much happens, the musicians can just create their own space and just stay there,” Miralles said.
About three-quarters through the piece, the entire orchestra fell into complete silence. Then, from behind their sheet music and beneath their seats, the musicians slowly started to reveal various objects, pulling out origami paper, Rubik’s cubes, sewing kits and more. The scratching of pencils on paper, clicking of knitting needles and flipping of pages filled the orchestra hall, this time, with a different kind of music.
“With this handcrafting, there’s a bit connected [with] the title to the braiding esparto grass. The hands represent this direct contact with the world in the face of this increasing digitalization of everything. So there is also that component of, look, ‘I can go out and actually touch and be in contact with reality,’” Miralles said.
The evening concluded with performances of Juhi Bansal’s “In the Pocket” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade, Op.35.” Interested students can view GTSO’s full schedule of upcoming performances throughout the school year on the GT School of Music webpage here: music.gatech.edu/news-and-events.
As for Miralles, she will continue on her journey of discovery and rest back in Finland.
“Immediacy: there is this permanent availability of virtually everything. So the fact that people can do things with their hands, things that take time, that are done slowly, that need care, that’s [the] sort of the thing that I wanted to convey,” she said.