“A staggering wealth of ideas drawn with a fineliner.
There is always a fine balance between clarity and secrecy.
Rodríguez Valenzuela’s music is great art.”
ENNO POPPE

Hideouts alerts us to a potential risk in attempting to understand the music of Manuel Rodríguez Valenzuela: that of mistaking his methodology for his thinking. Given his remarkable imagination, it is sometimes easy to focus on the most obvious aspects of his music (invented objects, ingeniously prepared and amplified instruments, or an imaginative manipulation of sound) and to pass over the fact that all of this is inspired by a unique, intimate manner of thinking. Listening to Hideouts is an excellent way to go deeper into the work of this composer, since his most important features –idealism in the smallest detail, and the value he gives to the concept of listening as evidenced in quotations, cultural intrusion, intertextuality and reflection upon the context– can be appreciated in pieces employing seemingly different methods.

At the time of writing these notes, Manuel Rodríguez Valenzuela has three pieces for solo keyboard (piano or harpsichord): Ungebetenes Spiel, Toccata à l’acte and Le piano engloutie, the first two being included in Hideouts. All three works open with a quotation from a classic piece of music, but the significance, reach and development of the quotations vary in each case. Ungebetenes Spiel, written in 2011, begins with a literal exposition of Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A major, Op. 119, No. 10. The use of quotation is not anecdotal here. Rather than a momentary presence from another world, it expresses the act of considering and pondering –in short, of listening to– that other world. The piece develops and displays Rodríguez Valenzuela’s vision and the transformation he effects upon the Bagatelle, with small elements taking it as their point of departure and reminding us of it; at the same time, the composer explores the piano at its most percussive, as captured exquisitely in Neu Records’ minutely detailed recording. This demonstrates one of the composer’s most fundamental traits. Manuel Rodríguez Valenzuela is an avid listener for whom the exercise of listening, far from being a creative limitation, is a fertile engine that sets in motion new ideas. The known is a point of departure, not the ultimate aim; only one who listens has something to say. All of which implies the question of contextualisation. Rather than creating a continuity of sound between the initial quotation and its development, the contrast is made evident. Ungebetenes Spiel does not disguise the extraneous nature of the quoted fragment; it celebrates it. This conscious play of contextualisation and decontextualisation, this simultaneous inclusion of different planes, is also reflected in the fragment constructed by different long notes generated by various e-bows** placed directly inside the body of the piano. A fragment that, in spite of having been introduced little by little, has a very significant role in terms of listening to the piece, even constituting an additional plane. At the work’s end –specifically devised for the disc– everything that has so far been recounted is elevated, not in a written quotation as may be imagined, but through the direct inclusion of a recording by Arthur Schnabel of Beethoven’s Bagatelle in G Minor, Op. 119, No. 11 –one of the earliest recordings of the piece– as an unequivocal declaration of the aforementioned principles.

Toccata à l’acte, written in 2015, sets a new level of intertextuality. The piece takes its departure from Sonata K. 141 by Domenico Scarlatti and is written for amplified piano or amplified harpsichord (the latter being the most appropriate option), delay pedal and a motorised music box that plays the melody from the sonata. Following an exposition of the first bars of the original sonata, the score introduces what at first seem to be wrong notes, interruptions, and small loops and repetitions that transform the significance of the piece from which they originate. These procedures are reminiscent of the work of the experimental filmmaker, Martin Arnold in works such as Passage à l’acte, from where Rodríguez Valenzuela takes the name of his piece.

The interferences are, to begin with, included in the score, but they are soon augmented by the use of the delay pedal –which records, reproduces and superimposes a number of short fragments– and by the motorised music box. These inclusions question the concept of context once again: perceived initially as extraneous bodies, they gradually become part of the new environment and end up establishing themselves as the centre of the piece. The harpsichord is the instrument of choice in order to go more deeply into this aspect: the very mechanism of the instrument, which is so characteristic, takes its place in the sound fabric like a noise that has been welcomed into the musical landscape, as the inclusion of something external. This additional plane, this other level that also has a place in the act of listening, is gradually amplified and built up over the course of the composition, to the point at which the performer ends up treating the harpsichord as a percussion instrument (symbolically completing the above-mentioned inclusion). The same approach is seen again and again: the integration and observation of the external, from the exercise of the act of listening as idea. We are listening to the listening of Manuel Rodríguez Valenzuela. In Toccata à l’acte there is an excellent example of a recording that demonstrates another facet of Rodríguez Valenzuela’s work: a heightened degree of idealism, the need for precision in certain ideas in order for them to make sense. The ambitiousness of these ideas does not derive from an ostentatious urge to make them visible, but rather from the composer’s honest attention to what is intimate; to all that which is so hidden and innermost that his only option is to be extremely demanding on himself. In this case we refer to the editing of some of the delays: many of them are designed to be produced by the action of the pedal, but in the studio they were recorded meticulously one by one, in order to reflect their motivating idea with utmost precision; a precision for which the recording process offers the perfect environment in which to excel.

Since 2011, the composer has continued to develop the different, above-mentioned characteristics in pieces where instruments are used in increasingly complex ways (instruments are frequently prepared and augmented, sometimes by electronic means), while highly demanding logistics turn productions of his music into real challenges. The creation, preparation and rehearsal of such scores increasingly defy the composer himself. 64 daily self-portraits/micro-variations on a motive of Brahms (written in 2016 and revised in 2017) for piano quartet, grew out of his intention to overcome, with the aid of two self-imposed limitations, this often distressing situation. The first limitation: simplify the logistics. The use of instruments would be relatively traditional with no additions, augmentations nor extraneous objects required in their preparation. The piece is not without extended techniques or an imaginative use of instruments; in many other composers some of the timbres achieved would be startling, but in the context of the music of Manuel Rodríguez Valenzuela they might even be considered restrained. This particular characteristic of the 64 daily self-portraits/micro-variations on a motive of Brahms allows us to observe the composer’s thinking in a different relationship to instrumentation; and it helps prevent us from confusing his attention to that personal idealism with a simple exploration of sound in relation to objects or extended instruments. The second limitation for writing the piece was that the work would not be planned in advance, but that for a little over two months the composer would write a self-portrait each day, in some cases of minimal duration, almost in the style of a diary; a similar methodology to that of the daily self-portraits produced by Bryan Lewis Saunders. Both limitations can be said to respond to a search for honesty in the creative process.

The simplifying of instrumentation, and the need for a more direct, less programmed form of composition leads to the elimination of intermediate steps between the composer and the object of his creation, thus, in a certain way, placing himself naked before a mirror. If, previously, we mentioned that Rodríguez Valenzuela transformed the exercise of his listening into the centre and principal element of his composition, in this case he converts his relationship to creation, together with the manner he understands and responds to this situation, into what motivates the piece. This has important consequences, the loss of the concept of traditional narrativity being the most notable. Given that many of these tiny fragments have been written without a previous plan, the order of performance can be freely chosen according to the preference of the performer, without the need to follow the chronological written order. In fact, hearing the work produces a marked sense of experiencing different snatches of music that are not necessarily organised in a linear relationship or with evident causality but which do exist in relation to a whole. This specific way of developing the creative process does not, however, prevent us from observing previously mentioned characteristic traits; the self-portraits are based on a motive from the Andante of Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor (Op. 60). This is particularly significant given that each of the fragments, created as something intimate and with the aim of providing an honest personal portrait, cannot avoid, in their turn, being a variation of something already known, a listening to a pre-existing motive. The act of listening is a mirror: attention turned towards the outside is matched by an inner development; to look at the world is to create a world of one’s own.

Text by Luis Codera Puzo, composer, curator and performer

** e-bows are small electromagnetic devices, originally designed to be used with electric guitars, that when placed upon the strings (in this case of the piano) causes them to vibrate.