07 Oct SPEECH RHYTHMS AND ‘THE ART OF FISHING’ (el arte de la pesca).
During lockdown, my friend the novelist Luisa Etxenike, sent me a series of poems entitled ‘el arte de la pesca’ (The Art of Fishing).
She asked me if I would like to collaborate and I said yes. What ensued were many conversations, which inspired me to write a song cycle made up of 6 songs and one piano piece.
The poems tell the tale of a grandson, who is being abused by his grandfather, a fisherman, in a Spanish Basque setting by the sea. I found the poems to be a powerful way for the young victim to transform and gain control over the negative experience of abuse.
The poems were all in Spanish and I am not a Spanish speaker. Consequently, my first task was to understand the Spanish speech rhythms and intonation shapes. Luisa recorded the poems for me, and I created speech rhythm and syllabic stress maps for each poem, so that when I came to set the poems to music, the intonation shapes and rhythmic stress patterns, would accurately reflect the musical cadence of the Spanish language.
