El Canto del
Mar Infinito

I have always lived close to the sea, and I have always thought of it as both an inspiration and a presence one cannot quite hold. The ocean has a beautiful surface, but it is also infinite and unpredictable. El Canto del Mar Infinito is built around two poems I wrote about that doubleness, one in English and one in Spanish, and the work refuses to choose between them: both texts run through the piece, fragmented, whispered and sung by the instrumentalists themselves, surfacing and submerging the way phrases of memory do.

I composed this piece to raise awareness of the importance of protecting our sea environments, but I also wanted to give part of the authorship of the work to the sea itself. So I made recordings - some above the water, some below - and ran them through computer-based analysis. Frequency content from those recordings became the basis for parts of the instrumentation and the pitch material. The instruments are not imitating the sea; they are carrying its voice forward, transposed into wood and air.

For seven players: flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet, piano, two violins, viola, and cello. The piano is the centre of gravity, but it does not soloise; it threads through, sometimes inside the strings, sometimes underneath them, sometimes alone. The texture is closer to a current than to a chamber score. About halfway through, the surface fractures, the texts overlap, and what had been distant becomes oddly intimate.

El Canto del Mar Infinito was commissioned by the Tampere Biennale 2020 and premiered there in August 2020 by the Uusinta Ensemble. It was later selected by the International Music Council for its Hidden Treasures Mixtape, an annual selection of works that the IMC believes deserve a wider international audience. It is the work in my catalogue closest to The Reef (2023) and La Danza Invisible del Agua (2021): three sister pieces, each one giving the sea a part of the score.