ICE at the Southern

by Ryan Ingebritsen

This piece is the first in a series of chamber works inspired by and incorporating text by Pablo Neruda.  Neruda has been one of my many mentors despite working in a different medium than I do, and his observations of the physical world using emotion to describe it, or his description of emotion in terms of the physical world around us has inspired certain paths of though and discourse in my music.  ”The Memory of you Emerges from the night around me, the river mingles it’s sad lament with the sea” as he writes at the beginning of his Song of Despair, uses imagery of the river flowing, moving, and becoming lost in the sea to describe a current feeling of loosing the present moment as a memory recalled takes his mind away from that moment to a sad memory.  In “The Great Ocean” as this poem is translated, I feel Neruda uses the ocean to describe an invisible structure that the ocean truly is, not just the water that fills it in or the plants and animals that inhabit it.  This invisible structure or pattern gives us a glimpse of the vibrations that create all matter and energy.  Sound also gives us a glimpse of these vibrations being the only naturally occurring vibrations that we can perceive.  In this piece, I use various delay patterns for each of the 4 instruments to create a “pattern” that is then filled in with the sound of each instrument.  I then use the process of convolution to color pre-recorded text with the sounds the instruments play.  The text is read primarily by my friends Elbio Barillari and and Guillermo Gregorio.  Additional samples were read by Shannon Budd, Claire Chase, and Mary Mazurek-Kahn.

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