Fonema Consort

Nina Dante writes:

The music of Juan Campoverde is full of deep, secretive, and lush magic. It sings of a profound worshipfulness, and all that is ceremonial and reverent in the natural world and human emotion. In his music, we hear the water and creatures and stones and stars. We hear the cries of the heart in all its complexity. 

Campoverde was born in Ecuador, through which runs the Andes and the Amazon rainforest with their ancient cultures and meltingly beautiful and wild natural landscapes, and which encompasses the Galápagos Islands. Campoverde’s four vocal works weave music to the poetry of two Ecuadorian poets: Efraín Jara Idrovo (Basalto, Umbrales I and II) and Cristóbal Zapata (Los lugares del deseo). The work of these poets resound both literally and figuratively in Campoverde’s music as fractured linguistic elements transcend into musical devices, and rich text painting transform written descriptions into complex and explicit musical landscapes.

Campoverde’s vocal writing in both solo and chamber settings is lyrical and expressive, fluttering between textures with the same sinuosity of the moving patterns cast by sunlight through trees or water. Sounds are always in the process of becoming other sounds, which is achieved technically in his scores by decoupling parameters of vocal and instrumental sound production and introducing changes to these parameters individually (in the case of the voice: consonants and vowels, rhythms and pitch, breath and mouth shape). Spiritually, this gives performers the sense of speaking in the language of the subconscious landscape.

Umbrales I and II are the first and most recent pieces (respectively) written for Fonema by Campoverde, spanning a six year collaboration. Both works are written for two voices, flute and guitar; and both works set the same excerpt of a poetic work by Idrovo, Sollozo por Pedro Jara (Escructuras para una elegía) / Lament for Pedro Jara (Structures for an elegy). The poetry is a visceral outpouring of sorrow, and two musical works seem hardly enough to dig beyond a thin layer of the boundless mourning that the poem embodies. “Pedro bones of stone / Pedro veins of stone / Pedro ageless rock…” On and on it weeps, punctuated by cries of “Ay!” that float like eternal echoes through the two works.

Basalto, Campoverde’s duet for voice and flute with tape, sets another except of Idrovo’s poetic work. This complex piece functions as a hymn to Ecuador’s embattled Galápagos Islands, which are in danger from over-tourism and the resulting environmental challenges. The work largely revolves around the word basalto and it’s fragmented components, basalt being the igneous rock that forms much of the Galápagos. Campoverde created the electronic track by manipulating the voices of whales that are present both perennially and in migration around the Galápagos, and much of the live sonic materials are also based on these primordial songs. One loses a sense of time in this work as the voice and flute melodies float in the sea of the electronic track, ultimately sounding together as a submerged song without beginning or end. 

The most starlit and fainting of his vocal works, Los lugares del deseo is a tribute to Love and the Beloved, setting four poems that explore the sacredness of erotic love from Zapata’s poetic collection La miel de la higuera / The honey of the fig. It is written for voice, flute, clarinet, percussion and guitar (or harpsichord in substitute for the final two instruments). In the first two movements (“Vestibulum”, “Corpus delicti”) the voice, flute and clarinet twine around each other, embodying a deep sensuality through endless melisma, tremoli, and trills; fragile quarter tones and multiphonics; and suspended fermate during which the world holds its breath. To sing the third movement (“De la cartografía / Of cartography”) the solo vocalist listens to an in-ear electronic track, elements of which she folds into the performance of the written vocal materials, metaphorically engaging in a conversation with an inner world available only to her. Appearing from the ether in the fourth and final movement are the lush spininess of the guitar and the moaning of the percussion, which ecstatically and ceremoniously usher in the end of this work.

Samuel Rowe writes:

The guitar is Juan Campoverde’s instrument, but I often think of him as someone who is both a native and stranger to its traditions. A native, because he knows the instrument backward and forward, and is attuned to its subtlest and most intricate possibilities. A stranger, because his music cultivates sounds that guitarists are trained to regard as non-musical: the extra pitch produced behind the fret by a hammer-on, the interference between two harmonics, the frictional hiss produced by sliding a finger along a string. Drawing on these resources – the fleeting, the unstable, and the shimmering in the guitar’s sound-would – Juan’s music accesses emotional spaces that we didn’t know the guitar had.

In his solo guitar writing, Juan creates shifting sonic landscape, meditative yet driven by a sense of narrative. Listening to the two major solo works on this album, one might hear a progression toward more introspection: the dense thicket of sounds in the early Topografías (1996) give way to the expansive, enigmatic sonorities of muna ii (2012). In his ensemble writing, Juan isolates clusters of sounds and harmonies in the guitar and uses them to build intricately sequenced interactions between players. In the umbrales sequence (2013-2019), dense and pulsing sonorities from the guitar provide a diaphanous background to the rest of the ensemble. In “La miel de la higuera”, rattling, thumping composite timbres between guitar and percussion open up a space for the figurations of the voice, flute and clarinet.

Though the effect is one of meditative spontaneity, Juan’s approach to the guitar is rigorous. His restless exploration of the instrument’s affordances produces challenging scores with a broad palette of techniques: microtonal scordatura, hammer-ons, notes plucked between the fret and the nut, irregular tremolos. To notate this complexity, Juan uses three staves, each for a different kind of technique. Such dialogue among musical ideas is fundamental to Juan’s approach. When I’ve worked with Juan on his music – he is both a gentle and a demanding coach – he emphasis the idea of counterpoint, of multiple techniques and lines of development interacting with one another. The coda to muna ii, notably, is marked “ricercar,” and accordingly unravels a tangle of contrapuntal interactions: between melodic lines unfolding at different rhythmic densities, between the right hand and the left, between even-tempered pitches and their detuning, between traditional guitar technique and its extensions. Moving in these contrapuntal spaces, Juan’s is a music of the in-between and the not-yet-formed.