LONDRES_NOV_2010-11-20

Es otro posting, creo, en que alternaré entre los dos idiomas, quizás sin traducir … sólo un aviso.

Tantas impresiones, y más bien desorganizadas … no obstante intento concretarlas, algo; para que después, con el tiempo, se cuajen mejor.

I had only two weeks between the US premiere of those ten pieces of Monarca and my departure for London. I had to move my head, soul, fingers, intellect –everything! – back into Rumor de Páramo. Since I’ve been invited to London as artistic advisor to a development session at the Royal Opera House of Stephen McNeff’s new chamber opera on Pedro Páramo, my way of moving back in was through Stephen McNeff’s Pavane (in the old way) for doña Susanita.

It’s the third or fourth time I’ve picked up this piece after giving it a rest. This time I go back to the score, listening to and questioning everything from articulation and colour to large architecture and how I want to define it. This is what convinces me that the great majority of these Rumor pieces are “keepers”: when I go back to them after a time they are still rich, there are still things to discover, I still deeply enjoy playing them. So much new music gets commissioned, premiered, and then forgotten. So much never truly becomes repertoire, and there’s a lot that surely deserves it. One reason why I so respect my colleagues like Tambuco and the Cuarteto Latinoamericano: they not only commission new music, they make it part of their repertoire, and record it.

Inglaterra. Mi otra Madre Patria. Desde niña he querido venir acá. Es un poco como mi primera visita a España, que es también mi Madre Patria, una generación más allá de México. Mi bisabuelo paterno, zapatero, vino a México desde Murcia ha de ser en 1890; mis tatarabuelos maternos vinieron a EU un poco antes, quizás una generación, huyendo de una de esas periódicas hambrunas en Irlanda. Algunos de ellos originalmente de Inglaterra: un ir y venir casi constante entre una isla y la otra, desde el año del caldo.

Asomándome de la ventana del avión al amanecer cuando nos acercábamos vi el contorno de una costa, tierra en media del agua; e inesperadamente me sentí al borde de las lágrimas. Como cuando llegué a Madrid, en vísperas del Año Nuevo, al mero final del 2005.

En el avión pensé, por la madrugada, Es la primera vez que viajo a Inglaterra, es la primera vez que viajo en British Airways, es la primera vez que voy a un sitio invitada como asesora artística a un proyecto de un muy querido compositor -- ¿qué chido es eso, tener 50 años y hacer cosas por primera vez? Requete chido, sí.

OK, this I WILL translate …

So many impressions, and rather disorganized … nevertheless I will try to set them down so that later, with time, they will set better.

England. My other Mother Country. Since I was a little girl I’ve wanted to come here. It’s a little like that first visit of mine to Spain, which is also my Mother Country, beyond Mexico. My paternal great-grandfather, shoemaker, came to Mexico from the Spanish province of Murcia around 1890 it must have been; my maternal great-grandparents came to the US a little before, fleeing from one of those periodic famines in Ireland. Some of them originally from England: there was a constant back and forth between those two islands, since God was a little boy, as they say.

Peering out of the airplane window around dawn when we were getting close I saw the outline of a coast, land in the middle of water; and unexpectedly felt as though I might burst into tears. As when I arrived in Madrid, at the very end of 2005, on the eve of the New Year.

In the airplane in the middle of the night, I think, This is the first time that I travel to England, it’s the first time I fly on British Airways, the first time that I go somewhere invited as artistic advisor to an exciting project of a very valued composer colleague; to be 50-something years old and be doing something completely new, how cool is that? Really, really very cool indeed.