Epitafio

This short piece was composed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Héctor Tosar, the greatest composer of classical music in Uruguay. At the same time, I wanted to commemorate the figure of Ariel Martínez, who was Tosar’s student in the 60’s, as I would be myself 20 years later. In this work, I assume myself as belonging to and continuing in the same line as both composers, although I mark my personal approach to some aspects of composition, such as Tosar’s work with ‘groups of sounds’, or Martínez’s formalization through algorithmic processes. The epitaph is not for Tosar or Martínez, but for a bygone era in which the three of us coexisted, belonging to three different generations but sharing the same paradigms, now gone. Paraphrasing the title of a piece by György Ligeti, who in the 1980s was an important reference for Tosar and for those of us in his closest circle of disciples, Epitafio is subtitled “Selfie mit Héctor Tosar und Ariel Martínez.” Extending the paraphrase, I might have added “und Ligeti ist auch dabei…”