Mystical Dances (in English)

Agustín Fernández
Mystical Dances
(2006)

i. ordelfire
ii. mooncast
iii. shapeshift


In a much-quoted phrase, Octavio Paz wrote: “the poet has no biography - his work is his biography”. I think of that when I find myself attempting an alchemy where personal experiences become music, and new pieces pick up the thread of previous ones like new chapters of the same novel. Mystical Dances charts some of the processes unleashed by encounters with mysterious forces, voices and presences experienced in rural Northumberland, so radically different and yet in some respects so eerily similar to my native Bolivia. On a more personal level, it has to do with a once-in-a-lifetime change of direction in pursuit of a truer self and a truer other.

The work is in three movements, following the age-old lively/slow/lively pattern. ‘ordelfire’ develops ideas associated with burning, first explored in my work Fuego of 1987, but taking them in a totally different direction. If the intention then was to explore fire as destructive violence, now the fire is a force that engulfs, cleanses, transforms and gives energy. The second movement, titled ‘mooncast’, tries to depict the burning light cast by the full moon over the hills of Northumberland. ‘shapeshift’ was titled before it existed, and once written its title proved its fate, as the music had to be re-written since the first performance. It deals with mutations of the preceding material, which in turn adopt ever new guises.

Mystical Dances was commissioned by Northern Sinfonia, who gave the first performance at the Huddersfield Festival in 2006. It was performed again by the same orchestra conducted by Alexander Shelley in August 2007 at The Sage Gateshead .

© Agustín Fernández 2007