For Radio France’s “Création Mondiale” podcast, Le Balcon performs Desdoblamientos de Selvas, a mixed-genre piece by the Franco-Colombian composer Pedro García-Velásquez.
The Colombian jungle lies at the heart of this suite of miniatures, conceived in 2021 by Pedro García-Velásquez for this program and for the musicians of the Ensemble Le Balcon. The jungle, and the music of the Pacific played by Afro-Colombian musicians. This music shaped the composer’s childhood and adolescence. He sought to return to his roots by revisiting this region, near his hometown of Cali, and by engaging with the musicians (he refers to “interactivist” ethnomusicology).
Several layers of memory emerge in Desdoblamentios de Selvas (“Unfolding of Jungles”): recordings made by the composer, and older ones of women working in the mines. The composer mixed these recordings with the already composite musical material of the five pieces, since the playing of the Balcon musicians is augmented by robotic sounds invented by the composer and operated by a computer music engineer, Noé Faure.
This duality is thus evident in the way the elements overlap and respond to one another. Pedro García-Velásquez had in mind the idea of unfolding layers—the notion that the memory of Pacific music, the memory of an entire culture devastated by slavery, gradually unfolds. The piece’s structure builds toward a growing sonic intensity.
Le Balcon
Conductor Pedro García-Velásquez
Music electronics Noé Faure
Flute Julie Brunet Jailly,
Clarinet Ghislain Roffat
Saxophone Juliette Herbet
Trumpet Florent Cardon
Electric bass Simon Drappier
Percussion Akino Kamiya
Viola Elsa Seger
Cello Clotilde Lacroix
