#ecuatorial

En esta ocasión tuve la oportunidad de visitar el Telescopio de la Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísica - FCAG - de la UNLP.

Relojes Solares Maravillosos: Parte IX

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Vicente Huidobro. Molino. Ecuatorial. [01]

May it be happy, the life of your upholders, your providers before your mouths, before your faces, Spirit of the Sky, Spirit of the Earth. Give Life, Give Life! Give Life, O All-Enveloping Force, in the sky, On the earth, at the four corners, At the four extremities, As long as the dawn exists, As long as the tribe exists!

Edgard Varèse - Ecuatorial. Excerpted from Naxos Records’ liner notes for their release: Perhaps in respect of no other work of Varèse is one of his favourite remarks more appropriate: “I like a certain awkwardness in a work of art.” For Écuatorial represents the raw savagery of human sacrifice, whose brutality Varèse brings vividly to life in highly unconventional vocal writing that calls for fortissimo nasal singing through closed lips, humming, mumbling, Sprechstimme, “percussive declamation”, glissandi, “raucous” speaking, quartertone intonation and so on. Though, earlier in the life of this work, he had called for a solo bass voice, his later prescription of small chorus — the present performance uses six solo voices — seems more in keeping both with the import of the text and the manner of setting for voices, so far outside of any style hitherto employed in western art music. Indeed, writing to Odile Vivier about Écuatorial in 1961, with a directness that cannot be contradicted he specifies: “Chorus: bass voices, above all, no church singers. At all costs avoid the constipated and Calvinists.” The sacred book of the Quiché tribe of the Maya civilisation, the Popol Vuh, has come down to us solely in a translation made in 1707 by Father Francisco Ximénes, of the Dominican order. The Quiché language text, which he — fortunately! — reproduces in parallel with his Spanish translation, was almost certainly made after the Spanish Conquest of the 1520s, perhaps by a late surviving Quiché Indian who had learned the European alphabet; for the original language was a pictographic script. Any earlier manuscripts have long since disappeared, as too the source text from which Father Ximénes worked; he returned it to its owner after making his translation, and it has never again surfaced. The Popol Vuh is a creation myth on a par with the Epic of Gilgamesh and with the oral traditions of the Australian aboriginal “Dreamtime”, and incidentally provides us with the fullest intimate portrait we have of the nature of the Mayan civilization. It is also a scriptural text of this most ancient of westernhemisphere civilizations. Alongside the cruelty of a fertility cult and human sacrifice are a sense of true wonder in the face of nature, of awe and respect for the unknowable gods, and a thorough attempt to provide a framework of social structure, of laws and of ethical principles as boundaries for human action.