Tomás Gueglio

In Tomás Gueglio’s Triste y madrigal the soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett adopts a silvery, quasi-straight tone approach over a murky, ambiguous accompaniment of nocturnal utterances and interjections in the ensemble. This sonic bog gradually becomes more animated and engaged with the foreground melodic material before the texture is suddenly interrupted by an automated voice overlaid with orchestral interludes and voice clips from 1940’s melodrama. The cool, detached quality of the main voice and ensemble material juxtaposed with the nostalgic flashback to a bygone time echoes what many of us experienced during lockdown, a yearning for a richer emotional experience that we could only access through memory.

In 1940 my grandmother on my mother’s side worked as an extra in a film featuring Libertad Lamarque. The name of that film is Cita en la Frontera (translatable as ‘Meeting/Date/Encounter At The Border’) and it is an early movie by Lamarque who eventually became one of the biggest movie stars of the Spanish-speaking world. Probably intoxicated by the glamour of the experience, my grandmother decided to adopt the artistic name of Libertad Del Río (‘Libertad’ out of admiration for Lamarque). Unfortunately, my grandma’s acting career started and ended with Cita En La Frontera and she never got to put her lovely stage name to use.

Until I recently watched Cita…, I was not aware of the extent to which films of this time could be reminiscent of both of my grandmothers’ mannerisms, body language, and use of the voice. Seeing and hearing Lamarque perform brought back vivid memories of them, of the environment of their homes when we visited, of certain family rituals in my childhood. Tres Madrigales is an oneiric account of those days and thus an exercise in nostalgia and sentimentality.

The sung text in Tres Madrigales is a re-working of three tangos from Cita En La Frontera. The lyrics of these tangos are stereotypical of the genre in their melodramatic depiction of longing, suffering, and eventually redemption. The spoken text in Tres Madrigales comes from a climactic scene in the movie where two of the characters, Luisa (Lamarque) and Chunguita, have a heated exchange with regards to territorial issues in Chunguita’s household.

Tres Decals consists of an ascending melody over which layers of ornamentation take place. Both the melody and the ornamentation respond to a series of permutational strategies that remain mostly untransformed over the span of the work. Despite the fact that the piece came to be as the layering of rather detached technical moves, my associations as I write this program note point towards the autobiographical: as I finished the piece, I was two weeks away from becoming a father for the first time, my former office literally turned into a nursery decorated with…decals. As a consequence, I tend to map many features of Tres Decals with tropes of infancy: the plain melody with the lullaby, the superimposition of pulses with the music-box, and the pervasive bits of major scales with the pitch material of, for instance, crib mobiles. In other words, Tres Decals is built with what, I imagine, are the sonic "day’s residues” in the dream of an infant.