Tomás Gueglio

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.

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.

On Love (2016) is a peculiar take on the radio soap-opera genre. It is in three movements and features two distinct superimposed layers. The "music" layer, performed by the instruments and the soprano, constitutes an idiosyncratic re-imagination of William Byrd’s masses. The second layer (that remains "tacet" until the beginning of the second movement) is performed by the actors and could be described as "speech-music". The material employed to compose this second layer is every sentence in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that features the word “love” plus fragments of two soliloquies: Juliet's in the balcony (act 2, scene 2) and Romeo's at the grave (act 5, scene 3).

In the Sight (a dream of the 9th) is a footnote, an accessory, to Beethoven’s 9th symphony. The opening three notes of the Ode to Joy provide the pitch material of a texture that shifts progressively from pontillistic to homophonic, from kaleidoscopically dynamic to suspended and pensive. The image at work here is of Beethoven falling asleep while composing the 9th, and dreaming: fragments and shards of his Ode to Joy appear half-digested in playful counterpoint, with legato melodies of lush highness juxtaposed with clunky clusters juxtaposed with feverishly virtuosic solos. In the Sight slows down as it goes, suggesting a curve of increased melancholy. It thus mimics the bittersweet emotional state of waking up from a dream so involved you need a few minutes to figure out that a dream was all that was.tion text goes here