ANDREA CASARRUBIOS Caminante

Caminante (2014) for cello and choir.

The text is from Antonio Machado's poem Caminante, which talks of someone who walks through a non-existing path, creating it by taking steps forward. The music is meditative, mystical, intuitive, welcoming the uncertainty of the future with humility but with confidence. Premiere: Spain 2015.

Speechless (2015) for percussion (vibraphone, cymbal, marimba) and cello. The work was dedicated and written for Ensemble ACJW (now known as Ensemble Connect).

The piece was born out of a question I have asked myself many times: “What does it mean to have a voice?” In the piece, the performers embark on a playful, yet desperate search. At its core, it is an experience based on a non-verbal discussion between the inner voices of one’s self.The premiere of this work was presented by Carnegie Hall at National Sawdust in New York City, on March 29, 2016. Garrett Arney, the percussionist for whom this piece was written for, premiered it with me.

Crisol: Improvisations on a theme by Haydn (2018) for piano.

Crisol is based on motives from the Sonata No. 39 in D major by J. Haydn. The improvisations begin with my own harmonic and textural language, to soon melt into a musical world from the Romantic era. The music walks through a jazz-like moment to then unveil the purity and simplicity of the Classicism, with the second movement of Haydn’s Sonata No. 39, which is harmonically linked to his last movement, the Finale.

Maktub (2013) for three cellos.

I wrote this trio while living in Los Angeles, for the VI Boccherini Festival in Spain. It is dedicated to my parents, who were there for the premiere in 2013. In America, along with musical trips to Asia and Europe, I met people from diverse backgrounds, people from whom I learned immensely, who opened up for me a wide range of knowledge, thoughts and sonorities. All of those new concepts coexisted with the classical music works that I was playing. In particular, there was a sonata by L.V. Beethoven which was the last piano piece I worked on in Los Angeles. It was Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 109. Maktub ends with a reference to the last movement of this sonata. 

La Libertad se levantó llorando (2017) for violin, cello, and pre-recorded text. 

The work was written for violinist Emily Daggett Smith, and premiered at National Sawdust in New York City on February 18th, 2018. The text is by Pablo Neruda, an excerpt about the Spanish Civil War. I used his words as resonance and inspiration for this piece: a cry for the never-ending fight for freedom and human rights still today, whether we deal with personal, societal or international issues. The words serve as perspective in time and history, and the music is filled with the strength and vulnerability of those words.

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