Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection

Javier Alvarez, Mambo à la Bracque, 1991
(Mexico)



Recording time: 3 min 08 s.
Instruments: For electroacoustic sounds

Other resources available:
- About Javier Alvarez
- Compositions by Javier Alvarez

About this composition:

Imagine you wanted to "write" a note but had no writing utensil. So, you decide to cut out letters from and old newspaper and put together your note. With that kind of intention in mind, in this piece, I used short musical segments, all which came from different versions of a well known mambo number - Caballo Negro (Black Horse) - by the King of Mambo, Cuban composer Dámaso Perez Prado, to whom this short piece pays homage. I then re-assembled them into a sound mosaic using a few other sounds to "glue" them together. My aim was to create a sort of cubist music, a mambo of my own invention made out of mambo cuttings.

First performance: Great Hall, Dartington Hall, 1991.

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