Carolina Noguera Palau
Colombia

“De Adoración y Espanto” (Of Adoration and Fear) was composed in 2020 and will be premiered in the winter of 2021. It is connected to Beethoven’s Sonata no. 31 in A flat Major, Op. 110

The piece is dedicated to the hundreds of community and social leaders in Colombia,
who are being subjected to widespread and systematic intimidation and assassination

Composer Carolina Noguera-Palau is currently the Head of Composition at the Composition Department at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. Her current research-composition project explores different relationships between music from oral traditions from the Colombian rural regions of the Pacific coasts and avant-garde vocabularies of Academic Music, mainly through a timbral approach. Carolina was granted a PhD degree (2012) and a Masters Degree (2008) with honours at Birmingham Conservatoire in the United Kingdom. There she studied with Lamberto Coccioli, Richard Causton and Edwin Rosbourgh, among others. She also obtained a Bachelor Degree in Composition (2003), granted at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. There she worked primarily with Guillermo Gaviria.

Her compositions have been performed throughout Europe, Latin and North America. Her musical language captures ideas of collapsing mechanisms, decomposing organisms, carnival and traditional popular culture, as well as the presence of noise and deception in traditional folk music.

Composer’s Note:

De adoración y espanto is a piece for solo piano written for Yael Weiss and commissioned for the “32 Bright Clouds Project”. The Work is conceived as related to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major, Op.110. It uses the fugato texture in different sections of the piece as part of its development. De adoración y espanto has a non-tonal harmonic structure, however it establishes an area of A flat as a reference to a number of cadential points, meaning a 3-1 Trichord that includes notes Ab, A and Bb.

In addition to its connection to this Beethoven Sonata, the work includes a reference to a motif from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

In spite that De adoración y espanto maintains the melodic contour of the aforementioned reference, each note of the motif appears in different registers of the piano, as well as accentuated in different densities. Its first appearance is in bar 79, Pesante. The higher note of the chord is G, although the orchestration of the chord is rather dissonant. The second appearance of the motif is in bar 164, in Lánguido, (in a lower register than the first one, harmonized by minor second intervals). The third and last appearance constitutes the closing theme of the work. It starts in bar 209 in Tiempo de Danza, graciozo (funny), or perhaps, cynical. And after four repetitions of the motif if vanishes away leaving a strange flavor and a baffling feeling in the atmosphere.

As an additional relation to the Fugue of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31, De adoracion y espanto quotes a Juga (a typical rhythmic dance structure from the Afro- Colombian tradition located in the Pacific Coast of the country) as a pun that connects the term “Fuga” (Spanish translation to Fugue) with “Juga”. This quotation is the main material for the composition of the Work.