El amor y la luna

Have you ever had the experience of imagining something, seeing it (or in my case listening to it) in your mind very clearly, very precisely, with all the details, without that image or that music really existing?

I composed El amor y la luna (Love and the Moon) back in 1998. 23 years later I have finally managed to make this piece sound as it has been sounding in my head all this time. Thanks to the interpretation of the Royal Symphony Orchestra of Seville, today I can finally share this music.

As in every piece, I would like you to listen to it in a particular way: think of a time when you felt madly in love with someone, it may be a fleeting love, it may be your current partner, it may be a story from the past. Try to relive the sensations that memory brings you … and let “El amor y la luna” accompany you.

(If you don’t have Spotify, you can find Love and the Moon on iTunes, Apple Music, Amazon, Youtube Music and any digital music distribution platform)

Before knowing the history of this piece of music, what sensations did it leave you? Please, leave them for me as a “post-it” on this virtual board (click or tap on the pink circle with the + sign). It can be something you write, an image, a video, a link … whatever you want.

This piece tells a story, and it also has its own history. Here you have it:

With Pilar Pérez Calvete in 1998, the day of the premiere of “Momentos en Lorca“

“El amor y la luna” is one of the movements from “Momentos en Lorca” (Moments in Lorca),my first professional musical composition. It was in 1998. I had started to collaborate as a pianist in contemporary dance classes, thanks to Marta Toro, an old friend from theater school. I remember how I enjoyed that job: having my music accompany movement, feeling how dance enriched music and music enriched movement, along with the challenge of having to improvise all the music based on the exercises, was fantastic. Pilar Pérez Calvete, the director of the Andalusian Dance Center, commissioned me to do the music for “Momentos en Lorca”, a contemporary dance show that she was going to choreograph and that was going to be premiered and performed throughout Andalusia.

It was amazing. My first professional commission as a composer, and also for a dance choreography. Music is my passion, but without a doubt I feel the expression of music even more when it accompanies movement, gesture, that physical part that has the presence and movement of the body. Dance. 

The work is a journey through the whole life of Federico García Lorca. I remember how I worked intensely on that creation: reading biographies of the poet, selecting passages from his poems to use as inspiration, and even including some fragments such as sung lyrics for one of the movements in the work: “El campo andaluz”. There were moments centered on his dreamlike vision of poetic creation, his closeness to the townspeople, the land, his trips to New York and Cuba … It was exciting.

Without a doubt, the musically most beautiful movement of the entire composition is “El amor y la luna“. Its origin is one of the fragments of the theatre play “Bodas de sangre” (Blood Wedding), by Lorca. Pilar, upon hearing it, asked me: “what or who were you thinking about when you wrote this music? It is very inspired.” The paso a tres that Pilar choreographed for this movement is a true marvel, which perfectly reflected the depth of the music and the tension of that Lorca love, always connected with death, and represented by a moon that in this case is the real protagonist in both the poem and the choreography.

All this creation, this delving into my own roots, using in some movements musical references that had been part of my own childhood, also led me to feel much closer to one of the people who has most influenced me as a creator, and who has also been a source of inspiration and guide many times: my uncle Bernardo Méndez. He will be the protagonist of another of the Relatos Cortos.