Greetings, St. Bart’s family! I asked Mother Nina whether I could write a note to you this week to share my latest travel experience and how it connects to something I’m working on for St. Bart’s. Recently, I was afforded the opportunity to travel to Spain and Portugal as both a time for respite and to find inspiration for my upcoming composition premiere in February 2025. I have been working on a piano suite based around the precious gemstones (diamond, emerald, jade, etc.), and I wanted an opportunity to spend intentional time crafting ideas for how I will best portray the subjects.
Whilst the Iberian peninsula is not naturally home to many of the world’s precious gemstones, it was a beautiful place to see unique shapes and colors (in nature and architecture), and also hear different genres of music that might be interesting to incorporate in the music. I’ve written four movements of the seven-movement suite thus far, and I’ve had a rewarding experience trying to capture the essence of each gemstone to music based on its appearance and magnitude. Much of my composition style is based on colors—how the warmth, depth, and shades of color can translate to emotions—and writing music to correspond to precious gemstones naturally involves considerations of color, texture, smoothness, sheen, and shape.
One place where I found chromatic inspiration is Parc Güell, a park in Barcelona designed by architect Antoni Gaudí. It is full of beautiful architectural marvels, such as colonnaded pathways, viaducts, and fountains, but none resonated with me more than the mosaics that are spread around the park on benches, walkways, and statues. Gaudí fused together scrap ceramic tiles from the city to create these mosaics, and the mixtures of texture, shape, and character in these mosaics demonstrates the way imbalance at the micro level can achieve balance and beauty when perceived as a whole. Other highlights of the trip were the white-colored cities of Andalucía, the Plaza de España in Seville, the Rock of Gibraltar, the views of Lisbon, and the Pyrenees mountains of Andorra, all of which yielded majestic pictures and wonderful memories.
I look forward to sharing the composition on Sunday, February 19, 2025, at 4 p.m. on our beautiful new Kawai sanctuary grand piano. I’ve engaged local concert pianist Bryan Verhoye to play the suite, so that I may sit back and enjoy the music alongside you and reflect on the colors. I hope you’ll share your thoughts with me, and whether the gemstones—and a glimpse of the colors of the Iberia—materialize for you through the music.
John-Luke
Comentarios