Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection

Javier Alvarez, Mannam, 1992
(Mexico)



Recording time: 13 min 59 s.
Remarks: Inok Paek, kayagum.

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

About this composition:

When I was commissioned to write a piece for Inok Paek in 1989 by Projects UK I hardly had any reference on the kayagum other that it was an ancient Korean zither-like instrument. It took nearly one year of collaborative work with Inok and the composition of that first piece to start understanding Korean music a little bit more and appreciate in detail the enormous expressive subtlety which this beautiful instrument is capable of.

For Mannam, I set myself an hypothetical scenario: a kayagum player finds a Mexican folk harp on the top of a mountain; a Mexican harp player finds a kayagum in the middle of the savanna; they both learn to play their newly found instruments from scratch, with no further piece of information. Imagine how these players could adapt their found instruments to their own music tradition, to their aesthetic and expressive needs. And if one ponders for a while, one can come up with amusingly arbitrary combinations. Say for example, a "Korean hat-dance" or a "Mexican court-Mariachi"; a "Korean bull-fighting call" or a "Mexican Ribbon-dance", and so on... As outlandish as these mixtures may seem, I found the possibility of creating such hybrids tantalising. So, I finally decided to 'glue' together comparable musical paradigms by means of a number of rhythmic patterns common to Korean and Mexican popular musics; a simple device which acts as a dramatic pivot to blend, juxtapose or simply move from one imaginary situation to the other.

Most of the sounds I used for the electroacoustic part were taken from studio recordings of Inok playing the kayagum. These were then processed using the Syter computer at the GRM studios in Paris. I re-assembled, sampled and sequenced the material at the GMEB in Bourges and at my own studio in London. Mannam was commissioned by the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges in 1990.


First performance:Inok Paek, Purcell Room, South Bamk Centre, London 1992.
Commissioned by the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges in 1990
Second Prize, Prix Ars Electronica 1992.

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