QUASI UNO SPECCHIO (2020) for Baritone Saxophone solo. Isabel Benito by Joan Martí-Frasquier

I met Isabel Benito at the reading sessions of the Composition and Sound Experimentation Workshop at Barcelona Mixtur Festival in April 2018. We talked about how express some details of the painting on music. After this interesting session we kept in touch in order to find a common way between these two arts. This short piece composed in 2020 is an approach to this subject.

As Isabel Benito says: "During my search of connecting music and visual arts, I realised that conventional music notation was making this connection forced and difficult to be perceived by the listener/obsever. At the same time, some of the parameters given of music notation were not relevant for me anymore. For that reason, I decided to created semi-improvised scores helping performers to follow a more open guidance, resulting in a more natural coordination of the visual and the sound elements in my pieces.

When meeting Joan Martí-Frasquier at Mixtur Festival 2018, we discussed one of my works, 'Triptych', for clarinet/bass clarinet, viola, cello and live painting. in one of the movements of this piece, live painting is indicated by graphic directions, and we exchanged some ideas about the graphic shapes and how these could be translated into baritone sax's sounds. These were the first steps of 'Quasi uno Specchio', a score I "painted" for Joan to interpret".

I proposed Isabel to include his piece in a compilation called "Suite Mixtur" and the composer did a few modifications on the original version. This new version was recorded by Antonio Velasco at Calafell Sound Recording Studio in June 2021.

Read more about "Suite Mixtur" here: https://joanmf.com/suite-mixtur/

Find out more about the classical/contemporary repertoire for baritone saxophone on the blog from my website: https://joanmf.com/jmf-blog/