The myth is the reality
The myth is the reality (Mircea Eliade)
Miguel Ángel Acebo
When the historian of religions Mircea Eliade equates myth with reality, he challenges a culture in which empirical and scientific-technical knowledge are considered the sole reliable avenues to truth. Yet the anthropological reality that civilizations construct their world upon mythical narratives —or, if one prefers, upon abstract values, fetishes, or ideas elevated to the status of gods— remains undeniable, beyond the scope of belief.
This work is not merely a musical proposal but a manifesto that engages multiple realms of thought. Encountering the later works of Alexander Scriabin reveals a profoundly disquieting reality, both musically and philosophically. In Scriabin, compositional language is not a mere vessel for expression; it is part of the very content itself. His friend and biographer Leonid Sabaneyev, in Memories of Scriabin, recalls the composer declaring: “I do not understand how one can simply write music. […] Music has meaning only when linked to a unified plan, to a complete vision of the world. […] Music is a path of revelation.” For Scriabin, music was ritual. His unfinished Mysterium, intended to unfold in the Himalayas over several days, was designed not for an audience but for participants in a multisensory ritual of music, visual spectacle, dance, fragrance, and tactile engagement.
Manfred Kelkel, in his seminal work Scriabin, sa vie, l’ésotérisme et le langage musical dans son œuvre, emphasizes that the primary influence on Scriabin was German idealism, particularly Fichte, rather than the more superficial New Age currents or the ideas of Blavatsky often associated with him. Intriguing parallels with Nietzsche are also evident: the will to power resonates with Scriabin’s notion of desire, recurrent in the composer’s notebooks and the Übermensch finds an echo in the “I am God” of his poetry.
Scriabin takes idealism to its extreme. Perception is reality, and nothing exists outside the mind: “Everything is my creation […] Nothing exists by itself, nothing was previously created: everything is play. And this play is the highest form of reality.” Frequently, he employs fire as a metaphor for desire: the creative impulse, the drive to construct one’s own reality, the human capacity to imagine novel sensations, combinations and meanings. “Desire is suffering,” he notes. Fire, for Scriabin, is life itself: a process of burning through desire’s ardour toward progressive extinction.
Yet Scriabin’s universe is darker still. His night is more suffocating than that of the German idealists. The advent of decadent art brings a particular vision of darkness. As Kelkel notes, in Scriabin the figure of Prometheus parallels that of Lucifer. The allure of ambiguity, the liminal, the sterile and the cadaverous is intensified.
What is striking is the extraordinary correspondence between Scriabin’s thought and his compositional language, which creates disorienting ambiguities in traditional tonal hierarchies. Harmonic tensions, founded on tonic, dominant, and subdominant functions, dissolve into symmetrical tritone relationships. As in traditional tonality, these tritone relationships are structural in nature and define the discourse sections.
In the so-called mystic chord or Prometheus chord, similar ambiguities appear: two chords separated by a tritone distance exchange and confuse all their notes: the major third of the first becomes the minor seventh of the second; the minor ninth becomes a perfect fifth, sometimes omitted; the major ninth, an augmented fifth; the added sixth, a minor third; and inevitably, the root becomes the tritone of the resulting chord. The conversions work identically in reverse. This, combined with the known symbolism of the tritone (diabolus in musica), creates a disorienting scenario: we do not know whether we are on one side of the mirror or the other, in tension or repose (tonic or dominant).
Another element connecting Scriabin to decadent art is two-dimensionality. In works such as Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, Millais’ Ophelia, or Klimt’s The Kiss, the figures exhibit an apolline mummification, making them disturbingly sterile, and a tendency to fill every part of the canvas, avoiding perspective. Possibly, the avoidance of depth, presenting everything in the foreground, petrified, is a way of representing sterility. In Scriabin, the impossibility of travelling to a neighbouring key represents the cancellation of perspective. Everything happens here. But in an ambiguous here, in which we do not know whether the dominant exists. The familiarity of the main key, infected by an intrusion of another reality, constitutes the Freudian definition of the uncanny: something hidden at home that should never have come to light. It modulates but modulates to the interchangeable tritone. It modulates to the reflection in the mirror. In this context, the suppression of the fifth in the Prometheus chord gains special meaning, impoverishing the primary harmonics and transforming the sonority into a frozen, sterile now, where the harmonic tensions of the third, seventh, or ninth appear bare, dissected.
But why is it necessary to reclaim this daemonic world of darkness and ambivalence? First, we may ask how art would appear in a society where the gods are assumed dead and myth serves only as entertainment. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han addresses this in Saving Beauty and The Disappearance of Rituals. He describes a “society saturated with positivity,” based on performance and happiness —a happiness, that is, at the service of performance. He speaks of a “society of transparency,” in which everything must be known, equating the accumulation and accessibility of data with the ancient concept of wisdom. As a result, an aesthetic of the polished emerges, entirely smooth, without traces of negativity or anything standing between the viewer and immediate narcissistic satisfaction. All signs of negativity are denied: death is omitted, pain pathologized, and ritual deemed accessory, a hindrance to productivity and efficacy.
The consequence is a culture of meaning and content, disregarding the signifier and form as mere dispensable containers. Yet beauty belongs to the world of appearance: it is form and signifier, suggesting impossibility of disclosure. Attempting to tear the veil of Maya, illuminating its fragile structures fully, beauty shifts from signifier to meaning, ceasing to be beauty and becoming dissected obscenity. In this sense, it is urgent to rescue the mysterious, to recognise human incapacity to name certain things, and that some things, though nameable, must eternally remain shrouded, lest they vanish forever.
The absence of darkness and abjection has dire implications. The entirely polished and positive describes a homogeneous panorama. According to Eliade, homogeneity equals chaos, what has yet to be civilized or known. In homogeneity, humans cannot orient themselves. Sacred elements act as references, making space and time habitable. This rupture, this wound, parallels entering a temple: a homogeneous temple is inconceivable. Similarly, eroticism cannot be strictly Apollonian; transgression and disturbance are necessary. In Roland Barthes’ words: “The most erotic place on a body is where clothing opens.” Where Dionysian forces unfold amidst concealment, an access to mystery is intuited. Darkness is inescapable. Darkness is not mere absence of light; it has ontological substance and imbues everything with blackness. Absolute positivity is an impossible abstraction and a perversion, a form of negativity. Absolute absence of evil, if it existed, would be the true hell.
This is the territory of Scriabin, and here art and ritual operate according to these rules. There is no art without negativity, strangeness, or otherness. Art ignoring difference becomes mere self-indulgence. The approach to the mysterious includes paths like quietism, alchemy, or the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross, here represented in Semejante a la noche. The “dark night,” lead, or black raven are metaphors of the alchemical nigredo: the putrefactive phase, reaching intense blackness, prior to transformation of matter through separation and reunification of fixed and volatile, matter and essence. Art, in this sense, is a ritual path to the unnameable.
The mysterious operates in darkness, where identities are unclear, and dissolution is the norm. Symbols include the night and the mirror. The mirror represents self-knowledge, yet we may ask whether the reflection contains another or merely projects the observer. Deformities may appear in the reflection. The premonition of otherness within oneself opens the door to the abject, to what the subject perceives but does not recognise. The unfaithfulness of reflection is treated extensively by Sánchez-Verdú in Jardín de espejos, where overlapping tempi create independent realities. The mirror symbolizes the passage from the sensible to the ideal world, the resonance of opposites, the confusion between reality and representation. The mirror is, ultimately, an essential symbol across many traditions of knowledge.
Where there is strangeness and otherness, there is fear. When identity is violated by an unrecognizable presence, when the body’s limits blur, the mask is born. The mask signifies monstrous mutation and relates to the liminal, the monster’s abode beyond the city walls. Yet concealment, modesty, and being for the other are essential to civilization, and the site where the character is inseparable from us, and identity becomes strange, is ritual, and in ritual, art achieves transcendence.
If there is one aspect of sound that relates to transcendence, it is resonance. It implies an aspiration upward, toward the distant horizon; and the existence of a space in which to propagate: a temple, a body, a hollow. It challenges the linearity of time, which expands and folds back on itself. It consists of a first cause and an effect in its image and likeness. Resonance is community: trembling with another’s pain, vibrating, and making another vibrate. Above all, it is an awareness of silence and space.
It is no coincidence that resonance serves as the guiding thread throughout the entire album. It appears in the spectral language of López López, in the astonishing textures of Sánchez-Verdú, and in the work of Francisco Domínguez, who undertook a daring study of the instrument’s sympathetic vibrations. In Laberinto de silencios, resonance unfolds within a contemplative environment where silence is equally, if not more, significant. The labyrinth implies shadow, secrecy, and passage. Silence, when shared, constitutes the most intense form of community, where lips need not part. Here we are gathered, united in purpose.
Miguel Ángel Acebo
Jesús Torres
The evolution of Jesús Torres’s catalogue can be traced through his piano music, where we see how he has gradually shaped a language unmistakably his own. Works such as the Piano Concerto —from which his Cadenza was later drawn— Monegros, Wasserfall, among many others, reveal his diverse and finely nuanced approaches to the instrument.
For this recording, two works have been chosen in which the composer’s defining traits converge: virtuosity, poetic allusion, melodic clarity, and linear thought, all framed within a mature language, firmly established and self-assured, free from dogmatism yet receptive to a wide spectrum of technical and aesthetic influences. Above all, they are marked by a powerful dramatic impulse, one that already pointed toward his future in opera, later fully realized in works such as Tránsito and Tejas verdes.
The mysticism of Torres, related to that of Scriabin (though closer to the Spanish Renaissance notion of ecstasy, vision, and contemplation of truth than to the Russian’s esoteric idea of redemption and the catalysis of the universe’s vibrations, an outlook closer to Giacinto Scelsi), takes on two forms of expression in these selected pieces: static-contemplative (Laberinto de silencios) and mobile-extatic (Semejante a la noche). Both share common features, yet the manner in which they arrive at certain conclusions establishes the duality presented here.
Laberinto de silencios
Laberinto de silencios draws us into contemplation primarily through rhythm, harmony, and register, all tending toward a stasis of discourse. Striking is the way in which Torres creates a sense of volatility and suspension of time. Through the movement of small, incisive figures, he sculpts silence against points always displaced from the metrical pulse. It is a rhythmic design that even the accumulation of events at the work’s close fails to destabilise.
The same occurs with harmony, which remains consistently diatonic in character. Although the material is deeply rooted in tradition —one may even trace shadows of tonal cadences in the bass lines— the way in which it is placed, carefully and out of context in rhythm and register, produces a tonal ambiguity oriented more toward texture and resonance than toward harmonic definition.
Equally noteworthy is Torres’s meticulous care to prevent this process of stasis from resulting in a loss of attention. While the material is constant, he calculates the proportions of change and the linearity of a progressive development. Acciaccaturas are his “workhorse,” employed to shape the discourse through their function as impulse, textural tension, and restraint. They guide phrasing and structure while also serving as pivots of modulation. Together with diatonic clusters, they enable this contemplative music to unfold with elegance and subtlety, yet with firm conviction.
The work was conceived to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Logia Voltaire No. 127 and bears certain Masonic symbolism —even graphically within the score— such as the phases of the square and compass, from rule to creativity. This symbolism also finds macro and microformal resonance in the recurrence of certain numbers —particularly the number three— most evident at the conclusion of the piece.
Here, Miguel Ángel Acebo makes highly refined use of the pedal to preserve the multiple textural layers —and the piano’s spectrum of colours— while maintaining rhythmic pulse and phrasing. Especially remarkable is his grasp of form, and still more, the way he sustains tension within the dynamic restraint that the work demands.
Semejante a la noche
Starting from a fragment of Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, the second piece by Torres included in this CD reveals mystical ecstasy from a more active, darker, and ornamented contemplation. Premiered by its dedicatee, Javier Perianes, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, it has since enjoyed wide diffusion. Yet this interpretation by Miguel Ángel Acebo stands out for its exceptional clarity, both in conception and in technique.
The opening, with its hollow chords moving in parallel across the piano’s extreme registers, already conveys a sense of suspension. This small element articulates the overall form of the work, reappearing episodically throughout, almost as a thematic gesture, until the ecstatic culmination in which it becomes the very centre around which the discourse expands.
This section finds its contrast in virtuosic mobility of a Ravelian or Granadian character —that light or guide […] which burned in my heart— where harmony unfolds as a counterpoint to a diatonically shaped melody. Striking is the way Torres fuses this inclination toward renewed tradition with a cell (minor 3rd and semitone, expanded to perfect 5th and semitone) so characteristic of his style. The result is a harmonic kaleidoscope in which suggested functional relationships are continually broken, yielding a distinctive expressive sensuality. Here, temporal perception emerges from the continuous undulation of rhythms and arpeggios of varying lengths, which coalesce into a linear melodic texture, mobile, yet static. It is contemplative.
Miguel Ángel Acebo approaches these challenges of shifting textures, measured use of the pedal, and continuous hand crossings with remarkable mastery. Especially striking is his search for balance in the weight of each chord and its textural layers, as well as the crystalline precision of his arpeggiated leaps.
José Manuel López López
Lo fijo y lo volátil
Lo fijo y lo volátil is a highly characteristic work in López López’s catalogue, with a commanding interpretive trajectory that reveals the composer’s very personal approach to the spectral dimension during his early mature period. His attachment to colour as in painting, his treatment of time and pitch as a unified factor —“particles of the same body”— and the poetic unfoldings present in all his works —a kinship strikingly evident with Scriabin— make his music a reference point for the latest generations of Spanish composers.
A defining feature of this work is the incorporation of electronics. At the time of its creation, this represented a major turning point, as its concept involves enlarging —or “magnifying” might also be an appropriate term— the instrument from its own characteristics, as the composer notes. That is, through pre-recorded piano sounds, he manipulates and expands both the instrument’s sonority and the performer’s physical capacities, whether by sound synthesis processes, impossible resonances, or frenzied speeds that become texture emulating granular synthesis. Notable examples include the search for “doubles” in certain sections, such as measures 19 onward, where one perceives the transverse idea of the harp sound or the lengthening of fundamentals at the piece’s opening.
The work’s three large sections are subdivided into subsections technically defined by the use of tonlos —key depressions for resonance— each assigned distinct rhythmic, melodic, temporal, decorative, or harmonic deployment techniques. The contrast among these sections never diminishes the sense of flow. Although approached differently, the experience is one of continuous unfolding, like a fluid, as in Scriabin’s Op. 63 No. 2. From the deployment of harmonics and resonant stretching to the most incisive, striated rhythms, this piece seems to float in time. It also sets the stage for subsequent remarkable works such as the Violin Concerto, Haikus d’automne, or Viento de otoño.
Miguel Ángel Acebo demonstrates a profound understanding of this work, bringing a wide-ranging and precise technique that preserves and highlights the character of each section while adding a notable expressive dimension. His interpretation reveals a fresh approach to Lo fijo y lo volátil, with a fluidity both assured and insightful, offering a model for future performances. In this way, repertoire is constructed.
José María Sánchez Verdú
José María Sánchez Verdú and his gardens
The garden is an architectural and aesthetic space that reflects how humans can structure (dominate), integrate, and engage in dialogue with nature, in a world of delight, creation, and reflection. In these gardens, Sánchez Verdú creates his own listening space, where the compartmentalization of the Italian garden, the undulating expanses of the French, and the intimate aquatic beauty of the Arab garden are all present.
The two pieces included in this recording, Jardín de espejos and Jardín de fuego, guide us through the composer’s poetic-sound world, reflecting some of his central concerns: a new conception of time tending toward stasis through repetition; rhythmic incision and the insertion of contrasting objects, gestures, or patterns that are varied but undeveloped; the timbral expansion of the instrument, aimed at surpassing the threshold of its own idiosyncrasy and creating new contexts; and the hedonistic beauty of the materials. In short, he creates music “driven and subjected to risk and adventure”, a garden as a listening space, emerging from the sobriety of the material.
Jardín de espejos
Jardín de espejos was composed in 2017 as a required work for the 60th International Piano Competition Premio Jaén. Its structural unity is based on three elements: a robust macrostructure of clearly defined sections, describing a linear-arch form, far removed from the classical-romantic approach; a metronomic circumscription fixed to two marks (quaver = 114 and quaver = 100), only broken in the final section (measures 135, 138, and 140), helping to create a sense of closure before the resonant ending; and the composer’s characteristic sobriety of materials, focusing above all on the almost obsessive repetition of notes and chords, the chromatic undulation of polarised notes, open arabesques, and resonance. Through variation, juxtaposition, and occasionally superposition, he creates on the micro-level a static journey of attentive listening.
Bringing cohesion to all these elements presents a considerable interpretive challenge. Especially delicate are the materials mirrored between the hands, the pedal on which the resonance —another mirror— is based, and the meticulous handling of dynamics, agogics, and character contrasts of each element. Here, Miguel Ángel Acebo’s mastery of pedal technique, clarity of touch and articulation, and formal understanding of the piece unfold magnificently, demonstrating his remarkable ability to assimilate and engage with all kinds of musical languages with dazzling precision.
Jardín de fuego
This piece was composed for the pianist Alfonso Gómez and, unlike the previous work, both its duration and character change markedly. The tempo is faster (quarter note = 63) and steady, with subtle agogic modifications and a more aggressive intent.
The temporal modulation of the piece lies in the way the various objects and gestures are designed and presented. Their tendency is toward rapid, sparkling juxtaposition, alternating with longer, more resonant objects, creating a strikingly contrasting sense of temporal flow —rigid yet flexible— as if we are moving through the recesses of this imaginary garden.
Abrupt shifts across the extremes of the piano add to this effect, generating silences and, therefore, different sonic planes that are unrelated to one another. This allows each material to be heard individually and, on a timbral level, highlights the piano as a percussion instrument through the audible mechanics in the treble and the near-undefinable pitch of the bass. Finally, a third, middle textural layer functions as a unifier and resonator.
In approaching this work, Miguel Ángel Acebo demonstrates the ability to follow precisely what the music demands. His superimposed rhythmic precision and flexibility (also evident in his interpretation of Scriabin’s most contemplative moments, as well as in abrupt, fleeting changes), along with his understanding of form, shine through in a performance full of subtle energy and poetry.
Francisco Domínguez
Approaching Mysterium
Francisco Domínguez belongs to the new generation of creators who can boast a solid training, consistent artistic references, and a technique that unifies the achievements of the avant-garde with an open approach to new sensitive horizons, both culturally and aesthetically. Some of his works, such as Taqsim, Eco de las noches, or Igurtzi, exemplify this. In them, we can observe the composer engaging with certain references to the Arab world, a new structuralism of an expressive nature, and an exploration of extended instrumental resources that at times approaches saturation.
He is also a remarkable orchestrator and creator of dialogues with the academic tradition, as is the case in this piece. Composed especially for this recording project (thanks are due to Paco Moya and Miguel Ángel Acebo), Domínguez traces harmonic materials and conceptual sketches from Scriabin’s “impossible” project Mysterium, of which only L’Acte Préalable remains. Yet he avoids reconstruction. On the contrary, he approaches these materials through objectification that reaffirms Domínguez’s own authorship.
To achieve this, the development of micro-formal events (chordal gestures, bursts of arabesques, etc.) as well as the stylistic deviation from their origin are essential. The composer accomplishes this through two main approaches. The first is the loss of linear phrasing through fragmentation, playing with the perception of time via succession, register expansion, and nullification of material through clusters. The second, perhaps even more important, is the use of the sostenuto pedal. Through this, Domínguez shapes resonant harmonic centres. Not only does what is directly sounded exist, but also what vibrates. In this way, Scriabin is present indirectly, as the reflection of a shadow (with the corresponding aesthetic-religious implications).
The work carries a great expressive weight and a highly solid structure. This is precisely what Miguel Ángel Acebo highlights in his “approach.” He extracts the highly personal sonorities of the piece, allowing the distant echoes of Scriabin to resonate. His handling of rhythm and textures is remarkable for its clarity and precision, resulting in a recording that aspires to be a reference.
