Murcof is Mexican musician Fernando Corona, an artist who integrates classical and electronic music. Working with pianist Vanessa Wagner he has recently released the Statea album, an ambient piece of work that takes its source material from John Cage and Erik Satie amongst others. Here he talks to Arcana about his love of classical music, and how the two forms harmonise together. But first, here’s an introduction to their album together:
Can you remember your first encounter with classical music?
It was a long time ago when I was a kid, and it comes from the side of my father in the family. It was an album of Wendy Carlos playing Bach in the late 1970s, I think. He also did some electronic / analogue synthesizer interpretations of Bach’s music, and so that was the first proper marriage of electronic and classical that I heard. I developed an interest in both, and I became much more familiar with 20th century music from composers like Stravinsky, the Schoenberg school, Xenakis, Ligeti and all the people up to Arvo Pärt, Silvestrov and the minimalists. Classical music has been with me all this time from my childhood and this album is a logical place to go because of that.
How did you get to work with Vanessa?
I met her before we started making music, through her husband Alexandre Cazac. He is director of the Infiné label, and I have been friends with him for many years. We’ve worked together, and in that time he has been very supportive. It wasn’t until a week-long workshop that we did a small arrangement together however. We were playing the same night, and Vanessa was the first one on, then me, so we interlinked the two. Statea has been a work in progress since 2010.
In that time we only did 20 or 30 concerts together, so it is still a fresh collaboration, and now with the album done we are adapting it for the stage. Many things have changed, and we have started from scratch again with some of the pieces, but we have always respected what we are doing.
For our Satie work (Gnossienne no.3) the piano sounds have a lot of analogue processes, where we have brought the piano audio signal into the modular system, before messing around with ring modulation, filtering, and experimenting with the possibilities. The piece is not too long, but I recorded around 45 minutes of messing around and cut the most important and interesting bits to fit the final track.
The album is called ‘Statea’. Is that because you achieve the ideal balance between classical and electronic music?
It’s because to make an album is sometimes the hardest part. It was open enough, it wasn’t going to encapsulate us in a direct way, a literal way, but we talked about a good balance between acoustic and digital. You can listen to the piece as one whole, not just the acoustic and not just the digital but something that works together. That is one of the things I am looking for, not getting lost in the sounds and what I have to say. That’s the reason for the name. We were initially going to use the Latin but Alexandre suggested the old Italian way.
Sometimes when classical and electronic music meet the results are a bit cheesy, but there is a very deep emotion to what you do.
That’s good to know, it’s a process and a matter of deciding what works and what doesn’t. It’s telling a story, and each sound needs a reason for existing. Vanessa and I were working together for a common goal. Most of these compositions are well known, and people have an idea about them, but even if it’s an abstract message it’s still there. You can enhance it or steer it off somewhere else.
With Satie, yeah, we wanted to see him a new light, especially as it’s one of the pieces that is most famous. It was tricky to work with it because of what you just said. We wanted to try and prepare a fresh view of the piece, to justify Vanessa and I working on it to contribute something new.
Is your approach in some way similar to that of Satie, a kind of ‘less is more’ viewpoint?
In a way, though I do find it quite a challenge to say when a track is done. I take that step very seriously, and I don’t like to overdo or underdo things. When a piece is finished it is when I have explored so many possibilities! Then I choose the best one, polish it and finish it.
Do you intend to continue working with classical music in this way?
Yeah. There are many things that can be done with classical music, and there are many approaches I would like to try. I would say ‘watch this space’, with compositions old and new. The acoustic instruments are so rich, and it is wonderful to work with them electronically and to open a can of worms with some of the weird harmonics that are peculiar to those instruments.
It has been a really strong emotional passage for me since our early ages, it is a big part of me on a personal level, and it is a natural situation for me to work with it.
You have a very fine ear for orchestration. Have you ever written for a full orchestra?
Yes. I did a small interaction with Jean-Paul Dessy, from Belgium, who is a composer and a director. Musiques Nouvelles is the name of his ensemble, and they adapted a piece of mine for orchestra. I have been sitting with this idea for a long time, and I would love to sit down with a composer / director who is open to the idea. It would be a bit stressful for sure but would be a lot of fun as well.
What does classical music mean to you?
For me personally each kind of music is a whole avenue of expression – classical, jazz and electronic with its many subgenres. Classical is long standing for so many centuries, and for me it is about always keeping with acoustic instruments – the more conservative music.
Classical music is a combination of centuries of studying, developing, trial and error of previous work. It is an emotional world but also a very strict one. The core essence is the compositions, but you need trained interpreters to play it. Because of that it can be stressful and competitive, but I think it is worthwhile to have highly trained interpreters so that we can enjoy the music of the past, from the Baroque to the 20th century twelve-tone music of Schoenberg and his school.
It is always this though – highly emotional and direct. In my case I formed an instant connection with it and because of that I have always found it very emotional.
If you could recommend one piece of classical music to Arcana readers that you’ve been listening to recently, what would it be and why?
I always go to one of my favourite composers of late, Valentin Silvestrov, a composer from the Ukraine. His latest work is amazing and I often go back to his Requiem, written for his wife. One small section of it is also part of a series of songs for piano and voice, but he also did a version for choir and orchestra. It is not a new piece but it is the one that comes to mind right now.
Statea, by Murcof and Vanessa Wagner, is out now on Infiné. The pair will appear at the Barbican on Monday 31 October as part of a bill including pianist Lubomyr Melnyk. Tickets can be purchased from the Barbican website. Vanessa will also be giving her thoughts on classical music to Arcana shortly!
Next followed a rare revival of the Third Piano Concerto, itself reworked from an abandoned symphony and what would doubtless have become a three-movement entity had Tchaikovsky completed its Andante and Finale to his satisfaction prior to his death (these latter, as realized posthumously by Taneyev, make an effective whole – as Alexander Markovich demonstrated in a Royal Festival Hall account eight years ago).
