Rosa mutabile for flute, viola, guitar, bass clarinet and percussion will be given its first performance on October 20 at the Auditorio Nacional in Madrid during the Festival Puentes. The composer describes his new work: «Written for two groups of instruments (A: flute, guitar, viola; B: bass clarinet, percussion), the cycle is divided into four short movements. The idea came to me after reading a poem contained in Federico García Lorca’s marvellous drama, Doña Rosita la soltera o el lenguaje de las flores, where the writer makes an allusion to the four stages of a flower created by Rosita’s uncle: a rose that lives for just one day and changes its state in line with the natural variations in the light, brought about by the intensity or lack of sunlight. The poetic images described by Lorca can be summarized as follows:

1. opening in the morning (red like blood);

2. maximum opening at midday (resplendent and hard as coral);

3. at sunset, while the birds are singing and the evening “faints into the violets of the sea”, it turns white;

4. in the night it gradually fades, as the stars advance, the winds drop and the night plays its “white metal horn”.

As always happens in my music, in the four movements that make up this cycle there are no programmatic elements alluding to the beautiful images described by Lorca, but rather the music describes four differing “states” of the opening material, which undergoes transformations related to what I might call the expressive state of the object in the poem. An interesting challenge was to succeed in obtaining “organic” musical material, constructed almost like the growth of a molecule, which is born from the relations between the open strings of the guitar and of the viola, and the pitches corresponding to their chromatic negative. It is the only case in my music so far where the proportions deduced from the pitches – and their transformations – have also been used to determine the proportions of the values assigned to the rhythmic sequences, so that the correspondence between the intervals and the rhythmic values is absolute as far as the musical objects forming the basis of the piece are concerned. However, the transformations performed on the material do not always necessarily correspond to the combinatory art or to techniques of molecular transformation, but more especially to ideas linked to criteria of how to transfer the expressive states of the poetic object to the musical object».