What do the Zapotec languages, Mandarin Chinese, a Cardenche song and a tree have in common? Very little, of course, but also a lot: in his work "Portal," the composer Carlos Iturralde takes them as launching pads into an exciting exploration of sound and physical phenomena. Before its premiere on the 30th October as part of "Tunings of the World 2.0" Iturralde explains the ideas that informed "Portal."
Your piece picks up on the sound qualities of language. How does that tie in with the umbrella theme, "Tunings of the World?"
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A couple of years ago I talked to Ana María [Rodriguez] about this concept, it is very broad and open to interpretation. The subjects of our talk ranged from tunings to ecology, pluralities and sound in ontological terms. Later when I started imagining the piece I related those discussions to the idea of borders, in conceptual and physical terms, and that took me directly to places and languages. I started thinking of a dimension in which borders where blurred, and that's how I remembered sitting in a church for a reunion of the members of a brass band, all speaking in Zapotec, and I started playing in my mind, finding phonetic similarities with other languages.