Salón de espejos (2010)
(for orchestra)

The title Salón de espejos refers to the tradition of mirrored cabinets, such as those found at fairs in the past. In these rooms, visual perception is confused by the infinite reflections of the images in the visàvis mirrors, creating a game of self-deception, as Orson Welles did in the famous showdown scene from The Lady from Shanghai.

My piece thematizes the comedy of reflections from an acoustic perspective. In the orchestra space, musical events are crossed, varied and expanded between left and right, front and back. This interplay is facilitated by the special arrangement: There is a piano and a percussion section to the left and right at the front, which mirror each other and at the same time act as impulse generators for actions that are picked up by the orchestra space at the back and sent back in a modified form. Another special feature is the identical instrumentation of the two violin groups, which also sit opposite each other and thus enable a further level of mirroring.

This polyphonic play of intersections and feedbacks ends in a frozen rhythmic situation in which several meters overlap and finally unite to form a single large pulse, completely eliminating the idea of mirroring. The mirrors are gradually switched off, as at the end of Orson Welles' scene.

Elena Mendoza