Fe de erratas (2008)
(for six singers a cappella)

Fe de erratas (in English: Erratum, Correction) is a scenic piece of music in which six singers continually try to invent the piece themselves. Six text fragments by Felipe Benítez Reyes, which thematize invention, and a few musical building blocks are repeatedly recombined and placed in relation to each other, so that a different context always emerges: in terms of music, semantics and finally also in the combination of both levels. The result is: Un espacio de ficción insensato (a foolish space of fiction), una sopa de letras (an alphabet soup) and in any case a constant correction of the piece by itself: A sentence that was previously spoken clearly appears later as sound material; the rhythmic sequence of a lotus flute becomes a sung word shortly afterwards; the assertion of a single singer reappears in a collective discussion that reduces it to absurdity... Thus the idea of rectification is also a kind of game of disguise: nothing is as it seems, everything can always take on a different guise.

The idea of rectification also permeates the scenic thinking: the singers are not only bearers of voices, but also figures who discuss the play and constantly correct each other. As characters, however, they are not clearly defined, but attempt to play through the possibilities of an identity: magos, moros, filólogos, psiquiatras, mercaderes genoveses (magicians, Moors, philologists, psychiatrists, Genoese merchants), or tener alas, ser vampiros, ser fantasmas (having wings, being vampires, ghosts)...

The text fragments by Felipe Benítez Reyes (*1960, Rota/Cádiz) come from his fantastic novel ‘Tratándose de Ustedes’, in which the act of literary invention is thematized full of humor and irony and spun to excess. For him, as for me, the creation of fictions is a cipher for the necessity of constantly reinventing reality so that it can be lived at all.