Hermana Lluvia

In recent years, Alberto Grau has placed ecological concerns at the heart of his music. Starting with Kasar mie la gaji (The earth is tired) about the draining and plundering of natural resources, through Bin-nam-ma dedicated to the 25,000 lives claimed by Venezuelan floods, to this work specially written for the SYC's 40th birthday.

Hermana Lluvia asks for rain to water the earth, to save the 6,000 children that perish every day from dehydration or drinking contaminated water. In the explanatory notes to the score, Grau notes that more than 1 billion people worldwide do not have access to drinkable water.

Agua, hermana lluvia          Water, sister rain

Lluvia besa la tierra           Rain that kisses the earth.

The work begins with onomatopoeic sounds imitating the sound of rain, little insects, birds and little frogs. A trance-like, hypnotic passage permeates this 'environmental soundscape' and the music progressively intensifies into a powerful rhythmically-charged praise. Grau repeats fragments of the Spanish word 'hermana' to create prayer-like chants, with the fragments themselves adding layers of meaning - mana meaning 'to flow' or 'to spring', and maná-manna alluding to the miraculous food that God sent to the Israelites in the desert.

Drawing from the driving rhythms and rich harmonies of salsa, Grau combines this with native Indian rain chants, creating music that is exuberant, exhilarating and inimitably Latin-American. The compound metres (for example, 3/8 and 6/8 time) characteristic of native Indian chants are superimposed on the regular metre of salsa (4/4 time) to produce a rhythmic complexity and tension that propels the music forward.

Grau, convinced of 'the good artistic results when combining musical elements with corporal movements', has also instructed for a series of movements to be performed, displaying salient features of both Indian prayer and salsa dancing which echo and intensify the musical aspects.

Programme notes by Chan Zhuomin.

Jennifer Tham, ed.