mp3 MUSIC by RAMON dos SANTOS

MUSIC by RAMON dos SANTOS

About the music:

Track 1: PIANO SOLO FOR A LARVA (2001)

This is a piece dedicated to a larva.
As dos Santos, in an email to Jackie vander Snaak explains: " (...) you see, inside my keyboard some terrible drama is evolving. A fruitfly somehow managed to lay an egg underneath the LCD display. Or inside the LCD.. anyway, now, stuck between glass and LCD lies, very visibly, a larva almost, but not totally, motionless!
Have you ever heard of such a thing?
I decided tonight, whilst Halbertsma was working on his essay, that I should write a pianosolo piece for this forever foetal creature.
The movements are:

1. The awaking of the Larva
2. The first dream.
3. "Looking at the outside of my display"
4. Fully awake in shock.
5. Resistance / Thinking of an escape.
6. Anger and despair.
7. Surrender.
8. Dreaming of flying.

Track 2: DIGITAL JUNGLE (1999)

One of Dos Santos' rare 'soundscapes', composed on his Yamaha CS1X.
The sound of the jungle, fully digitally created. Hence the title.
This piece now seems an eerie prophecy of the recent biological drama that is taking place inside this keyboard (see: Piano Solo for a Larva).

Track 3: TIME & SPACE SUITE (2000)

Dos Santos composed this music for the Kaganof movie "Hotel Ava".
It consists of eight tracks. Four of them 'edgy' and simplistic manifestations of the small space of the hotelroom. The other four dreamlike and fluent manifestations of the 'timeless time' spend in hotelrooms.

Tracks 4 - 9: MUSIC FOR A FUNERAL (1974)

New York bound artist Ramon dos Santos (New York, 1939) divides his time between writing and composing. And allthough his works differ ofcourse in texture and form, they all share that same trance-like state of semi-existence.

In Music for a Funeral, Dos Santos not only liberates the music from the classic structure of a Requiem, but he also wrote a whole new liturgy to accompany the music.
This monumental piece, a true Romantic Modernistic classic, is best played loud. And as soundsystems in churches are often lousy, in his accompaning writings Dos Santos suggests that you should bring your own.
"Only music lets us understand the necessity of death," he states, "We therefore should perform it well."
Dos Santos does not deny the explicit psychedelic infuence in particulary the third movement because "life itself is a psychedelic experience, normality is a anomality."

MOVEMENTS:

I. Enter the living, enter the dead, (2.46)
II. The empty room.
III. Some thoughts left inside my brain after I'm dead, (9.01)
IV. The departed as remembered by his loved ones, (0.58)
V. Here I am, already parting from my body, (0.45)
VI. Prelude to a shared rememberance, a farwell (4.05)

This recording © 1978, The Manhattan Romantic Modernistic Orchestra, The New York Firebrigade Choir and The St.Pauls Womens Choir.
Conductor: Ramon dos Santos

Digitally remastered at the Silent Woods Studio's, 2001.

Tracks 10-12: THE KAGANOF CONCERTO (1988)

Dedicated to his South African Guru, the writer and artist KAGANOF.
A rich, multil-ayered orchestral piece consisting of mostly, timpani, celesta, the synthesized sounds of the Organix and female choir.

MOVEMENTS:

I. The Man and his Mission
II. The man and his Mistress
III. The man and his Mind

TRACKS 13 - 15: LABOUR DAY SONATA (1977)

Assigned by the American Communist Party, Dos Santos directed and partly performed this boisterous piece for the first time at the Labour Day celebration in Chicago 1977 before a baffled audience of workers and union members.
The first and third movement are quatre-mains pieces with the distinction that both performers were unable to hear eachother. Only the director (Dos Santos) and the audience were able to witness this "clash of notes and thoughts" (a review in the Chicago Tribune).
This blindness or deafness should, according to the composer, symbolize the conmtinuous epic clash between ideals and reality. Only in the second movement, performed by the composer, there's a unity in thought and deed.

MOVEMENTS:

I. Aurora, a revolutionairy vision.
II. Midday, Remembering the great battles of the Cold War.
III. Aurora reversed, The Struggle Continues.

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