Work nominated 
for the 2026 Music Springboard Award

Estudio sobre la carne is a short work for large ensemble, commissioned by the Joven Orquesta Nacional de España (JONDE) and subsequently performed by the JONDE and Ensemble Modern during the Contemporary Music Days in Santiago de Compostela.

The piece engages primarily with the theme of violence. I was interested in conceiving a brief work that unfolds in bursts: highly concentrated moments of extreme intensity in which sound is continuously transformed. The form emerges precisely from this succession of explosions. Rather than a continuous discourse, the piece is structured as a chain of episodes that appear, are consumed, and disappear before they can stabilize. Each of them is intended to reach, from the very moment of its emergence, the limit of its own energy, as though sound were to enter the scene after combustion has already begun and withdraw just before collapse.

While composing the work, I was constantly thinking of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical studies: drawings of muscles, arms, and legs captured in states of relaxation, tension, and movement. I was interested in translating that same sense of materiality into sound—writing a piece in which dynamic, rhythmic, and timbral differences, the entire fabric of the work, could be experienced as something as tangible and real as the flesh of a muscle. I wanted the twenty-four musicians to exert such pressure on the sound that it would acquire an almost physical presence—a volume and density that would render it, in a sense, more visible.

I was also interested in conceiving sound as matter continuously subjected to forces. Textures shift state in an instant; they accelerate, deform, and tear into one another like a muscle repeatedly driven to the limit of its contraction. Each time a texture appears to reach equilibrium, a new force interrupts it and compels it to transform. This permanent instability is, for me, a form of violence—not the destruction of a material, but the impossibility of its remaining identical to itself.

I also wanted this effort to be inscribed in the performers’ bodies: for the physical gesture of the musicians to embody this continuous tension, and for the ensemble to function as a single organism, incapable of ever fully relaxing, always on the verge of breaking or igniting from within. Ideally, this tension is not only heard but also transmitted to the listener’s body. I wanted the listener not to observe this violence from the outside, but to be drawn into the same field of forces.

In this piece, I was interested in each sonic gesture appearing with the force of an assertion—not as an episode within a narrative, but as a presence that bursts forth, occupies the space of listening, and disappears before fully settling. I wanted the listener not only to perceive the relationships between sounds, but also their weight, density, and volume; to be immersed in a brutal choreography of sound, and thereby to become disoriented, even lost.

Ultimately, I sought to give sound an almost visible presence. I am drawn to this assertive quality in painting: the capacity for something that exists only in the ear to appear with the immediacy and evidence of a portrait. To make music as declarative and as incontestable as a Titian or a Velázquez, or in the tradition of Mahler, Beethoven, and Brahms. To allow the work to escape the traps of discourse and language. To let sound become flesh.

Hugo Gómez-Chao Porta (2024)