
"En la mar hay una torre" ("There's a Tower at the Sea") by Martin Kutnowski; version for clarinet and string quartet. Ensemble Epomeo (Caroline Chin, violin; David Yang, viola; Kenneth Woods, cello) and guests, Wesley Ferreira, clarinet; and Nadia Francavilla, violin. Recorded live at St. Thomas University, Fredericton (Canada) on November 9, 2010. Notes by the composer En la mar hay una torre ("There is a Tower at the Sea") is inspired in a Sephardic Jewish song of the same name from medieval Spain, originally documented during the first half of the twentieth century by pioneer musicologists Alberto Hemsi and Isaac Levy in locales of the Sephardic Diaspora such as Rhodes, Salonica, Alexandria, and Istambul. The lyrics of one of its many versions are as follows, in Ladino spelling: En la mar ay una torre, en la torre una ventana, en la ventana una hija qu'a los marineros llama. Si la mar era de leche yo m'haria un pexcador pexcaria las mis dolores con palavricas d'amor. Dame tu mano palomba para suvir a tu nido maldicha que durmes sola vengo a durmir contigo. When I read the lyrics, I try to imagine the context of the story. Who is this mysterious woman: friend, lover, a stranger...perhaps a siren? In some anthologies, an alternate title is La Serena, which in archaic Spanish perhaps meant "The Siren" or "The Serene One," or perhaps both. Reconstructing the story, I think of a sailor gazing from the bridge of his ship at a castle in twilight. I picture the ship gently <b>...</b>
chin
epomeo
ferreira
francavilla
kutnowski
woods
yang
chamber music
海にある塔