Los viajes de Humboldt

The piece describes several destinations of the travels of Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland around Venezuela. These places were painted few years later by German landscape painter Ferdinand Bellermann. ‘A bordo de la Fragata Pizarro’ describes the adventurous sailing of the scientists across the rough Atlantic Ocean and their arrival to the calm waters of the Caribbean Sea. The distinctive 3 note motive appears throughout the piece whenever they travel over water. In their first Venezuela port, Cumana, they witnessed a colossal display of shooting stars that Bellermann pictured in one of his paintings. A harmonic-glissando effect on the strings gives this movement a very magical sound. Mérida is a city beautifully set in the Venezuelan Andes; high in the mountains the vegetation is very peculiar, a fact that captured the attention of the researchers. In this movement appears the Venezuelan Merengue, a musical style in 5/8 which unique among all the Latin American folkloric music. The researchers also visited Maracaibo, which is an important city at the shore of a great lake, the capital of the County Zulia. This county is partially inhabited by aborigines of the tribes Añú (Paraujano), Barí, Wayúu (Guajiro), Yukpa y Japreria. I used the rhythm of ‘Gaita de Tambora’, which belongs to the folklore of this county and the sound of the piccolo flute, to imitate the ‘Pífan’, an ethnic flute used in the area. In Caracas Humboldt was surprised by the strong European influence on the life of Venezuelan capital. This movement begins with a touch of European Waltz but then turns into a Joropo, Venezuela music style of the plain lands. The longest part of the expedition took place in the south of the country where the scientists were looking for the connection between the rivers Orinoco and Amazonas, while making a catalogue of all the plants and animals they found on their way across the Amazonic Jungle. In this section the musical language is less traditional, improvisation and extended techniques are required on the woodwinds. In ‘Angostura’, the final stop on their expedition to Venezuela, Humboldt and Bonpland wrote the report of their travels. In this final movement all the main melodies are played again with slight modifications.