Ekphrastic Study based on Sergio Ocampo’s Work Orígenes, as Alternative Propose of Compositional Analysis on Art

Abstract

The Ekphrasis is a compositional phenomenon used in the arts by referencing some of the elements of an existing work towards the construction of a different artistic representation, being made from painting to poetry and vice versa or, in our case, from poetry to music. It is a phenomenon commonly used since ancient times (Bruhn, 2000), requiring the use of a transmedialization with the practise of certain aids such as metaphors, ideas or forms, among other elements. Siglind Bruhn conforms his Ekphrastic model essentially combining the categories of Hans Lund: combination, integration and transformation and five categories of Gisbert Kranz: transposition, supplementation, association, interpretation and ludic position. The three categories of Lund (relationship between text and image), adapted by Bruhn, serve to differentiate or categorize Ekphrastic musical works (Bruhn, 2001). Considering the elements of the Ekphrastic model, this work intends to reveals the relations between Sergio Ocampo's work for guitar Orígenes and Eduardo Langagne's poem “Otros Orígenes”. This poem is made up of four quartets and hence Ocampo structures his musical work in four parts with an ending that represents a free style arrangement, out of the established musical forms. This transposition of the re-presentation of the poem in the musical work is evident: the composer's concern to preserve as much as possible the same structure in music, but also the content. The themes of the poem: wind, water, fire and earth are consistently represented in music in the same order of the poem, as well the silence is considered a central element and this in the music acquires the same value, so even the four parts are divided –or rather linked– by silences. Finally, this work reveals how the work proposes innovations and explorations of alternative sonorities through a complex tuning for a musical instrument as the guitar, which even implies risks; in that same drift, is identified that in each part of the Origins work contains different musical material according to the intention, but linked it to the theme and general structure of the work with a very clear description of the images that the composer builds from the poem of Langagne. Is with these and other elements the piece Orígenes is presented as a study of the compositional sense.