Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez was born in Mexico City in 1964 and now lives in the New York tundra, where he chairs the Composition Department at the Eastman School of Music. He studied with Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, Steven Mackey, and Henri Dutilleux at Yale, Princeton, and Tanglewood, respectively. He has received many of the standard awards in the field (e.g. Barlow Prize, Guggenheim, Fulbright, Koussevitzky, Fromm, American Academy of Arts and Letters.) He likes machines with hiccups and spiders with missing legs, looks at Paul Klee’s Notebooks everyday, and tries to use the same set of ears to listen to Bach, Radiohead, or Ligeti.
His piece New Short Stories premiered on March 15, 2019.
Performance notes:
The words of Italo Calvino were on my mind when composing New Short Stories. In this piece I aspire to convey the qualities that provide music it’s quickness: above all agility, mobility, and ease. I follow the thread spun by the first gesture (heard on bar one and present in a myriad of ways in the obbligato piano part), losing it a hundred times, finding it again after a hundred more twists and turns, and jumping around from one subject to another. I hope that the moment my initial “subject” appears in the narrative, “it will already be charged with a special force and become like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships.”