Arturo Corrales: Flow

Arturo Corrales is a composer, conductor, musicologist, guitarist, teacher and Salvadorian / Swiss architect. Born in El Salvador and naturalized Swiss, he studied music in San Salvador, Geneva, Lugano and Paris. Arturo Corrales is an intensely active composer on the swiss and international scene. Co founder of the Ensemble Vortex and the duo Electric Primitivo, for the creation of new music, he participates in various international art festivals, as a composer, performer, teacher and conductor. Currently, he is the professor of composition and analysis at CPMDT, artistic and musical director of the Orchestre des Trois-Chêne, Ensemble Vortex and Electric Primitivo. He obtained a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Geneva, with honorable mention and congratulations from the jury unanimously; as well as the Barbour 2019 Award for excellence in aesthetic criticism. He is the creator of several projects proposing a renewed vision on the music of today, projects in close relation with the diffusion of new music addressed to musicologists or experienced composers, as well as to young composers, amateur musicians or young people : Since its founding 15 years ago, he has actively participated in the programming of Ensemble Vortex, whose originality of the concerts have become a landmark reference on the Geneva scene, and which has shined with great success in other countries in Europe, America, Asia and Oceania. His Ph.D. work entitled Musical Figures, offers an innovative tool for understanding and analyzing new music. This work, attended by an exceptionally large audience, achieved the highest merits and unanimous congratulations from the jury, and continues to bear fruit in its innovative teaching activity. At the head of the Orchestre des Trois-Chêne, he started a project of commissions for which established composers must write for an amateur orchestra, weaving a bridge between the intense musical life of Geneva’s community and specialists in contemporary creation. He is the inventor of the Cathédrale avec des Briques, a visionary project where it is the children of the primary school who participate in the creation of a demanding musical work. A gigantic project that required the interaction of institutions such as the City of Geneva, Victoria Hall, DIP, CPMDT or the SUISA Foundation, among others. As a composition teacher, he created the Jeune Création class and produced an exponential growth of the composition class at CPMDT. In the same vein, he has created a unique pre-professional composition class in Switzerland, which has already allowed many young composers to enter superior training in Switzerland and abroad. Each year, he organizes for this course collaborations with professional ensembles (USE, NEC, Batida, Container, Contrechamps, Ums’nJip), Festivals (Archipelago) and local and international artistic institutions (MAMCO, CEGM, SMC, CMJPR).

Flow, for violin and ensemble with a pre-recorded spoken word track, was composed in 2019 and received its world premiere in a performance by violinist Roberto Alonso Trillo with the Vertixe Sonora Ensemble conducted by Pedro Amaral at the Festival ENSEMS in Valencia on 11 May 2019. The recorded spoken word track is Bing’s speech, featuring the voice of Daniel Kaluuya, from “15 Million Merits,”  the second episode of the first season of the British science fiction anthology series Black Mirror which originally aired on 11 December 2011.