The Entanglement is conceived as a compositional artifact situated at the intersection of orchestration, distributed cognition, and choreographic interaction. It emerges from a long-term collaboration with choreographer Luis Garay, articulated through three successive works: Naked Mind, Mental Activity, and Pensamento Cintillante. These works constitute a continuous investigation into how thinking and mental models can be externalized and formalized as material process, across sound, body, and space.
The central hypothesis guiding this trajectory is that cognition can be treated as a distributed, non-symbolic phenomenon, structured through correlations rather than representations. In Naked Mind, this hypothesis was approached through the destabilization of linguistic and performative codes: speech, gesture, and movement were stripped of their communicative function and reconfigured as opaque operations. Mental Activity extended this logic by treating bodily movement as a form of cognitive labor, where intelligence is defined as situated skill, an athropological protocol of inhabitants with no explicit teleology.
Pensamento Cintillante, and its orchestral realization The Entanglement, transfer this research question into a large-scale instrumental context. Here, the orchestra is treated as a complex physical system capable of modeling collective cognition. The conceptual reference to quantum entanglement is operational: it provides a framework to think correlations without direct causality, and coherence without centralized control.
The flow of micro-articulatory processes structures ultra-short staccati, high-density reiterations, random or pseudo-random tremolos, and controlled fluctuations between attack types. They are deployed to minimize perceptual salience at the local level, shifting attention away from discrete events toward emergent collective behavior. Instrumental identities are masked and blurred through timbral convergence-divergence, shared articulation profiles, and, more specifically, through the use of surrounding chirp structures.
Chirps function as generators of micro-variation that partially escape direct human control. In The Entanglement, this is realized through a full section of four Waldteufel instruments surrounding a fixed sine tone at approximately 80 Hz. The resulting interference patterns produce unstable spectral and temporal fluctuations.
In this respect, Enno Poppe’s notion of composing with a “damaged nature” — the construction of strict generative systems that are subsequently destabilized through internal deviations — provides an important methodological reference (Poppe 2006). However, in The Entanglement, the emphasis shifts from local deformation of material to systemic disturbance of relational structures. The compositional “pathologies” introduced here operate primarily at the level of correlation: temporal inversions, displaced responsorial behaviors, and anti-accentual rhythmic fields that undermine causal listening models.
Historically saturated materials, such as scalar figures or quasi-functional progressions, appear in the work as re-mediated anti-quoting control structures. Their reintroduction functions analytically, exposing the persistence of pedagogical and perceptual schemas while simultaneously neutralizing their teleological force. These materials are subjected to processes of exaggeration, compression, and redundancy, resulting in what can be described as a parodic overdetermination: a form that continues to operate structurally while being emptied of expressive intent.
In Pensamento Cintillante, choreography is treated as a parallel system of micro-gestures governed by comparable constraints: reduction of expressive amplitude, emphasis on minimal variation, and most of all the abandon of narrative causality toward a generative fictionality. Music and movement are not hierarchically related, nor do they function in terms of synchronization or illustration. They share an underlying process, unfolding within a common temporal and spatial field, so the “entanglement” doesnt referent to the multi-modal aspect but the correlation of the materials. This allows for the study of how collective states — tension, drift, saturation, instability — emerge across modalities without direct translation between them.
How complex systems generate coherence?, how control is negotiated and relinquished?, and how collective perceptual phenomena arise from minimal, constrained actions?
In this sense, the piece functions both as an artistic outcome and as a research experiment. It does not seek to illustrate theories of cognition or physics, but to test their implications within a strictly musical and performative setting. The resulting form is not closed, the samples mirror the orchestral activity with basic techniques of audio registering as stretching and reverse, aiming a dynamic configuration in which sound, body, and space continuously renegotiate its unstable systematics.
@misc{Poppe2006DentedNature,
author = {Poppe, Enno},
title = {Dented Nature},
year = {2006},
note = {Composer's text and interviews, Ricordi},
pages = {1--2}
}snippets
S1 the void
S2 intro
S4 ruido branco
S6.2 the map