Ocaso de los soles

Poesía en voz alta, Casa del Lago, 2019.

Ocaso de los soles, 2019

Ocaso de lo soles is a piece for narrators in Spanish and Nahuatl, two singers, wind instruments, percussion and electronic music on eight channels. The work was commissioned by Casa del Lago to mark the 500th anniversary of the Spanish arrival in Tenochtitlan, drawing from some of the texts found in the book La visión de los vencidos, by the renowned Mexican anthropologist and historian Miguel León-Portilla.

The work is made up of seventeen micro scenes in which narrations of the legend of the five cosmogonic suns are interspersed with narrations of Moctezuma’s eight fatal omens that predict the fall of Tenochtitlan. In this way, the epic majesty of the cosmic origins of the Mexica culture are interrupted by the mysticism and mystery of the extraordinary events that forecast the Spanish arrival. This work simultaneously expresses the beginning and the end of a culture. 

The Spanish narration of the text “Los soles, las edades cósmicas” used in the piece is extracted from the album Mitos Prehispánicos recorded by Miguel León Portilla for the Voz Viva de México collection. The narrations in Nahuatl are carried out by Salvador Reyes and Ana Lilia Velázquez. The eight dire omens are the transcripts of the informants from Bernardino de Sahagún contained in Book XII of the Florentine Codex.

Ocaso de los Soles seeks to revisit the Mexica musical universe in an eclectic and syncretic way, mixing contemporary and experimental musical resources with a sonority of pre-Hispanic and ritual character. Thus, each scene is imagined and represented musically through an amalgam of soundscapes, concrete sounds, vocal and instrumental improvisations, and processed sounds from various instruments of pre-Hispanic origin such as flutes, whistles, ocarinas, drums, rattles, jingle bells and several percussion instruments.

Spanish narration: Miguel León Portilla and Gabriela Palafox
Náhuatl narration: Salvador Reyes and Ana Lilia Velázquez
Live voices: Rodrigo Ambriz and Bárbara Lázara
Percussion: Milo Tamez
Wind instruments: Jacob Wick
Stage coordinator: Aura Arreola
Production assistant: Daniel Lara
Composition, musical and stage direction: Rogelio Sosa