1) I personally conceive music as an essential activity of human rationalism.

In fact, not
only music, but all arts, emerge from human reason, and only through reason art can be
constructed, deconstructed, transmitted, explained… For me music is, beyond anything,
a challenge to our intellect. To claim that music is about emotions or passions is a
reductionism, where we are reducing art to a mere psychologism, an art governed by
sentimentalism. In this way, what appeals to the senses is not enough, art demands what
is intelligible. In fact, our senses alone are of no value. Only when they are ordered and
carefully used through a system of ideas, through reasoning, is when they acquire
significance and meaning.

I also defend the usage of a common aesthetic language. I don’t share the vision where
every composer is expected to invent a brand new language of his own. Nothing is
created from nothing. In fact, I believe that reasoning is a collective activity, nobody
can reason outside of a preexisting, and given, system of ideas, be this ideas musical,
philosophical, psychological, or artistic. If we curse the usage of common aesthetic
systems, then we are condemning music.

As a composer, I also believe that to think is to think against someone. In other words,
music is always written against someone or against something. Instead of asking, “tell
me how you think, and I’ll tell you who you are,” I believe we should ask, “tell me how
you think, and I’ll tell you against who is it that you’re thinking. For instance, in music
it is not possible to be an organicist and a pluralist at the same time, and these principles
have been crucially important throughout the history of music. The mere existence of
one idea demands the confrontation with the other. And it is this confrontational view of
art making that I think is crucial for music, because composers more than anyone, need
to be able to define themselves, and to become very aware of the aesthetic principles
that govern their music.

This is my own personal artistic vision. It is not my intention to convince anyone, and
my words can perfectly be confronted and debated. However, this is what I defend art to
be.

2) The audience is crucially important in this vision of music making. For me, music is
composed of four basic elements: the author, the work, the interpreter, and the listener.
Music consists on the appreciation of sound, and without and audience to appreciate
that sound it is futile to compose music. For me, art and contemplation are very united.

3) I think it is the duty of any good musician to strive to surprise audiences, to strike
them with what is completely unexpected, to play with expectation, to make audiences
swing with the pulse of a section, and to take them through countless moments of
passion, despair, melancholy, drama, joy...

4) I see curatorial responsibility as being a stage more of interpretation. Meaning, the

curator is a small, subtle interpreter that comes before the actual performer in a concert.
He organizes a set of pieces according to his view, or interpretation of those pieces.
Thus there is always an implicit meaning in any curated program. Thus curatorial
responsibility could be considered as the duty to construct an interpretation that makes
sense out of a set of pieces that were put together because of the common interpretation
the curator makes out of them, trying this way, to convey meaning with their grouping.