Ferran Cruixent: "The most important thing is not to want to become the zoo's dolphin, but to be outside the zoo"

BarcelonaFerran Cruixent (Barcelona, 1976) is one of the Catalan composers with the most presence in auditoriums worldwide. This year he premiered Mare nostra for the Cor Canta Foundation and Voladúries at the Liceu, and he has done the orchestrations for the Lux tour by Rosalía. In June, two works by Cruixent will be performed in Germany: the duo for viola and percussion Deserts and Trinity, the triple concerto for violin, cello, piano and orchestra. He talks about all of this, as well as spirituality, philosophy, and reflection on technology that accompanies his compositions, in this interview.

Deunidó, the month of June you have.

— Yes. They are works written at different moments of my biography and that represent different relationships with the performers who will later play them.

What would you say is the most representative of your current moment?

— This is hard to say. For example, the work for the Bestiari del Liceu, Voladúries, starts from a poem by Enric Casasses that describes the fascination of a man who gets out of the metro and begins to see flocks of birds flying in the middle of Plaça Catalunya, and I let myself be carried away by this experience. Deserts, on the other hand, is a duo for viola and percussion that was commissioned by Hiyoli Togawa and Alexej Gerassimez, whom I have known for years; I wrote it in 2017 after some complicated experiences, and they have played it quite a bit. As for Trinity, it is a work of greater scope and I am very excited that it will be played again. It was commissioned by the Sitkovetsky Trio, as the resident ensemble at the Beethoven Fest in Bonn in 2024. They discovered me at a festival in Marvão (Portugal) where I premiered a string quartet (Post lucem) with the Mandelring Quartet in 2021, and in 2023 I also premiered a concerto for clarinet and string orchestra there (Unicorn). They were fascinated by my music and wanted to commission me. And from this came this triple concerto that I premiered at the Beethoven Fest in 2024 with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, and of which a recording was made with the Sitkovetsky Trio and the same orchestra conducted by Ivan Repusic, who is now the principal conductor of the Staatskapelle orchestra in Weimar. Repusic really liked the concerto, and that's why they are playing it at the end of June in Weimar with the same Sitkovetsky Trio, because for now they have the exclusivity.

These exclusivities are common, right?

— It depends on the artist's fame. Since it was an important commission, they wanted to have some control over the situation because they knew about the success of my concert for percussion and orchestra Focs d’artifici, which premiered in 2008 in Germany with the percussionist Peter Sadlo, who died ten years ago. Focs d’artifici, which is a work based on Catalan traditions, has been performed more than fifty times worldwide. In Spain, Peter Sadlo played it once, in Oviedo. We tried to have it played with him in Barcelona too, but it wasn't performed until I was composer-in-residence at the Palau de la Música. It was too late... But the work is still alive: it was recently played in Switzerland, in Thailand, and at the end of August it will be played in China, where it had already been played four times before.

Peter Sadlo was very important for the impact of Fireworks, right?

— Peter Sadlo commissioned the work from me, and years later I was fortunate enough that he programmed it in the ARD international competition in Munich as a repertoire piece in the final and at the award ceremony concert. Regarding what you asked me about exclusivity, the Trio Fortuny already wanted to perform "Trinity" in 2024, but I had to tell them they had to wait. Well, nothing would happen if they invited the Sitkovetsky Trio to Barcelona to play "Trinity" at L'Auditori, for example. It would be wonderful, especially considering that the work is inspired by texts from the Indo-Catalan philosopher Raimon Panikkar, who had a very interesting trinitarian and cosmotheandric vision of reality. That is also why the concert is called "Trinity", and not for the Christian trinity, playing with the concept of trio on many different levels.

In fact, spirituality is very present in your works.

— Yes, spirituality is perhaps the nexus of all my works, along with technology, but always seen from a human point of view and the relationship of man with his environment. An artist must be committed to the current world and not live only in the past. I am now reading the book Daodejing, by Lao Tzu, and, talking with old composition masters, we arrive at the spiritual conclusion that in the end God is water, it is these molecules that come together perfectly. And then you see how science and spirituality unite when you contemplate the wonder of the Universe. The most interesting thing is perhaps to learn to believe in ourselves, which is very difficult. We live permanently bombarded by what others do, by the successes of others, by superficiality, to become the most beautiful, the dolphins of the zoo. But a psychologist to whom I am very fond always told me that the most important thing is not to want to become the dolphin of the zoo, but to be outside the zoo to be free. And that is the most difficult, because we have to pay the rents, the bills... All this leads us to live in a very inhuman world in which very few get rich and all the rest of us are slaves, in this new medieval era where we are nobody if we don't have an Instagram profile.

Technofeudalism.

— Exactly. Precisely in the book Technofeudalism, Varoufakis talks about the art world and an artist like Stelarc, with whom I made contact in 2010 for the work Cyborg. I used texts by him and Donna Haraway to discuss how man is becoming a cyborg in a spiritual way, some more physically than others. From this dystopia that I found very attractive fifteen years ago, I have now moved away a little; it attracts me, but no longer in that way. Especially since the pandemic and with the wars that have come since, there is always a permanent crisis that causes optimism and illusion to be lost, which are complicated to maintain in the field of creativity. I try to encapsulate myself as much as I can, and for Trinity I found some texts by Raimon Panikkar that talk about the trinitarian vision according to which man should have a divine dimension, another cosmic one, and another human one; and only if he is truly aware of these three realities in an authentic way can he achieve transcendence.

You explained that the composition of Deserts responded to a complicated life moment. When you receive a commission for a work like this, do you speak with the performers to explain the emotional content?

— Yes, I always share the secrets of the work with the performers, and they give me absolute creative freedom. In this case, they asked me to write a duet and that's it. There are cases where you are asked for a thematic relationship or a dialogue with a composer, as with Trinity. Obviously, the setting was the Beethoven Fest and Trinity was to be played instead of Beethoven's Triple Concerto. The work is divided into three parts, each representing one of the realities of the trinity described by Panikkar: the most divine part, the cosmic part, and the most human part. The first movement uses Gregorian and Hindu chants, and the element of water is very present. And in the second, Cosmic Beethoven, I take the notes of the cello melody from the second movement of Beethoven's Triple Concerto, deconstruct them and play as if the trio itself were searching for these notes in the beyond, following the theory of acoustics that states that a sound never completely disappears; that is, that the sound will never reach absolute zero and that, therefore, perhaps one day we would be able to find some machine or algorithm capable of recovering those notes from the Triple Concerto} that Beethoven premiered one day. It seemed like a very beautiful idea that two composers separated by two centuries could meet in the beyond, in this cosmos, playing with the notes in a truly humble way. I saw it as a tribute.

In other works you address issues such as the use of artificial intelligence.

— Precisely recently the Trio Fortuny premiered a work of mine at the Palau de la Música called FAIK (as far as I know...) and it also plays with the word fake and has artificial intelligence (AI) in the title. I play with the idea of whether we are capable of discerning if a musical work is human or artificial creation. And also with the idea of the body, of how the body disappears but the system remains. During the performance, the trio was disappearing and in the end only the same work remained, performed from inside the piano through a speaker. It's not that I'm questioning technology itself, but this progressive displacement of the body that leads everything to reproduction and simulation in this world of Spotify. If the music is not recorded, you are nobody. In a context where music can be generated, replicated, and consumed without performers, with FAIK I wanted to put into crisis the relationship between what we see and what we hear, and explain that we must be aware that at this moment 30% of the music we can find on Spotify or that we can use in our Instagram videos is already generated by artificial intelligence. They are pieces of music that have no depth...

Did you create it, with artificial intelligence?

— I speak a lot with the pianist Ignasi Cambra. He premiered my Digital studies at the Palau de la Música and as soon as he finds something new, he tells me about it. When the Udio program came out, I started doing tests. If they are little things of 30 seconds or a minute, the sound quality is very good, but the composition quality is quite disastrous; but well, nowadays, with the little musical education there is, it ends up convincing you just the same. Then I found out that the German Society of Authors and Publishers, GEMA, filed a lawsuit against Spotify and Udio, because Udio was created by people who had left Spotify and used the files they themselves had been cataloging for years to feed the algorithm and make it capable of generating new music. If you told it "write me a violin and orchestra concerto", it would take fragments and the solo violin sounded incredible, but probably that was David Oistrakh playing the violin, or mixed with Janine Jansen, and no royalties are paid to anyone. We must be very aware that the algorithm is nothing, it is code, only. The issue is what you feed the algorithm. If you feed it with information that you have stolen, because it can no longer be put another way, you are creating new music from recordings that you had no right to use. Recently, the director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Josep Maria Martorell, predicted that data is running out; that is, there will come a time when we will become redundant, because humanity also does not generate new information that quickly. This tremendous fever will end. What happens is that they are all very nervous because the investment funds that put money into these algorithms are starting to demand results. They say: "That's all very well, all that you were promising, but I want a little more". I don't know if there will be a bubble like the dot-com bubble of 2000.

Throughout your career, have you ever felt the need for validation from a mentor?

— No. My teacher in Munich, Dieter Acker, gave students absolute freedom to be themselves and for each one's voice to emerge, without representing a totem for anyone. We were friends with him and the composers, without idealizing anyone. Unfortunately, he died three months after I finished my master's degree. He had already been ill with cancer for three years. I do maintain a relationship with my film and television composition teacher, Enjott Schneider, who is a very spiritual person. Regarding external validation, I was fortunate that in 2008 I wrote the concerto for percussion and orchestra, and it was immediately successful, leading to the contract with the Sikorski publishing house in Hamburg, which is now part of the Boosey & Hawkes publishing house in Berlin, a publishing house where John Adams, Gabriela Ortiz, and all the Russians I love, Shostakovich, Prokofiev... are published. The luck I had is that as the percussion concerto has been performed, the conductors who have conducted it have liked it a lot, and they have immediately given me commissions. It can be said that it has been the conductors and performers themselves who have usually validated my work. Leonard Slatkin, for example, discovered me when "Cyborg" premiered in 2010 in Weimar, conducted by Christoph Poppen. Apparently, someone in the audience alerted him that something very interesting was happening. And without my knowing, the work was programmed in Detroit. I found out through the publishing house, which wrote to me. After performing "Cyborg" in the United States, I received a commission to open the season in 2016 with "Big Data". These are works that for years I have dreamed of being performed at L'Auditori with the OBC, even bringing Slatkin, who gets a little older each year. He has performed it, he has performed it in Gran Canaria, Valencia, and Bilbao, but in Barcelona, we have not yet had the luck to invite him and have him conduct it. I would be very excited because it is a work that stems not only from the relationship between music and technology, but also from the spirituality inspired by a rather difficult moment in my life when my father survived several heart attacks thanks to technology. It is a spiritual work filled with hope. I would be very excited if it could be experienced here and if my father, who is still alive, could attend.

And what needs to happen for it to be interpreted here?

— It is true that there was an important premiere, It's true that there was an important premiere, Human brother, with Kazushi Ono, but since then...

It was in September 2019, to open the L'Auditori season.

— Yes, and it had a lot of impact. Probably, if I were a foreigner it would have gone faster, but here I understand that there is a need to equalize, because they are orchestras that have a desire to promote Catalan music and local creation, and therefore I understand that everyone must be given a voice and that there are quotas to follow. But yes, if you have a composer who somehow stands out or to whom unusual things are happening, like a concert that is played so many times around the world or a work that premieres with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra... Kazushi Ono himself said that he did not understand why it had not been done before, that this is Catalan heritage. And I told him: "Well, things are like that." I know the moment will come. What I am very excited about is doing an opera with the Liceu.

I actually wanted to ask you about that, because you have composed two chamber operas, but no grand opera.

— Yes, Valentí Oviedo, the general director of the Liceu, was very impressed when he heard Human brother at L'Auditori. There was already an intention, but, as I was saying, things move slowly and there are debts with other composers. For example, Antoni Ros Marbà, who is a magnificent conductor, premiered the opera Benjamin a Portbou,which is wonderful, and he had to wait more than ten years. Look, he was also in a way a mentor, because he was there, at the premiere of Human brother, and it was thanks to him that I later got the residency at the Palau de la Música, because he defended me a lot. He said: "Who is this guy? I really liked this". I like it when things happen like this, that it's not me who goes around asking for anything, because in the end you achieve less.

And it generates frustration in you.

— Yes, and furthermore it is a way of not respecting oneself and of sinking into the mud, and I don't like it very much. I prefer to fly high and wait for connections like this one with Antoni Ros Marbà to occur. I understand that they are very slow processes and you have to load yourself with patience and not lose enthusiasm. Right now I also have other works in hand, but I am excited to write an opera after the success of the micro-opera Eliza with texts by Pau Miró and the scenography by Pol Roig and the mentorship of Àlex Ollé, Anna Ponces, and Anna Llopart, which was very important for us. It was a beautiful experience that should be repeated in other places. There were excellent reviews of this Eliza, which is precisely about artificial intelligence.

Your residency at the Palau de la Música coincided with that of Caroline Shaw, who is one of the composers who has worked with Rosalía. Was it through Caroline Shaw that Rosalía contacted you to do the arrangements for the tour of the album Lux, including the tracks from previous albums like Saoko, and which you were recently talking about in a conversation with Bernat Vivancos at the same Palau de la Música?

— I don't know, maybe it was through the opera Eliza, because the review was very good and a few days after the premiere they contacted me. But they already knew me before. In this case I don't know if it was through Caroline, but I remember that when we presented the residency, she had already hinted at things; I wasn't aware of it at the time, but she must have been working or preparing to work on a couple of Lux tracks. Consider that Rosalía's tracks are full of talent, many people have worked on them and contributed their bit. And Rosalía constantly rewrites. Sometimes you write a piece, listen to it a month later and say: I'd like to change this, I'd like to improve this, now I need to record another piano, I want this intro to be different. I came in once the album was already done. Some recordings had been made previously but not everything could be used for this reason I'm telling you, because, as it was constantly being rewritten, the work wasn't set in stone. And that's where I came in to extract all the material again, a lot of it by ear, and re-orchestrate from the original scores that had been done with orchestrators from Los Angeles. I had to take all that and arrange it so that it sounded live as they had mixed it. Everything they had modified had to be rewritten into a definitive score, which was, let's say, the score that matches 100% with what you're hearing on the album. My job was that and also, from there, to do the arrangements for the smaller ensemble for the first performances at the Los 40 awards, in Valencia, where there was no orchestra conductor, and I played the piano. And then they asked me to prepare all the scores for the specific ensemble for the Lux tour, and some more surprises to come. Consider that the album is very mixed: they've improved many things, they've compressed sounds that have been modified in such a way that in the end you can't make a double bass sound like it does on the album. In reality, they've modified reality, which is also the beauty of being able to record, that you don't really want to imitate how real things are.

Like the solo violinist of Berghain, which you cannot ask a violinist to play because it is impossible to do so at that speed.

— Exactly. In the recording, that was interpreted three or four times slower and later the speed was increased, and then that extremely strong ritardando is done. This is very interesting, because if you did it classically, as it was, it wouldn't be attractive, because that has already been done and is known. But she takes it a step further, makes it even more extreme and takes it almost into what I consider a diabolical territory. She, who presents herself as the light, at that moment adds an almost diabolical violin that creates a very interesting, very strong contrast, and with an energy more suited to the world we live in today.

What awaits you in the coming months?

— For the moment I'm going to Weimar to see Trinity, and in August Focs d'artifici will be performed for the 54th time with Kai Strobel on percussion. Regarding new commissions, I can't talk about them openly yet, but I have one for two soloists and orchestra, another for solo percussion, and a commission for a piece for two pianos with a renowned duo from Paris; and we are also trying to have Emergence (finding La Mer) performed again, a piece for orchestra that was recently premiered by the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Pablo González. I keep dreaming.