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 did the orchestrations for Rosalía's Lux tour. 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, you have a busy June.

— 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 difficult to say. For example, the work for the Bestiari del Liceu, Voladúries, is based on a poem by Enric Casasses that describes the fascination of a man who emerges from 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 performed it quite a bit. As for Trinity, it is a larger-scale work and I am very excited that it will be performed 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 liked the concerto a lot, and that's why they are performing it at the end of June in Weimar with the same Sitkovetsky Trio, because for now they have the exclusivity.

These exclusives 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 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 around the world. In Spain, Peter Sadlo played it once, in Oviedo. We tried to have it played with him in Barcelona as well, but it wasn't performed until I was composer-in-residence at the Palau de la Música. It was too late... But the work lives on: 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 repercussion of Fireworks, right?

— Peter Sadlo was the one who 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 awards 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's 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 perspective 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 reach 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 marvel of the Universe. Perhaps the most interesting thing is 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, by wanting to be the most beautiful, the dolphins in the zoo. But a psychologist I am very fond of always told me that the most important thing is not to want to be the dolphin in 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 of 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 in which 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 talk about how man is becoming a cyborg spiritually, some more physically than others. From this dystopia, which I found very attractive fifteen years ago, I have now moved away a little; it attracts me, but not in that way anymore. Especially since the pandemic and with the wars that have come since, there is always a permanent crisis that causes optimism and enthusiasm 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 authentically can he reach transcendence.

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

— 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 duo 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 hereafter, following the theory of acoustics which states that a sound never completely disappears; that is to say, that 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 hereafter, 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 causes everything to move towards 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 challenge 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 use in our Instagram videos is already generated by artificial intelligence. They are musics that have no depth...

Did you create it, with artificial intelligence?

— We talk 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 experimenting. If they are short pieces of 30 seconds or a minute, the sound quality is excellent, but the composition quality is quite disastrous; but hey, 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 were using the files they themselves had been cataloging for years to feed the algorithm and enable it to generate new music. If you told it "write me a violin and orchestra concerto", it would take fragments and the solo violin would sound 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's just code. The issue is what you feed the algorithm with. If you feed it with information you have stolen, because there's no other way to put it, you are creating new music from recordings 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 doesn't generate new information that quickly either. This crazy fever will end. What's happening is that they are all very nervous because the investment funds that are putting money into these algorithms are starting to demand results. They say: "That's all very well, all this 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 let each person's voice 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 contact with my film and television composition teacher, Enjott Schneider, who is a very spiritual person. Regarding external validation, I was lucky 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. This is 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 very much, and they have immediately given me commissions. It can be said that the conductors and performers themselves 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 knowledge, the piece 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 been performing 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 thrilled because it is a work that stems not only from the relationship between music and technology, but also from this 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 with a lot of hope. I would be very thrilled if it could be experienced here and if my father, who is still alive, could attend it.

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

— It is true that there was an important premiere,

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

— Yes, and it had a lot of impact. Probably, if I were foreign it would have gone faster, but here I understand that there is a need to equalize, because they are orchestras that have a will to promote Catalan music and creation from here, 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 being played so many times around the world or a work premiering with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra... Kazushi Ono himself said that he didn't understand why it hadn't 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 wanted to ask you exactly 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 to other composers. For example, Antoni Ros Marbà, who is a magnificent conductor, premiered the opera Benjamin in Portbou,which is marvelous, 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 liked it a lot." I like it when things happen like that, that I'm not the one going around asking for anything, because in the end you achieve less.

And it generates frustration in you.

— Yes, and it's also a way of not respecting oneself and of sinking into the mud, and I don't like that very much. I prefer to fly high and wait for connections like this one with Antoni Ros Marbà to happen. I understand that these are very slow processes and you have to arm yourself with patience and not lose hope. 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 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 elsewhere. There were very good 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 make the arrangements 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 Palau de la Música itself?

— I don't know, maybe it was through the opera Eliza, because the reviews were 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 did the presentation of the residency, she had already advanced things; I wasn't aware of it at the time, but she must have already been working or preparing to work on a couple of themes for Lux. Consider that Rosalía's songs are full of talent, there are many people who have worked on them and contributed their bit. And Rosalía is constantly rewriting. Sometimes you write a piece, you listen to it a month later and you 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 what I'm telling you, because, as it was constantly being rewritten, the work was not set in stone. And that's where I came in to extract all the material again, a lot of things by ear, and re-orchestrate from the original scores that had been made with orchestrators from Los Angeles. I had to take all of 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 would be, 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. Keep in mind that the album is very mixed: many things have been improved, sounds have been compressed and modified in such a way that in the end you can't make a double bass sound like it sounds on the album. In reality, they have 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, you can't ask a violinist to play it because it's impossible to do it at that speed.

— Exactly. In the recording, that was performed three or four times slower and then the speed was increased, and then that ritardando is done so wildly. 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 already known. But she takes it a step further, makes it even more extreme and brings it almost to a territory that, in my opinion, is diabolical. She, who presents herself as light, at that moment introduces an almost diabolical violin that creates a very interesting, very wild contrast, and with an energy more suited to the world we live in today.

What awaits you in the coming months?

— For now 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 speak openly about them yet, but I have one for two soloists and orchestra, another for solo percussion, and a commission for a work for two pianos from a renowned duo from Paris; and we are also trying to have Emergence (finding La Mer) performed again, a work for orchestra that was recently premiered by the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Pablo González. I keep dreaming.