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Interview with Servando Valero
We spoke with Cádiz-born composer and pianist Servando Valero about the creative process behind La Sublime Esperpento, a work written for saxophone quartet that engages in dialogue with the visual universe of Albert Bonet through fourteen interconnected pieces.
When I first came across Albert’s work, the experience was far less spontaneous than I would have liked, and honestly, that complicated both my perception of it and the compositional process itself. I had just come from working on a series of sketches inspired by Praeteritum, a collection by the Aragonese painter Santi Pina, whose aesthetic and technique are completely different from Albert’s. The contrast was so extreme that it took me some time to settle into Albert’s visual language while the lingering memory of Santi’s world gradually faded away.
What slowed me down even more, unfortunately, was the second-hand information I already had about Albert before properly engaging with his work. I knew, for example, that jazz was deeply present in his musical tastes, both personally and through family tradition, since his father is a bassist. At first, at least conceptually, that seemed to align perfectly with the urban atmosphere present in much of his work, and ironically, that ended up working against me during the early stages of composition.
In fact, it was one of the reasons we initially thought a saxophone quartet would be the ideal chamber ensemble for the piece, whereas without that preconceived idea, it could just as easily have been conceived for a woodwind quintet, which is arguably a richer and more versatile ensemble in terms of colour. The deeper I went into Albert’s universe, though, the more I realised that the connection between his visual language and jazz felt more circumstantial than essential. I spent far too long trying to figure out how to make his paintings “sound” like a jam session, so to speak.
For me, the hardest part of this kind of project is finding a musical language that genuinely resonates with the visual one, something that doesn’t create friction or cognitive dissonance for the audience, but instead invites them into the painting and somehow accompanies their gaze.
Fortunately, Albert’s technique, his use of colour, his compositional approach, his themes, and especially his constant references to popular culture gradually began to shape the musical language of La Sublime Esperpento. Then, at some point, I read that he considered himself a “neo-baroque” painter, and suddenly some of the key decisions fell into place. That was when the idea of structuring the piece as a dance suite emerged, almost like a musical journey from the “baroque” to the “contemporary”, while always maintaining a shared harmonic language capable of holding that constant transition together.
Up to that point, I had mainly been working with an abstract harmonic and rhythmic framework. From there onwards, subtler nuances started appearing within that broader language, allowing me to shape the journey I had in mind. Even then, though, the core idea of the piece still felt elusive. I kept running into resistance, probably because of that strange tension between external expectations and my own instincts.
Then one day, perhaps simply out of exhaustion, everything suddenly collapsed, and I began seeing Albert’s work the way I wish I had seen it from the very beginning: without preconceptions, without suggestions, essentially without purpose. That was the breakthrough. Everything immediately clicked into place with remarkable ease. Once you remove that external filter, you stop seeing what you think you are supposed to see and start seeing what is actually there for you.
In other words, assuming none of us ever sees reality itself but rather our own version of it, what truly changes is the filter through which we perceive things. You move away from a purely circumstantial filter, built from superficial and recent information, towards a much more personal and structural one, shaped slowly over the years by your own lived experience. And that filter, for better or worse, colours everything you perceive and everything you project.
From that perspective, which is the one that truly interests me as a composer because it lies at the core of creation, Albert’s humour, his sharpness, his critical and sometimes cynical view of society, and especially the way he translates all of that onto canvas with such visceral grotesqueness yet extraordinary precision, suddenly felt deeply familiar to me. To the point where he almost started to feel “more from Cádiz than from Catalonia.”
Once that happened, the apparent conflict with all those external suggestions disappeared. Rather than seeing them as obstacles, I could finally use them as springboards to enrich my own personal vision. That was also the moment when the saxophone quartet once again became the perfect ensemble for the piece.
From then on, the rest of the process flowed naturally and became incredibly enjoyable: choosing the paintings, finding the title, shaping the narrative, building the symbolic architecture of the work, and finally crafting all the small details of the musical surface. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I laughed as much while composing as I did with La Sublime Esperpento.
Yes, despite the very distinctive personality of each instrument, the saxophone quartet suffers from the same kind of timbral homogeneity that affects many chamber ensembles built around instruments from the same family. Because of that, the duration of the piece, roughly half an hour, immediately became an added challenge. The real difficulty was making sure the music felt fresh and alive from beginning to end.
At first, I spent a huge amount of time simply looking at Albert’s paintings, wrestling with the preconceptions I mentioned earlier, while slowly becoming immersed in his universe and imagining possible sonic worlds and musical structures. Out of his entire catalogue, I needed to find a group of paintings that would allow me to achieve two things. First, I needed enough material to maintain a relatively quick structural pulse between the different dances, which meant working with a broad selection of images. Second, I needed to create a strong tension between two opposing forces: one cohesive and one dispersive. That long line of tension was essential if the piece was going to sustain the listener’s attention over such an extended timespan.
Although several of Albert’s paintings can be understood as part of broader visual series, his portraits were the collection that fulfilled those conditions almost automatically. Coincidentally, they were also the works I felt most drawn to. Early on, for example, I even completed a movement based on his painting “Asuntos de Brujas”. Beyond the fact that I immediately became very fond of its strange “chicken-children”, that painting also connected directly with the thematic world I initially had in mind for the piece. La Sublime Esperpento is actually the second quartet in a future trilogy dedicated to that darker side of femininity that has fascinated me since childhood.
Still, even before finishing that first movement, I already knew the painting wouldn’t allow me to build the larger structure I needed around it. Albert never actually heard that standalone piece, although perhaps one day I’ll send him the unfinished orchestral version I started sketching. In a way, though, that little independent work remains spiritually connected to La Sublime Esperpento, because internally the piece is really nothing more than a witches’ conclave where the only thing ever discussed is precisely their “asuntos”. It is essentially a musical sabbath in which thirteen witches dance before a goat-like master of ceremonies, offering up their individual energies and qualities so they can be fused into a single, more powerful matriarch: La Sublime Esperpento herself.
Because of the scale the piece required, it became obvious that this “divine grotesque figure” needed a different selection of paintings, something broader and more flexible, capable of creating an immediate sense of both unity and contrast at the same time. The portraits fulfilled that perfectly. On one hand, they naturally created cohesion simply by belonging to the same genre. On the other, they introduced enormous stylistic and thematic contrasts.
So I selected fourteen portraits. Partly for structural reasons, because I needed that relatively fast-moving pulse of roughly two minutes per movement, but also for symbolic ones. The idea was to represent thirteen witches alongside the male goat figure presiding over the ritual. Out of those fourteen paintings, only thirteen are female, and only thirteen are actually portraits. The central Herzstück of the work, which gathers the tension of the first structural arc and redirects it into the second, is not a portrait at all, but rather a detail taken from the female figure in Albert’s “El Sueño Húmedo”. Meanwhile, the final galop, “Takeishi”, is the only male portrait in the cycle.
These two “special guests” at the sabbath, the seductive false portrait at the centre and the grotesque male portrait at the end, function as the two great structural poles of the work. One implosive, the other explosive. Together, they generate the tension necessary to sustain the uninterrupted musical current running through the entire half-hour arc.
That sexual polarity, together with the tension between the work’s seemingly playful exterior and its much darker internal reality, shapes everything that happens inside La Sublime Esperpento. Taken together, the fourteen paintings form what could almost be described as a “double neo-baroque suite”, borrowing Albert’s own term for his painting. That becomes the formal disguise of the work itself.
In that sense, “Takeishi”, the fourteenth portrait, represents not only the Lucifer figure presiding over the sabbath, but also the great guiding spirit of our musical tradition: J. S. Bach. Maintaining that double association felt important to me, not only symbolically but also because it connects directly with the earlier work in the trilogy, Sax in New York, where those same dual aspects of Lucifer already appear.
Both “Takeishi”, which embodies the morning star, and “El Sueño Húmedo”, which represents the evening star, are built around the collision of those opposing forces. In Takeishi, everything feels explosive and outwardly dynamic, but underneath there is actually something deeply implosive and static about it, almost like a carefully controlled supernova collapsing in on itself beneath the apparent chaos. El Sueño Húmedo works in the opposite direction. It behaves more like a black hole, absorbing the energy and light of the first arc of the piece while quietly preparing the emergence of the second.
That crossing of masculine and feminine qualities is fundamental to the work. Both Takeishi and the Sublime herself are, in the end, variations of the same androgynous archetype. Even the ridiculous Cádiz nickname we gave him privately, “Takeishi, Japoné pero hahtha’r shishi”, comes from that idea.
For me, these kinds of relationships cannot exist only at the audible level of the music. They also need to operate symbolically beneath the surface, through hidden extramusical systems that the listener may never consciously perceive but which still shape the internal logic of the work.
In La Sublime Esperpento, for example, the entire underlying numerical structure revolves around the numbers 23 and 28. The number 23 represents something solar, centrifugal, destructive, and it also happens to appear frequently throughout Albert’s paintings. The number 28, meanwhile, grows out of Bach’s symbolic number 14 and carries the opposite qualities: lunar, centripetal, unifying.
Those two numbers shape the proportions and architecture of the piece at multiple levels. Inside the larger half-hour structure, smaller internal arcs appear and dissolve through groups of portraits connected by symbolic relationships. There is one major group of seven dances, made up of the four “fat women”, linked to the matriarchs of the Torah and the gematria underlying the work, alongside the three “noble women”. Then there is another group of six formed by the two “post-war” portraits, the two “pink” ones, and the two “beautiful” ones. Together, these internal groupings hold together the dense web of musical quotations, symbolic references, and hidden codes that form the flesh and skeleton of La Sublime Esperpento.
Even the division between six and seven reflects another solar-lunar polarity, while their intersection in the number 42. colel of 41, becomes yet another homage to J.S. Bach, the trismegistos (3×14) figure at the centre of my own musical mythology.
But honestly, trying to explain all of this verbally could take years, whereas music can bring it to life in half an hour without needing to explain anything at all. If I had to reduce La Sublime Esperpento to a single idea, I’d probably say that it is simply another attempt to show, through music, that once we move beyond the strange superiority complex built into human intellect, it becomes obvious that the grotesque and the sublime are not opposites at all, but simply two different ways of looking at the same reality.
And turning that idea into sound is always the hardest part of composing. La Sublime Esperpento is no exception.
The short answer is: technique. The longer answer is that it’s a very good question, but also a difficult one to explain without becoming overly technical.
Broadly speaking, I would say it comes down to balancing the two opposing forces I mentioned earlier: cohesive elements and destructive ones. It’s really about maintaining a kind of stable orbit generated by the interaction between centripetal and centrifugal forces, not only at the structural level, but also at the ornamental one, or more precisely, across every layer of the musical hierarchy, from the deepest structural foundations to the smallest surface details.
In the case of La Sublime Esperpento, that balance was undoubtedly the central challenge of the piece and, now that the work exists, I hope it also becomes one of its most recognisable qualities.
There is a very clear impulse in Albert’s paintings to juxtapose highly striking and contrasting visual elements, not only against each other, but also against the context surrounding them. In his work, it feels perfectly natural to find compositions built from things as wildly disconnected as someone enjoying a day at the beach while reading ¡Hola!, a bottle of bleach, a syringe, a condom wrapper, two zebras, and a beer fridge with the head of a decapitated woman sticking out of it, naturally with the number 23 appearing somewhere on the label.
Musically, the challenge was exactly the same: creating a sense of inevitability and natural flow from violently contrasting juxtapositions, all held together by a strong symbolic narrative. At the same time, the work constantly references popular cultural material that listeners can recognise intuitively, although naturally the number of references they catch will depend on their own musical background.
A French overture, a Baroque-inspired gigue, and Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme are not things you would normally expect to coexist within the same piece. And that’s before adding Mozart’s Lacrimosa, Los Duros Antiguos by El Tío de la Tiza, Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi, Piazzolla tangos, Harry Potter, Doraemon, Bach, Brahms’ German Requiem, Sakura, Kurt Weill, Miklós Rózsa, Bernard Herrmann, The Simpsons, or Tico-Tico. Even listing the most obvious references feels enough to overload the algorithm, which is precisely the point.
That diversity is intrinsic to the work, but it is also fundamentally destructive by nature. The same applies to the coexistence of Baroque forms with tonal, polytonal, modal, polymodal, geometric, and atonal harmonic languages, or the rhythmic contrast between simple binary and ternary metres alongside asymmetrical structures in 7 or 14, sometimes driven by mechanical pulses and at other moments by highly flexible rubato, without which many of the dances would simply collapse.
Obviously, all of those elements would become complete chaos if they were not constantly tempered by equally powerful cohesive forces operating at tonal, harmonic, rhythmic, motivic, and textural levels.
To give one simple example, aside from the two “post-war” portraits, as I call them, Catalina la Grimosa and Lola, which are built around clearly recognisable ornamental variations of Mozart’s Lacrimosa (Requiem), most listeners will probably perceive the cohesive role of recurring motivic and harmonic material only subconsciously. The same applies to the carefully calculated tension curve generated by the changing rhythmic densities, impulses, and pacing throughout the suite.
It’s impossible to summarise in a few words the number of processes operating simultaneously to create that sense of “glue” within the piece. But that is also precisely why music is so much more powerful than spoken language as a medium for communicating and encrypting certain kinds of non-verbal information across multiple dimensions at once.
I’ve always been deeply drawn to codes, symbolism, cryptography, and occult systems. Those ideas are very much part of my nature, and I’ve always found enormous pleasure in working with artistic forms that allow me to express those impulses freely and multidimensionally. Sound is, without question, the most powerful medium I know for doing that.
Well, to be fair, if I’d been born in Manchester, I probably wouldn’t have dared commit that level of sacrilege. But since I’m from Cádiz… honestly, why not? Haydn was already performed at the Santa Cueva centuries ago, so I don’t think it’s such a tragedy for Mozart to show up at the Palacio de San Agustín with a slight Cádiz accent now and then. (laughs)
The most obvious Cádiz reference in the piece is definitely Lola’s tanguillo, but in reality all the characters have unofficial Cádiz-style nicknames that we use privately, and which probably won’t appear in the printed edition of the score. Not for any serious reason, simply because nobody outside Cádiz would understand them. Like the one I mentioned earlier for Takeishi. I’m convinced that if you showed Albert’s portraits to anyone from Cádiz and asked them, for example, to identify “la Matahari d’Argantonio”, they’d immediately know exactly who you meant. Someone from elsewhere, though, would have absolutely no idea what to do with that information.
As for the tanguillo itself, which is really the only explicit reference to Cádiz folklore in the entire work, it came from a very personal association. For some reason, Albert’s Lola reminded me of my grandmother from the very first moment I saw the painting. Although, to be fair, my grandmother was prettier and her eyes weren’t exploding out of her head. (laughs)
There’s something about the portrait that feels deeply old-fashioned, almost worn by hardship, but hardship carried with dignity. Her hairstyle and that flower immediately reminded me of that very Cádiz instinct to cling to optimism and beauty no matter what life throws at you, while at the same time somehow taking a strange pleasure in your own misfortune. For reasons nobody fully understands, we manage to do both simultaneously without experiencing it as a contradiction.
Once I had that image in mind, and considering the convenient excuse that Albert’s exhibition was arriving at the Casa de Iberoamérica, it became almost inevitable that his Lola would transform into “Lola la Piconera”. That naturally led to the second variation on Mozart’s Lacrimosa becoming a tanguillo, including an explicit quotation from Los Duros Antiguos inserted into a passage that shares the same harmonic structure as the original Mozart material. For me, that reference symbolises not only Cádiz Carnival, but also that very particular coexistence of hardship and joie de vivre that defines so much of Cádiz identity.
Double meanings are such a fundamental part of our character that you only realise how constantly you rely on them once you spend enough time living elsewhere and suddenly nobody understands you anymore, even if you’re speaking without an accent or in another language.
It’s simply that “por supuesto” never quite feels expressive enough for us. We always instinctively escalate it into something closer to a “no ni na”. So the combination of Lola, a requiem, and a tanguillo felt incredibly Cádiz to me, while also reinforcing the permanent contradiction at the heart of the piece itself, which is ultimately where the title La Sublime Esperpento comes from.
Although I should say: it’s a very weary tanguillo.
It’s not necessarily a priority for me, but I’d certainly be open to it if the project felt genuinely interesting.
Before La Sublime Esperpento, I had never really worked on audiovisual or interdisciplinary projects, mainly because what attracts me most about composition is the absolute freedom it gives you to shape every dimension of the creative process however you want. That includes everything from the most sensory and immediate aspects to the most symbolic and conceptual ones, without forgetting the intellectual architecture needed to hold the entire structure together over time.
That’s actually why I’ve always found cinema difficult as a medium to work with. Film is already a time-based art, and one of the things that fascinates me most about composing music is precisely the construction of narrative through time itself. I love the idea of suggesting a story purely through sound, and timing is absolutely critical in that process.
In film music, however, the story already exists. The narrative, the pacing, the duration, the rhythm of events, all of that has already been fixed by the screenplay and the edit. You can’t create your own film inside the music or manipulate time entirely on your own terms. In that sense, I find the work of screenwriters, directors, and composers equally creative, but for the way I personally understand musical creation, each discipline on its own somehow feels incomplete.
That said, I deeply admire the great composers of Hollywood’s golden age and the generations that followed them. I’m actually very excited to hear the score John Williams has written for Disclosure Day this summer. But composing for film is not something that naturally attracts me, at least not instinctively. Although, to be fair, there are plenty of small nods to those composers hidden throughout La Sublime Esperpento.
What this project did make me realise, though, is that things change completely when you work with visual disciplines that don’t impose a pre-existing temporal structure. In those cases, the original artwork becomes more of a stimulus, an idea you can absorb, reinterpret, and transform freely within your own language.
That is something I do find very appealing. So I absolutely wouldn’t rule out working with other visual artists in the future, especially artists whose work I genuinely admire, and there are many of them.
There are ideas that have been sitting in the back of my mind for years. Things like some of Luis Royo’s Tarot illustrations, or paintings such as Liberaci dal Male by Roberto Ferri, which has something deeply hypnotic about it. More recently, there are works that have completely blown me away, like Arantzazu Martínez’s Dracula, which I only discovered because you introduced me to it. That piece is overwhelming in the best possible way. Visually, it’s astonishing. It has this incredible balance between elegance and raw force.
Honestly, there are countless visual works I’d love to connect with musically, even if only loosely or indirectly. I’ve even spent years thinking about writing music inspired by a goose board game and still haven’t actually done it, so if that counts as an interdisciplinary project, then maybe the answer is yes. (laughs)
Collective hypnosis. (laughs)
No, seriously, if for the roughly thirty minutes the piece lasts people can forget about their lives for a while and temporarily put that mental circus we all build day after day on standby, then I’ll already consider the experience a success. And if those thirty minutes happen to feel short, then even better, mission accomplished.
From my point of view, that’s ultimately the purpose of any form of art. Maybe not to completely destroy the psychological structure we call the “self”, because that would probably be too ambitious, but at least to soften it a little. That constant inner machinery consumes an enormous amount of our energy and time throughout our lives, often without us even realising it.
On a more practical level, though, there’s nothing I hate more than wasting people’s time. So above all, I simply hope audiences are able to connect with the piece and genuinely enjoy the experience.
Hopefully that happens.
Have you already listened to La Sublime Esperpento?
A musical journey built from Albert Bonet’s portraits and visual imagination.
Fourteen interconnected pieces where the baroque, the contemporary, the popular and the grotesque coexist within a single sonic experience.
