Alfredo Santa Ana – Before the World Sleeps

TRACKS
1.-3. A Council of Apparitions
4.-7 Memory, I often think of you as time ash…
8.-12. Colours
13.-18. Little Ice Age

It is hardly an overstatement to say that, regardless of one’s artistic discipline or aesthetic orientation, among the biggest questions facing artists today is the very future of humanity itself. That might sound bleak, but it’s difficult to contest the precariousness of the present moment, be it in the political, environmental, or technological realm.

Rather than grappling with this topic beneath the surface of his music, Vancouver-based Mexican-Canadian composer Alfredo Santa Ana has elected to work with these assumptions transparently on his new release, Before the World Sleeps, though not in the manner that one might expect. In his case, these concerns manifest more in terms of his approach than as some sort of programmatic arc.

The impact of these conditions on those composing music for others to interpret is undeniably particular to that world. If technology encroaches further, if intrapersonal connections become more strained, and if performances become less-than-feasible because of climate change or the economy, artists in the concert music realm will need to radically rethink things. Yet, as Santa Ana notes, his goal with this album, “was not to celebrate despair or calamity, or to come up with music filled with ideas about the end of the world and humanity’s demise. It was to reorient the compositional process toward creating small pieces of music that I could finish quickly, and using an archiver’s mindset, commit them to a recording rather than prepare them for public performance.”

Indeed, there’s very little that could be characterized as grim or even apathetic about the compositions that the album contains. Though it nominally emerges from a sense of impending crisis, with Before the World Sleeps one gets the impression that Alfredo Santa Ana has transformed the intrinsic urgency of the situation at hand into potent creative fuel, generating a vivid portrait of his own compositional imagination.

REVIEWS
“These evocative piano miniatures are both haunting and alluring. The suite is Satie-esque in its apparent sparsity and simplicity but one can’t help but be drawn into its beautiful strange soundworld.” – Les Dala (Conductor and Pianist, Music Director, Vancouver Bach Choir)

CREDITS
Miranda Wong – Pianist
Alfredo Santa Ana – Composer
Mark Takeshi McGregor – Producer
Don Harder – Recording Engineer & Editor
Scott Harker – Piano Technician
Nick Storring, Riparian Media – Promotion & Publicity

Before the World Sleeps is available from:

Made in Canada
Recorded on July 25 & 26, 2024 at HippoSonic Studio in Vancouver, British Columbia. Piano by Yamaha Corp. (C7 #B2690561). Made in Hamamatsu, Japan in 1978.

The music contained in this album was created, performed, and recorded on the Coast Salish territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.