The electronics, at the beginning of the process of composing Mirroring the voice of time, started to be a single instrument, something that would appear as a soloist with an accompaniment that would travel around all the instruments of the ensemble. The idea was to use the electronics as a single instrument to fulfil the need to include fragments of previous compositions. The place for it would be at some point in the middle section with a simple material as an accompaniment, having then a mixture of old material with new material.
The electronics, on the one hand, gave me the opportunity to take complexity out of my mind. In the process of composing this section I thought that if I already have something complex in the electronics, why would I complicate even more in the ensemble? Also, if the ensemble have been playing difficult material in the first section, and it would play more in the third section, why would I not give them a rest? For all these reasons, I decided to create this moment where the ambience of it is plain, calm and very simple material. A sort of chorale that the only function is to make a harmonic journey.
So, in the middle section, I wrote the electronic material which I was very confident that would work with the music I had written for the instruments in the ensemble. However, during the process of learning the piece with the instrumentalists, and rehearsing the piece with them, I started to think that maybe the electronics would be wrong in this section for a single reason: this section has a slow, plain and calm choral on the strings, which is followed by solos by the flute, clarinet, oboe, percussion and brass; and the final result of having rehearsed these sequence of materials in a more expressive tempo was so satisfying that I started to be afraid that keeping the tempo of the bits of the electronics would be a problem. Nevertheless, I could not make the decision without experimenting. For that reason, on the first day of rehearsal at the hall of the concert, we tried the electronics and my awareness was completely right. The music worked by itself without the electronics, and it could not have been played in a strict metric way.
At the moment of composing, I normally feel that there is something missing. That the music I am writing is not good enough, that it has too many gaps, silences, spaces that are not played by anyone; and sometimes that is annoying because I want to create sound. I want to create a sonic result that goes from one thing to the other. However, in this particular case, when composing this section with electronics, because I was aware of the electronics I decided to have these gaps, silences, spaces that are not played by anyone, or even spaces that are just played by one instrumentalist. When I just realised that the music just worked perfectly with the gaps, the silences, the spaces that are not played by anyone it was a sort of surprise. It was the music breathing by itself. Breathing from the first section and getting ready for the next.
So at the end, no electronics were needed.