Crónica: Diogo Alvim: Música para Mysterious Heart

Mysterious Heart is a dance piece by choreographer Tânia Carvalho, created for Tanzmainz at the Staatstheater Mainz in 2023–24.

The music composed for this project was conceived from the outset with a certain autonomy from the choreography. The initial idea, taken from a practice already familiar in Tânia’s choreographic work, involved exploring and characterising different emotions or states of mind — a kind of sonic catalogue of affects that would later support the choreographic composition.

With this in mind, I proposed working with the drawings of Charles Le Brun, published in his treatise Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698). These drawings, which examine the particularities of facial expressions associated with different human emotions, stem from Descartes’s Les Passions de l’Âme (1649) and became a kind of visual grammar for many later creations. At the same time, in much of her work — both in drawing and in choreography — Tânia has developed her own vocabulary of facial expressions, which created an immediate affinity with Le Brun’s universe.

The first step was to select a group of emotions and their corresponding drawings, and to record vocal improvisations by Tânia exploring each affect. The only exception was “Envy”, which does not appear in Le Brun’s catalogue; for this we used the figure de la jalousie naist l’aversion. With no stimulus other than the “passion” and its drawing, the recordings were made without any instrumental accompaniment or sonic support.

These recordings became the initial material for the electroacoustic composition. The vocal material was selected, then edited or transformed, and integrated into a new structure that explored different sonic atmospheres and characters for each emotional state. Each short piece was later explored, adjusted and adapted during the choreographic creation process, testing its relationship with the dancers’ movements.

Two pieces that were not used in the final performance (“Envy” and “Fear”) are presented here for the first time as independent tracks (11 and 12). Some of their sonic material was nonetheless included in “Pictures” (track 3), which runs through the entire “catalogue” of emotions in a sequence that also includes material not used elsewhere. In addition, a longer version of the piece “Sadness” is included.

“Hope” is based on John Blow’s “Morlake Ground” (1689), as well as excerpts from “Triumph, Victorious Love” from Henry Purcell’s opera Dioclesian (1690).

Alongside this small catalogue of “passions”, other pieces were developed according to different criteria, responding to a structure that emerged from the choreographic process. “All the thoughts in the world at the same time” (tracks 2 and 8) stands apart from the rest, both choreographically and sonically. From the beginning, these pieces were shaped as dense layers of different sonic textures in constant transformation. The title, given by Tânia, became an early guide for the sonic composition. Finally, “Overture”, “Interlude” and “Finale” (tracks 1, 5 and 10) also diverge from the sonic vocabulary of the other pieces, helping articulate the overall form.

All pieces in this album were revisited at the mixing stage and newly mastered for this edition.

Diogo AlvimMúsica para Mysterious Heart