Dialectics between Transformation and Memory: ‘Sonata’ (1989) by Enrique X. Macías
The Galician composer Enrique X. Macías (Vigo, 1958-1995) emerged as one of the foremost figures in the Spanish music scene during the 1980s and 1990s. Acclaimed throughout Europe with numerous international awards and commissions from leading institutions, he also maintained strong ties with Portugal, where the Miso Music publishing house played a pivotal role in promoting his works, publishing most of its scores and producing several monographic recordings. Macías succeeded in defining a highly distinctive musical style characterized by experimentalism and rigorous, speculative research into compositive strategies. Among the concepts he explored through his compositions, the transformational articulation of temporal developments that are deeply informed by memory is particularly notable. From Macías’s perspective, structural mechanisms based on logic and mathematics, and the processes of remembrance in auditory perception, summarize two of his core artistic preoccupations as a contemporary composer.
In coincidence with the 30th anniversary of the composer’s untimely death, this study analyzes one of his most representative works. Sonata, for solo piano, was written between 1986 and 1989, when it was premiered in the Xornadas de Música Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela. Miso Music soon got the score published and recorded. Despite that apparently traditional title, the piece represents a reimagining of historical and academic conventions, redefining the underlining principles. The four movements allude to conventional types and procedures, rooted in past repertoires and constructive techniques: ‘Impromptu I’ (1986), ‘Refrain’ (1989), ‘Impromptu II’ (1988), and ‘Paraphrase’ (1989), with the second and third movements being interchangeable. They are interconnected by motivic materials that, more precisely in their dyadic dimensions, and playing with the idea of ‘memory’, involve certain invariances in the expression of different statements. The rhapsodic quality of the Impromptus contrasts with the more rigid design of the Refrain, while the final Paraphrase recalls various aspects of the preceding movements.
The analytical methodological approach undertaken here aims to elucidate how Macías conceives his compositional strategies to structure the piece as a complex whole, with particular emphasis on harmonic design (utilizing Allen Forte’s Pitch-Class Set Theory as an essential tool), and the structural procedures through which Macías engaged with musical time and complexity.
Ultimately, this analysis of the Sonata for solo piano demonstrates how Macías employs compositional devices related to memory and transformation to create a dialectical reformulation of the historicist notion of the sonata type.
Keywords: memory, Enrique X. Macías (Vigo 1958-1995), music analysis, pitch-class set theory
Biography
Specialized in the analysis of Hispanic music, particularly Spanish and Cuban from the 20th century onwards. His research focuses on Pitch-Class Set Theory, dodecaphonic analysis, and Topic Theory. He completed short research stays at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne and IRCAM (Paris, 1998), and at Columbia University (New York, 1999).
Since 2007, he has been a Tenured Associate Professor of Musicology (accredited as a Full Professor) at the University of Valladolid (Spain), where he has chaired the Musicology PhD Program since 2019.
He has given seminars on music analysis at several Spanish universities and conservatoires and has supervised over 35 Master’s theses and 11 PhD dissertations on key figures and events in contemporary Spanish music. After contributing to the biennial Music and Philosophy: 19th-20th Centuries (1999-2007) and Joaquín Rodrigo and Spanish Music (2003-2007), currently organizes international conferences on music analysis and Topic Theory (UVa, 2022, 2024; UCM, 2025).
University of Valladolid, Spain – villar-taboada@uva.es