La nave de Teseo

Plutarch recounts how the Athenians preserved the ship in which Theseus had sailed to Crete and returned after defeating the Minotaur. Over time, its old timbers were gradually replaced with new ones. This process of continuous renewal gave rise to the celebrated philosophical paradox of the “Ship of Theseus”: was it still the same ship once all its parts had been replaced? The paradox raises a fundamental question: what remains when matter changes? Where does the identity of something subjected to continuous transformation reside? From Heraclitus and Plato to contemporary thought (David Wiggins, Peter Geach, Peter Unger, David Lewis and Gilles Deleuze), the concepts of identity, matter, time and memory have been closely bound to this question.

My composition arises from this paradox. The form remains, but the matter changes. Is it still the same ship? Is it still the same musical work? My work is like that ship, and this reflection is projected directly onto the musical material through processes of repetition, transformation, ageing and sonic erosion. The materials are constantly modified, making time and memory the true protagonists. Yet an underlying formal idea remains perceptible throughout these transformations: musical identity does not reside in the intact preservation of materials, but in the processes through which they appear, disappear, erode, are restored or replaced.

The three movements of the work are entitled I. Memoria de la madera (Memory of Wood), II. Memoria del hierro (Memory of Iron), and III. Memoria del viento (Memory of Wind). Wood, iron and wind – the latter encompassing, in my imagination, the fabric of the sails – generate different images and sonic worlds. Yet beyond their evocative associations, I would speak here of transmediality. Each movement involves sensory and synaesthetic translations: sound evokes matter, space, weight, friction, surface and movement. One might even speak of a perception that is not exclusively auditory, but also haptic – related to touch – and even olfactory. Wood, iron and wind thus constitute different sensory states of musical matter.

The three movements are not three independent objects, but three states or temporal regions of a single musical identity (Lewis), continuously subjected to processes of erosion, transformation and restoration. Following Deleuze, one might say that this is not a paradox of identity, but rather a dramaturgy of time. For Deleuze, “repetition is never repetition of the Same, but always of Difference as such” (Différence et répétition). The ship was never a thing: it was always a becoming.

La nave de Teseo thus opens up new paths within my compositional work, continuing my exploration of the territories of the guitar – one of the instruments I love most – while at the same time proposing an especially unusual instrumental configuration: three solo guitars and string orchestra.