Hektor Oltra Garsija

Héctor Oltra García (Alboraya, Valencia – Spain), composer, conductor, and musical researcher. García holds a High Degree in Composition and a High Degree in Orchestra Conducting with top marks from the Conservatorio Superior de Música of Valencia, a Master’s Degree in Contemporary Music with Mention of Honours, and is currently working on his DMA dissertation at the Universitat Politècnica of Valencia.

As a composer, García regularly receives commissions and his works have been awarded and premièred at different international contemporary music festivals: Ensems International Contemporary Music Festival in Valencia; the concert cycle Huihuihui Música (SGAE-Art’sXXI); Mostra Sonora; Bell’ Arte Europa International Cultural Society; Somelgrup Concert Series; Brand Associates Music Series (Los Angeles, USA and Athens, Greece); Composer’s Voice Concert Series (New York, USA); Vox Novus Festival Romania (Bucharest, Romania); Risuonanze – Incontri di Nuove Musiche (Udine, Italia), etc…

His musical style features an abstract and non-traditional language, giving a primary role to colour, the texture of sound, and its suggestive capacity.

clariMIXnetTUR (2015) for solo clarinet was specially composed for Festival Mixtur 2015 (Barcelona), in close collaboration with Ensemble Recherche’s clarinettist, Ms. Shizuyo Oka, to whom it is dedicated. The work explores the possibilities of timbre by using several contemporary extended techniques and assigning a primary role to colour, the texture of sound, and its suggestive capacity, in an abstract musical language. The piece revolves around E as its focal centre and is constructed in six sections with well-defined different characters:

– saturation / erosion: extreme sound reliefs as gestures shaped in saturation impulses, which ultimately erode and dissolve into silence;
– volatile: the sound is on the threshold of silence, blur;
– ethereal-aural: a polyphonic atmosphere, static, pervasive;
– limits: an intense exploration of the limits of the instrument through agility and virtuosity;
– & exhausted: extremely flustered and agitated, with sound wandering between decomposition and exhausted breathing;
– (epilogue): subtle final flourish over E as the focal centre of the piece.