Hybris Borja Granell i Ciscar

Compulsory piece for the 2nd section of 43th Band Contest from Comunitat Valenciana 2023

The ancient Greeks understood the world as a web of constant tension and release between gods and men, who were separated by an infrangible boundary, immortals on one side, mortals on the other. There was a necessary natural order that governed the universe, which had to be respected, an order not to be transgressed. Hubris or hybris is a concept that can be translated as immoderation, referring precisely to an attempt to transgress these limits, to an irrational, passionate impulse to expand upon possibilities, to venture into forbidden realms with a certain insolence and lack of restraint. A classic example of hybris is Prometheus, the titan who defied the gods by stealing fire and giving it to men, allowing them to progress, for which he was punished terribly.

Yet the word hybris likewise suggests the idea of hybridisation, of mixing elements, separate units that, when brought together, generate new ones, in some sense transgressing purity so as to attain an ever richer, more suggestive fusion.

From these two ideas is born this work which aims to build sonorities that through the music reflect and explore the state of passionate excitement, exaggeration and excess of hubris to create a musical kaleidoscope that traverses various atmospheres, at once fierce, now seductive, then grotesque, comic, furious, exalted, or jovial. And it does so through a musical language conceived from blending and superimposing elements that when united, when hybridised, generate more complex, stimulating sonorities.