ANTONIO CELAYA
COMPOSER
ABOUT ME
I am a composer living in Oakland, CA. I am from Tucson, AZ and the sounds of Mariachi music, deer dance, Waila and Norteño music are forever at the back of my mind.
ABOUT MY MUSIC
This website is intended to give a sample of my compositional work, rather than a full listing of my oeuvre. If you would like to know whether I have pieces for the musical forces in your concert contact me by email. I like to be free to explore different styles and idioms. I don't think history demands any particular musical language. I try to pursue simplicity and clarity as practiced by Satie. I also love to provide a sense of bodily movement.
FEATURED TRACK
Dancing Among the Ruins (String quartet)
Sometimes in music as in life, everything falls apart only to pick up and go again. (Performers: Kayo Miki, Emily Onderdonk, Joel Cohen)..
Chongos
Morongos
(Piano) (Maria Choban)
At the start of the 20th Century composers such as Ignacio Cervantes and Ernesto Lecuona in Cuba, Scott Joplin in the US, Manuel Ponce in Mexico, and Ernesto Nazareth in Brazil wrote piano pieces to be played in homes. Their music was rooted in popular idioms. Chongos Morongos is one of several pieces that were inspired by those composers. Thanks to the ferocious and virtuosic Maria Choban..
The Nagual Cotillion
Mesoamerican religion teaches that each person has within a protecting animal spirit. Some people have the ability to transform into the animal whose spirit they carry. They go about at night as jaguars, pumas, dogs, or eagles. Such people are called naguales.
Transformations have their risks. In a Hopi tale, a coyote mother eavesdrops on naguales having a party and overhears how to transform herself into a rabbit, and joins the party. She does not learn to reverse the process. She returns to her hungry pups who have a rabbit dinner.
In my piece a funk bass line slithers and are suddenly becomes an antique Cuban dance. A nagual dance party gives new meaning to the square dance call, "Change your partner do-si-do."
Lamentatione Jerimae Prophetae
The original version of this piece was for countertenor, violin, cello, soprano and alto recorder. The Latin text was taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah and describes children starving in their mothers' arms.
This version is for two violins, two violas, and cello. It was performed on a concert of the Composers Anonymous composers collective on September 8, 1991. The concert featured guest composer, Lou Harrison. The performers are Eugen Chukhlov and Dmitri Glovko (vlns.), Rem Djemilev (vla.), Sergei Riabtchenk (vlc.), and Paul Espinosa (vla.).
Go Ask Alice
Portrait of the Artist as a Cosmopolitan Exile with Dodgson, Groucho, Chico (and Harpo is also there)
Wind Quintet
(Slide whistle and bicycle horn)
Go Ask Alice is a tribute to Ligeti, György and was written for a June 2023 Cascadia Composer concert commemorating the centennial of his birth. The Portland concert included music by Ligeti and composers from Portland, Oakland (me), Texas, and Italy. Go Ask Alice includes a recitation of Lewis Carrol's "Jabberwocky" and lines from the state room scene in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. Both the Alice books and A Night at the Opera were inspirations to Ligeti.
Composers Anonymous Concert, September 8, 1991 in San Francisco, CA.
L/R: Antonio Celay,a, (Anthony Doherty), Sergei Riabtchenko Arlekin Quartet) , Eugene Chukholov (Arleen Quartet), Peter Adler, Charles Berry, Jeff Kingman, Daniel Kobialka (violin soloist), Lou Harrison, Jonathon Grasse, Rem Djemilev (Arlekin), Dmitri Glovko (Arlekin)
Sailing Lake Superior is a landscape choral piece. The text is a contemplation of mortality by Kirsten Dierking, one of America's foremost poets.
Der Fodem (The Thread) (SSAATTBB) is a choral fantasy based on an old Yiddish song. The story is told from the point of view of a young woman whose father has died, her mother is in the hospital and her fiancé has left her for a woman with a dowry. She has sewn and cried all night and now realizes it is dawn. The piece is now of a series of arrangements of Yiddish songs I have made.
Whistling in the Dark was written for the superb Del Sol String Quartet under the aegis of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music.
Chugachugazjung is for cello and piano and was premiered in 2021 on a concert presented by Sonic Harvest. The onomatopoeic title sounds like the piece as I heard it in my head. It is a tango-like dance that is continually collapsing only to arise again. I kept thinking of a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which a plague victim keeps yelling, "I'm not dead yet."
The Blackbird is a very simple setting of W. E. Henley's poem. It is one of several songs I have written in an extremely simplified style. Some may say it is simplistic and perhaps they are right. Satie's famous Three Songs of 1886, Les Anges, Elegie, and Sylvie, are even simpler and are as beautiful as any song I have ever heard. Simplicity and clarity are virtues I pursue.