Clara Levy is a French. Brussels-based violinist, improviser, and «sound crafter», devoted to contemporary music. Victor Guaita Igual is a Spanish, Brussels-based violist, focusing on new music and «other sonic explorations», who often works with ensembles such as Ensemble Modern, Ictus, or Klangforum Wien. Songs of Erosion is Levy and Igual’s work-in-progress project that began in 2021 and revisits the 13th-century Spanish songbook Cantigas de Santa María through the lens of erosion.
The Cantigas de Santa María comprise over 400 compositions in Galician-Portuguese and mensural notation. They are dated between 1270 and 1282 and were composed by various individuals in the context of the court of King Alfonso X of Castilla and León (1221-1284). Four manuscripts of the Cantigas have been preserved, although none of them contains all the compositions.
Levy and Igual reject a historicist interpretation of these compositions. They treat the Cantigas de Santa María manuscript as an archaeological artifact, an object written in a strange code, almost impossible to decipher from a purely textual perspective. They have developed a set of instructions inspired by geological processes that led to a contemporary reading of the Cantigas de Santa María through the lens of erosion, allowing them to manipulate the various materials.
Their irreverent reading of Cantigas de Santa María manuscript serves as a basis for approaching pitch and rhythmic material, shaping two cantigas – «Alluvium» (CSM 27) and «Landslide» (CSM 209) – as new compositions. Songs of Erosion was recorded by Spanish experimental electronics composer Clara de Asís at Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia in León, Spain, in March 2025, during Levy and Igual’s residency in this foundation, and its music was clearly shaped by the reverberating acoustics of its modern, barn-like architecture.
The interpretation of «Alluvium» reflects on its original, ceremonial repetition as a process of both sedimentation and renewal, but conveying a modernist, minimalist, polyphonic pattern through persistence and reciprocity. «Landslide» receives a more minimalist and spacious interpretation that offers a haunting exploration of instability as a generative force. A digital-only bonus track, «La Quebrantada», with de Asís on synth, deepens the meditative, minimalist essence of Songs of Erosion, with its mysterious, elusive, and timeless repetitive motifs.
Levy and Igual see this project as a sonic lab where repetition is presented in a nearly exhausting way, inviting the listener to look through the rubble and sediment at what remains of these songs. According to Levy and Igual, repetition can be a way of remembering, as oral traditions rely on repetition for transmission. But, as the sound curator of the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, Luis Martinez Campos, suggests, it can also be a way of shaping: each repetition is a revival, a recreation that is both similar and subtly different. Repetition turns sound into a flow, a temporal window.
Eyal Hareuveni
Clara Levy (violin), Victor Guaita Igual (viola)
