Magic Realism in Music
Magic Realism describes an artistic world in which the extraordinary enters everyday reality without destroying its continuity. The magical is not presented as fantasy or as an escape from the real; it appears naturally within it, revealing that reality may be more complex, layered and mysterious than it first seems.
The term was first used in the visual arts by the German critic Franz Roh in the 1920s, but it became internationally associated above all with twentieth-century Latin American literature. Writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo and Isabel Allende explored worlds in which history, myth, memory, dreams, the living and the dead can coexist within the same reality. Beyond Latin America, related approaches can also be found in writers such as Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami.
What interests me most in Magic Realism is not the supernatural itself, but the idea that one reality can gradually reveal another reality within it.
This became the starting point for what I describe as Magic Realism in Music.
Music is a statement:
There is another fundamental element of Magic Realism that has deeply influenced the way I compose: the extraordinary is presented with absolute clarity, without hesitation or ambiguity.
In Magic Realism, if a peacock enters a room, it is a peacock. Not someone whose appearance resembles a peacock, not a metaphor that needs explaining. It is a peacock. And if someone is speaking to a dead person, they are speaking to that person. Not necessarily to a ghost, a memory or an imagined presence. The writer presents the extraordinary as something unquestionably real within the world of the story.
I believe music should have the same courage to make a statement.
Music, for me, is not ambiguous. It has something definite to say, and it should not be afraid to say it.
This does not mean that music has only one possible meaning, or that every listener must experience it in the same way. Quite the opposite. I believe that each listener completes the musical story through their own experiences, memories and emotions. But the musical statement itself must be clear.
My melodies have a distinct identity. They are not vague suggestions of something that might exist. They are musical characters, with their own presence and intentions. The structures surrounding them may be complex, with multiple layers and constantly changing harmonic relationships, but the musical ideas themselves remain defined and recognisable, both to the performers and to the audience.
Complexity does not require ambiguity. A musical work can contain many different emotional dimensions without losing the clarity of its voice.
In this respect, Magic Realism in Music begins with a simple conviction: before reality can be transformed, it must first exist.
Tonality as musical reality:
Music has no literal reality in the way that literature has characters, places or events. But it creates its own internal world. In my music, tonality plays an important part in establishing that world. A tonal centre creates a particular musical and emotional reality; the listener enters it and intuitively understands its internal relationships.
What interests me is the transformation of that reality.
Rather than abruptly moving from one musical world to another, I often use exceptionally smooth, sometimes almost imperceptible transitions between different tonal and emotional centres. The listener may not consciously identify the moment when the transformation occurs. The music remains continuous, yet its reality has changed.
My method often moves beyond conventional modulation through the circle of fifths or fourths. At times, the transition to a new tonality can be harmonically quite unexpected, emerging from voice leading and the movement of individual lines.
The important element is to keep the listener’s focus uninterrupted. In other words, the listener keeps ‘seeing’ the main character—the leading theme—while the world around it changes.
This is where the two principles meet. The melodic statement remains clear, while the reality surrounding it is transformed. The theme does not need to lose its identity in order to exist in another harmonic world. On the contrary, its meaning may become entirely different because the world around it has changed.
In this sense, the process resembles Magic Realism in literature: the extraordinary appears from within the familiar rather than arriving from outside it. The listener remains inside the same musical continuum while gradually discovering that the world has become different.
And just as the reader of Magic Realism does not stop to question why a peacock has entered the room, I do not want the listener to become distracted by how a harmonic transformation has occurred. The transition must feel so natural that the listener experiences the new reality without questioning how it became possible.
The musical technique should never interrupt the emotional experience. Ideally, it should become almost invisible.
This principle lies at the centre of my conception of Tangos of the Magic Reality.
Borges, labyrinths and parallel realities:
I feel particularly close to the universe of Borges—his labyrinths, mirrors, doubles and parallel realities. The labyrinth is a world whose complete structure cannot be understood by the person moving inside it. Something similar happens in music: we experience the path moment by moment, while the larger architecture may only become visible afterwards.
The connection between Borges, the Labyrinth, Knossos and the Minotaur also creates a natural bridge between Latin American imagination and the Greek mythological world.
In Tangos of the Magic Reality, tango provides another layer. Tango begins in something intensely physical and real—the body, the embrace, desire, migration, memory and loss. I do not approach it as folklore, but as material that can gradually open into a larger symphonic and cinematic space.
For me, therefore, Magic Realism in Music is not a genre or a fixed harmonic system. It is a way of thinking about musical reality.
It begins with the conviction that music must have something clear to say, and continues with the possibility that the world in which that statement exists can be transformed without losing its continuity.
It is the moment when reality quietly becomes something more.