Compared to other festivals that, with one concert per day, stretch their programming over several months, the ME_MMIX Festival in Palma de Mallorca concentrates the bulk of its activities into two weekends which, like other European events dedicated to new music (think of Donaueschingen or Darmstadt), offer us an intensive schedule that can span up to thirteen hours in a single day, moving from lectures and sector-specific meetings to installations or concerts featuring the most varied musical genres and styles.
Such was the case with the extremely full programme presented by ME_MMIX on 22 November, a day that began at ten in the morning with an interesting lecture given by Magda Polo Pujadas, Professor of Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts, as well as of Music History at the University of Barcelona. Her talk placed in context many of the central issues of contemporary music that we would later experience in the three concerts reviewed here.
The first of these concerts featured the Swiss duo of voice, recorders, and electronics UMS’nJIP, formed by Ulrike Mayer-Spohn and Javier Hagen. Together, they guided us through an exploration of the architectural spaces of the contemporary art museum Es Baluard—a particularly pertinent approach in the first piece of their programme, Identity (2011), by Anton Svetlichny, for soprano recorders and electronics, in which resonances play a central role in revealing the acoustics of the space. This effect is heightened when the performers play while walking along a catwalk above the audience, as was the case here, further complicating our perception of the sound sources. These sources—just as in works with similar concepts, such as the bass clarinet duo 1+1=1 (2006) by Pierluigi Billone—strive for a constant con-fusion of timbres and harmonic registers marked by piercing flautando whispers that seem to evoke the snowy landscapes of Svetlichny’s native Russia, in contrast with a deeper and more threatening electronic layer which, considering the title of the score and the current state of affairs in Ukraine, feels like a premonition of the present.
As Magda Polo previously explained, the reformulation of space in works such as Identity breaks what is known as the “fourth wall” in music, enriching our acoustic experience. In the case of oscillation ou interstice (2013), a work for voice and bass recorder by Barcelona-born composer Luis Codera Puzo, the experience of space is more conventional, but through the verses of Irène Gayraud the effects multiply—both in Javier Hagen’s recitation and in Ulrike Mayer-Spohn’s recorder playing—materialising textures and references that evoke the life of fire: from the crackling dances of harmonic sparks to the blazing eruption we hear after a long pause, which structures oscillation ou interstice as a diptych whose second part is more theatrical, with extended techniques in the recorder, phonetic gestures, and a strong rhythmic-timbral connection between both performers that seeks to make them a single prosodic entity.
The following scores proved to be artistically more modest: the subtle KAMP (2015) by Turkish composer Idil Ataç; the Spanish premiere of the third and fourth numbers of Dark Matter (2015), a cycle by American composer Adam Roberts that seems to evoke Renaissance madrigals; and Panacea, a piece by Chinese-born American composer Du Yun — three proposals with more predictable and conventional aesthetics.
More interesting was another Spanish premiere: the fifth and sixth numbers of Ambient Songs (2025), a work for voice, recorders, and electronics by Javier Hagen. It immerses us in an ethereal world, with echoes of Vangelis and an intricate hybridization of the acoustic recorder sound with electronics that makes both practically permeate each other into a single texture. This serenity was shattered by the laughter-filled Das Lachenmann IV (2017), a score for recorder and voice by Japanese composer Motoharu Kawashima which—although its title might suggest a homage to Helmut Lachenmann—owes more in style to works such as György Ligeti’s Nonsense Madrigals (1988–93) or the more theatrical Georges Aperghis of the Récitations (1977–78). Utterly hyperactive, Ulrike Mayer-Spohn’s recorder once again imitates the voice instrumentally; in this case, the hilarious laughter of Javier Hagen which, in its histrionic manner, gives meaning to what the title of the score signifies in German: that laughing man who splits his sides in a duet with the recorder until they reach unison and final concord — the very rapport that UMS’nJIP undeniably possess to achieve the degree of complicity and refinement distilled in Mallorca.
Later in the afternoon, we listened to Prima Materia, an interdisciplinary performance by José Venditti (saxophone and electronics) and Marta Verde (visuals), presented in the cistern of Es Baluard. Venditti seemed intent on putting its walls to the test, given the dynamic extremes to which he pushed the most saturated and piercing electronic passages. As the day before in EMEA’s electroacoustic session, the connections between music and image were extremely direct, as in the Escher-like constructions that fused both languages, though accompanied by that sense of repetition and material exhaustion so often present in this type of musical session.
Certainly, signs of exhaustion are not something Vertixe Sonora shows. After fourteen years of activity, it remains one of the best Spanish ensembles dedicated to contemporary music. As we noted in our first review devoted to ME_MMIX, in 2025 the festival has built bridges with the Vertixe Festival, which in its thirteenth edition has shared musicians, composers, and scores — bringing closer not only these festivals in Galicia and the Balearic Islands, but both regions to the rest of the world. This contributes to the much-needed social and cultural cohesion of a country, Spain, which, as Jordi Teixidor once stated, has a great deal of culture but still needs greater civilization.
That goal — to help make Spain a cultured and civilized country — must necessarily be based on a high-level education, and this has also been a focus of ME_MMIX in its seventh edition, with family concerts, inclusive activities, and pedagogical projects that included the involvement of students from the Conservatori Superior de Música de les Illes Balears. Moreover, they took part as a prelude to some of the most notable concerts of ME_MMIX 2025, such as those by Ensemble Multilatérale or this one by Vertixe Sonora.
Thus, before hearing the Galician ensemble, we were able to enjoy a full demonstration of musicality by flutist Maria de Lluc, as well as strong writing for her instrument by young composer Vicente Olivares, who in Noche febril provides a whole showcase of multiphonics, frullato, percussive effects, and air-no-tone passages — on the more extended-technique side — as well as Boulezian inheritances in the harmonic writing. All of this is in search of his own language, yet already assimilating some of the quintessential stylistic markers of contemporary music, which is an excellent foundation.
A solid foundation for an ensemble also depends on the scores it performs and/or premieres not being a one-off for a single concert but becoming part of its repertoire — not only to deepen what their composers have bequeathed (after all, what would our understanding of the great works of Bach, Chopin, or Mahler be if only one version of their works existed?), but also to create a sonic ensemble culture and refine technique and musicality through the challenges that new creations typically present. In Vertixe’s case, given their excellence and perseverance with this repertoire, this has earned them praise such as that expressed by our colleague Tomás Marco last September, when Vertixe performed three of the works heard at ME_MMIX during the XVI Festival de Ensembles in Madrid.
The first of these was La belleza de lo roto (2025), a quintet for saxophone, accordion, electric guitar, piano, and percussion by Valencian composer Voro Garcia. The piece premiered on September 21 at Vertixe Festival 13, after which I had received highly enthusiastic comments — which, having now heard it live, I can only echo. It once again demonstrates why Voro Garcia is today one of the most interesting Spanish composers, for the way in which his scores unite refined technical command with powerful expressivity. In La belleza de lo roto, this expressivity is unleashed from the very first bar, with those abrasive blows that periodically rupture the musical discourse. It is precisely within the spaces opened by those blows — in the fracture and the fissures of the musical materials — that the most beautiful and meaningful elements of the quintet unfold, revealing the nature of each of those acoustic cracks, whether through granularity, crackling, roughness, or different modes of extended activation of the instruments.
Once we penetrate those ruptures in the material, their interiors appear populated either by rhythmic frenzies or by suspended passages in which, in any case, the work on the links between timbral proliferation and rhythmic organization is worthy of note. The ensemble becomes a truly polymorphic fissure, with its elongations, glissandi on the piano strings, loops of obsessive rings, or percussive effects. At many moments, it is thus a rupture through saturation, revealing the beauty of each personality and texture in the ensemble’s instruments when they are capable of avoiding the conventional and founding a language of their own. Therefore, although broken, this score displays a beauty of difference — in times when the uniformization of thought makes alternative forms of divergence so necessary. After the switch from baritone to soprano saxophone, that voice of the self seems to want to express itself, like a suspended specter, in the dialogues within the quintet, with a continuous flight of materials in timbral variations of slaps, piano activation, and textures that sealed an exemplary performance of La belleza de lo roto.
From the subtlety distilled by Voro Garcia’s score, we moved to a full-blown explosion of adrenaline — that unleashed by Yann Robin in Art of Metal II (2007), a piece already discussed in the pages of SCHERZO, likewise performed by Pablo Coello, on the occasion of its programming at Vertixe Festival 11. We refer back to that review to contextualize a saxophone arrangement made in 2015 by Coello himself, who, as two years ago, again collaborated with composer Iván Ferrer-Orozco on the electronics, rounding out a stunning and overwhelmingly intense reading.
Composed for alto saxophone, accordion, and electric guitar by Portuguese composer Luís Neto da Costa, Punge (2025) stages a dialogue between hardcore punk and art music, taking rhythmic patterns from bands like the Dead Kennedys, which Vertixe transforms into a polyrhythmic frenzy through techniques such as air-no-tone or the powerfully staccato declamations of accordionist María Mogas and guitarist Nuno Pinto. The creation of these obsessive universes recalls, in the world of contemporary music hybridized with rock, composers whose aesthetic hovers over Punge, such as Austrian composer Bernhard Lang in his polymorphic Differenz / Wiederholung cycle.
The concert concluded with music by the director of the ME_MMIX Festival, Mateu Malondra: we heard the impressive Free Module Study No. 1 (2015) and Free Module Study No. 2 (2024–25), works heard at the Ensemble Festival, with the latter having premiered in Vigo in the same concert as La belleza de lo roto.
Here we are faced with devilishly complex music. Vertixe also premiered the first study (at the 2015 Mixtur Festival) with an ensemble of saxophone, accordion, electric guitar, piano, and electronics. Electronics is one of the most striking “instruments” in Free Module Study No. 1, due to the degree of personality it achieves and the way it interacts with each voice in an ensemble in which groupings and stylistic echoes proliferate, drawing from post-structuralism as much as from jazz and rock. Complexity, in any case (so often associated with coldness), does not prevent this Study No. 1 from attaining a sensual musicality that lends it an aura of powerful attraction, gradually fading into the electronic bridge that links it to Study No. 2, while the oboist and drummer entered the stage to complete the instrumentation of the second study. Vertixe performed this study with click track, as — given its even greater difficulty — the musicians could not possibly look at a conductor and simultaneously read the score due to its extreme speed and technical virtuosity.
As Mateu Malondra noted at the time, Free Module Study No. 2 “alternates frenzied melodic lines within polyphonic saturations with spaces in which timbre becomes the protagonist.” This leads to associations that render this study at times an authentic session of composed jazz — in its freest and most frenzied form — and at times a series of micro-concertos in which Pilar Fontalba’s oboe and David Durán’s piano take on enormous prominence, revealing Malondra’s deep knowledge of each instrument, which he pushes to its limits in technique, articulation, and ensemble coordination. In all this, the current Vertixe recalls Ensemble Modern of the 1990s, for its overwhelming rhythmic pulse and strong personality. Thus, in the fastest sections, the ensemble becomes a true sound machine, a compact flow composed of continual bursts and cracklings of formidable expressiveness, sealing one of the finest concerts of ME_MMIX.
Paco Yáñez