Happy Father's Day

Devoid of words and the warmth of the human voice, the instrumental fourth movement of Camilo Aybar's Symphony No. 4 in A Major "La Espiral Infinita", dedicated to his father Edwin Aybar, is Camilo Aybar's nihilistic elegy of not just his father's, but his own love life. Its expansive string writing and slow pace, interrupted by a brutally crass tango which spirals into a symbolic death, makes it his most emotionally profound movement written yet. As an antithesis to the warmth and soulful melodies of the Romantic Era, Aybar sought to elicit a sense of existential dread without resorting to a complete abandonment of tonality. The opening figure exploits the ambiguity of a ♯2 suspension superimposed over a major triad, blurring the line between a comedic ♯2 inflection and a dissonant split-third chord (with ♭3 clashing against ♮3). This harmonic unease leaves the listener adrift—an emotional limbo that defines the entire 20-minute movement. Aybar creates an ascending chain of suspensions where the third keeps attempting to resolve to a major triad, but the underlying chromatically ascending harmonies keep forcing it to become a ♯2 suspension, preventing a feeling of resolution, akin to the existentialist never allowing themself the evil of feeling happiness in a meaningless universe. This progression, mainly led by the strings in a Shostakovich-esque sonority, climaxes in a pivotal ♭6 deceptive cadence, thus prolonging the absence of perfect authentic cadences. What follows, after a recitative from a lone violin accompanied by etherial harmonics, is the most dissonant passage of music written by Aybar in his consonance-seeking career. A tango, led by the cello, is accompanied by a broodish bass drum-cymbal ostinato derived from Stravinsky's Petrushka. As the Aybars witness the objects of their affection tantalizingly dance in the hands of another, they lead their own dance towards their demise as this theme becomes increasingly perverted with thickening layers of orchestration in dissonance. It culminates in a second climax which finally gives the audience a resolution of a perfect authentic cadence. Here, the Aybars relish the freedom of their own grave, in a return of the ♯2 melody, where after a massive build-up of diminished triads, the ondes martenot, as an hommage to Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie and its inspiration of the Futurama character of the same name (a series with which the Aybars enjoy the distraction from the meaninglessness of the universe), brings the movement to a poignant close, as the tantalizing bass drum-cymbal ostinato echoes in the distance.