Maresía

Sometimes the smallest thing in a project shows you where to go next. Not the biggest piece. The quietest one.

While recording the album DUETY, sung by Ivan and Desana, we originally had a completely different running order planned. Then Desana had an idea: open the whole album with a small piano piece. She asked me to write it. She wanted something short and intimate — not a big production moment, just something to quiet the listener for a beat before everything else begins.

That’s how Maresía came to be.

The title comes from the Canary Islands — from the sea-salt mist the wind carries there. A word I heard during a stay in Tenerife, and one that stayed with me as an image: something invisible, but felt against the skin. That’s the kind of atmosphere I wanted for this miniature — impressionistic, dissolving at the edges, more feeling than strict form.

What’s interesting is that the music itself was written in Slovakia, and it speaks in a slightly different language than the title suggests. I built it on an E Lydian-Mixolydian scale — known among folklorists as the podhalanská scale.

So the piece has a Canarian name and a Slovak heart. I didn’t try to reconcile that internally. Sometimes a title comes from one place and the music from another — and both layers are equally true.

What actually matters most to me about this piece, though, isn’t the name or the folk mode. It’s the date.

My last original composition dates back to around 2000. Twenty-six years passed between that and Maresía. For a long time there was simply silence around my own composing — life pulled me in entirely different directions. And although I’d been slowly finding my way back to music over the last five years — arranging, playing again — one thing was still missing. Writing something new, from nothing, from a blank page: I hadn’t done that in over two decades.

When I sat down at the piano to honour Desana’s request, it didn’t occur to me that I was writing my first new piece in that many years. I only knew the album needed its quiet opening. It was only once it was finished that I understood what had actually happened. It felt like something between surprise and rediscovery — like opening a door you assumed was permanently locked, and finding the key still turns.

Maresía is now the gift waiting for anyone who subscribes to updates from this site. I wanted the first thing you receive from me not to be a preview of some larger project, but exactly this — a quiet piece, just as it is.

And one more thing. I don’t think Maresía is only a gift, or only an album opener. For me, it’s also a new question.

Because somewhere inside this, an idea for a larger suite has started taking shape — Vientos de la Isla, inspired by the different winds of Tenerife. Whether it ends up being six pieces or ten, I don’t know yet. But I know that what was only meant to be a quiet breath before the first duet may have become the start of something larger.

Happy practicing, friends.