Cants Mágics (1917) was Mompou’s first published work and is dedicated ‘A mon cher maître F. Motte-Lacroix’. These are ‘songs’ in the loosest, or perhaps ‘most primitive’, sense of the word (‘incantations’, Mellers calls them, describing the vocal lines as ‘pre-melodic’), and the marking ‘Obscur’ at the top of No 2 has surely never seemed more apt. These spells frighten us not through their malevolence, but because we are transported to an unknown, prehistoric world. Here is Mompou’s most deliberate rejection of the cerebral complexity in much artistic thought of the period.
from notes by Stephen Hough © 1997
