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STYLE

The music of Tenreiro can be seen as a personal response to the conflict of style that developed during the 20th Century. On one hand, Schöenberg exploded the tonal universe by stretching the chromatic scale to a point that music expressed in this fashion tends to lose its center, its basic tonality, and on the other Neo-Classicist musicians, like Stravinsky, tried revitalizing the same idea of tonality by superimposing different rhythms and tones. Both styles present certain challenges to the ear of the listener. Therein lies the difficulty many have in appreciating and understanding most of the music of this century.

Alfonso Tenreiro has synthesized both of these tendencies with a very personal language, in which he not only uses atonal, polyrhythmic and polytonal techniques proper of the 20th Century Composers, but also effectively incorporates traditional elements from Classicism and Romanticism, as well as brush strokes of folkloric origin. The variety of resources used in his compositions enhance each other and add to the richness of the work, carrying it to a very high creative level.

Since 1998, Tenreiro´s imagination has taken him to the past, when at the begining of the 20th Century a young Schöemberg asked himself to what point could he expand harmonic ambiguity in his compositions. Having already used atonal, polyrhythmic, polychromatic and polytonal techniques during the 80´s and 90´s, Tenreiro forges a different road, as he decides to embrace again the direction of a harmonic language anchored in Romanticism, which many 20th century composers abandoned. This creative decision has led him to navigate hardly explored tonal universes. 

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