Seven Sones: Choreographies of Memory

There are pieces of music that seem to carry movement inside them. Both, metaphorically, and also physically.

This was the sensation to return to 7 Sones Sencillos, a cycle by the Cuban composer Carlos Fariñas. The pieces themselves are deceptively simple in title. Yet within them lives the pulse of the son, one of the foundational rhythms of Cuban musical culture.

Ignacio Piñeiro, the founder of the Septeto Nacional, once described it plainly: “El son es lo más sublime para el alma divertir.” The phrase captures something essential about the music — its ability to move between celebration and introspection, between the communal and the deeply personal.

Fariñas wrote the seven sones across more than four decades, between 1954 and 1998, in different moments of his life and in different cities. Listening to them today, what emerges most clearly is their sense of gesture. Each piece seems to carry an implied choreography. A step. A pause. A turning of energy.

From this perception grew the idea of Seven Sones for Piano with Contemporary Dance — a project that allows the music’s internal movement to become visible through the body.

The son, historically tied to social dance and collective celebration, finds itself reframed within a contemporary stage language — not abandoned, but transformed.

Within the arc of the cycle, the pieces begin to resemble stages of a life journey. There is vitality and propulsion in some movements, a sense of modern acceleration. Others feel more introspective, almost suspended in time. The final son returns to something quieter — a place where memory and nostalgia seem to settle gently back into the music.

First presented in Berlin at Radialsystem, the project continues to evolve as an open artistic exploration. A new chapter is currently unfolding in New York, where the work is being developed into a 16mm art film, extending the dialogue between music, movement, and visual space.