Francisco Guerrero was the most outstanding figure in Spanish music of his generation.
I met him while attending a course on Fractal Composition that he offered at the Centro para la Difusión de la Música Contemporánea - CDMC in Madrid, where I was fascinated by the treatment of sound masses in his work.
The course was shared with Miguel Ángel Guillen, an engineer and friend who assisted him developing the software that his work needed throughout its evolution.
I began to study with him, became his student, his copyist, and even began to write a book (unfinished) to deepen my understanding of what he was teaching me and to share his extraordinary vision of the whole in every part.
I also met other composers students (Alberto Posadas, Canco Lopez, Alfonso Casanova) and a musicologist who came from Italy attracted by his work, Stefano Russomanno. We became friends and use to gather once a week in a bar to discuss our mutual interests.
The teaching began with a conceptual vision that goes from the whole to the part, where the idea was to compose music as nature creates form.
At first, we worked manually: combinatorial, calculations, proportions, distributions, axioms, symmetries, just as he himself started.
Then we used programs created specifically for multiple functions such as generating envelopes, threads, calculating matrices, midi files, etc.
When we free ourselves from the distraction of understanding music as "notes-and-their-relationships" to open ourselves to the understanding of a completely new natural territory (because new are the eyes that see it) it is possible to work on a truly new creation.
That this is not music? That that is a tree, a river or a stone?
But it is that the tree, the river and the stone are music.
You just need to realize it.