MÁS MÚSICA MÍSTICA – In memoriam Max Jardow-Pedersen is written for guitar quartet & percussion. Some few years ago I attended an event hosted by the Mexican embassy in Denmark.  It was a special gathering to commemorate the late Danish ethnomusicologist Max Jardow-Pedersen, who had died a couple of years before that.  Max spent a good part of his professional life in Mexico, living in Yucatán and studying the music of the Maya people.  I never met him and hadn’t heard of him before being invited to this event by a dear friend of mine.  When I walked into the room, a video was being projected.  In it, I could see a tall Danish man, with a white beard and blue eyes, walking around in what looked like a Mexican town.  This man I was looking at, was dressed as a Mexican, walked like a Mexican and his gaze told of a foreigner that maybe wasn’t such a foreigner anymore.  He looked like, through his years in this different land, he had come to understand it, and carried it in him.  At the time I was also trying to find my own place in a foreign land, trying to understand, and wondering what was this life I was having far away from my own country.  This made me feel very intimately reflected on the man I was looking at on the screen. That same night, I was very lucky to meet Max’s daughter Erika, and she was kind enough to give me a copy of Max’s book La Música Divina de la Selva Yucateca (The Divine Music of the Yucatec Jungle).  Using this book as a point of reference I wrote a three-movement piece in which each part focuses on a particular aspect of Max’s work.  Danza del ramillete is written in the structure of a Jarana – the beginning of the festivities in some Mayan towns, in which the band stops in every house to play a round of music and thus, signals the start of the celebrations.  A central motif is passed around through the guitar parts and then given to the percussion in the last section.  El tacho gacho is a melody transcribed by Max and written by Filberto Tináh Loria.  The theme is set to a canon that once more runs through the different parts of the ensemble.  Max loved to play the Blues, and the last movement is an effort to acknowledge this.