ONDE A SOMBRA DE TI [WHERE THE SHADOW OF YOU] is a work for solo percussive guitar, composed from the homonymous poem by José Saramago (1922–2010). Its musical materials were derived through techniques and processes of cryptographic transformation, by transcribing and encoding the original text itself.

Its genesis arose from a collaborative proposal with guitarist and researcher Amanda Carpenedo, to whom the work is dedicated. The proposal of the composer and the performer research: musical cryptography and percussive techniques for guitar, respectively, in a creative symbiosis that culminated in a lecture-recital, developed and showcased at an array of national and international conferences.

From a compositional perspective, Saramago’s words were treated in multiple ways (divided into letters and/or syllables, inverted, fragmented, etc.) and transcribed into musical vocabulary, in terms of pitch and rhythm, to develop harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral materials. These were organized into the three main sections of the work: “saudade” (longing), “sombra” (shadow), and “fantasma” (ghost).

“Where your shadow, my profile
Is a line of certainty. There converge
The circular waves, at their limit
The precise point spreads.
There the original voice is reproduced,
The solar word, the bond of the root.
From us time is born, and, creators,
By the strength of the coincident profile,
We awaken gods, hand in hand”. (SARAMAGO, 1985, p. 27).