Its gestation has been a protracted process. In the spring of 1982, while still living in Minnesota, I wrote a solo guitar piece, Monólogo II, which, 15 years later, served as the basis for Tiempo Muerto.

The latter substantially changed the content and structure of the shorter, less developed predecessor, given the new possibilities offered by the confabulation between guitar and orchestra. Although the initial sketches for the concerto were first conceived in 1992, it was not until 1996, at the end of a sabbatical leave from DU, that the first draft of the concerto was finished. The orchestration was completed in 1997, with additional revisions being incorporated in the last two years. As someone once said, a work of art is never completed, it is only abandoned.

Many friends and colleagues have asked me, with no small puzzlement, about the rather unusual and, at first hearing, macabre-sounding title of my work. Its literal English translation, "dead time", is not the most appealing image, particularly for musicians. It seems to be a rather difficult name to give to a piece of music. To these well-intentioned concerns I might respond that when you live in America with a name like Iznaola, you pretty quickly lose your fear of difficult names.

In fact, the expression is, or, at least, was, a very common, colloquial one, used by Cuban sugar-cane workers to describe the period after the harvest, when all activity in the fields ends, and there's no more work, until the following season. It more appropriately translates as "down time", a time of little income and much hardship, but leaving plenty of space to think and dream and, why not, sing and dance. This down time, in short, was an interruption of the normal course of life, a void in between the productive activities that filled lives before, and those that, hopefully, would fill them again in the future. A period of waiting, of patient expectation, even anticipation.

Mind you, tiempo muerto was no vacation, and it is symptomatic that these Cuban peasants never thought of it as such. The concept of vacation implies security, stability, a continuity in our endeavors that is so solid that we can have the luxury of a period of leisure, without fearing what the future will bring or take away.

And this is why I titled my piece as I did, for I am acknowledging the experience of my parents and, more generally, of all who, in the XX century more than at any other time in history, have been forced, by diverse circumstances, to live a good part of their lives in a state of tiempo muerto.

Even I, with my vicarious melancholy for landscapes more imagined than remembered, have unwillingly communicated my inherited down time to my sons, Ricardo and Victor Fernández, and this is why this work is dedicated to them, children of immigrants, immigrants themselves, who, nevertheless, close the

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