Early
in 1988, Spanish composer Llorenç
Barber (born in Aielo del Malferit, Valencia, 1948) created what
is without any doubt one of the most original and beautiful ideas in recent
sound creation: the Ciudadanos Conciertos de Campanas, or Citizen Concerts for
Bells.
These are colossal symphonies of bell towers where entire cities resound to the rhythm of precise minimal (or heterorepetitive) scores, rigorously coordinated by means of exactly timed instructions.
In
order to hear these concerts, which vary in length between 30 and 60 minutes,
the public has to go out to squares and gardens, climb onto roof tops, terraces
or balconies, withdraw to vantage points, or just walk freely along the streets,
either following predetermined routes or improvised ones, on foot or on fast
bikes. The location of each listener substantially transforms the compositional
plan of each work. The score becomes multiplied: there will be as many concerts
as there are hearers and listening strategies.
This is outdoor music,
fragile towards the weather: a gust of wind could magnify or annul it, the
humidity of the atmosphere expands low sounds while dryness launches high
notes with greater speed. This is music that does not go around with an
umbrella...
For this reason, and because the sound sources are
distributed through an extensive urban space, Barber calls his project Plurifocal
Music.
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Almost fifteen years
after starting the adventure, Barber has written scores and urban sound spaces
for cities in Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Guatemala, Germany, Italy, Colombia,
Holland, Austria, Brazil, England, France, Cuba, Sweden, Ecuador, Poland,
Slovenia, Switzerland, Argentina, Denmark, etc., amounting to over two hundred
concerts in his personal and communal compositional/urban chronoscopy.
In
recent concerts, Barber has brought in new sound sources to create a
counterpoint to the metallic timbre of the bells. Among them are: wooden
rattles, horns, fireworks, artillery salvoes, drums, ships’ whistles and
sirens, metal, the booming of cannons, harmonic tubes and bands. Standing out
among these works are his compositions for a multitude of symphonic bands in
movement and the Naumachias:
sound battles between sea, earth and sky with ships’ whistles.
Plurifocal
Music is not an abstract exercise of speculative aseptic composition. It
concerns music for use, an entrance or inaugural fanfare of sound, a sonic and
communal fiesta, pure urban and historical appropriations, it concerns
collective performances, shared conceptual dreams, pamphlets of ecological
awareness, a brief reminder that neither art nor music is a shadow of what
they were, a tugging of ears for the arrogant closurers of history: it may be
that it has already run out, but not our desires to transform the
world...
