Notes on  

Plurifocal Music 

of

Llorenç Barber

It happened on Twelfth Night in 1998. A large group of musicians, eccentric and wrapped up as much as possible, climbed the towers of five churches of Ontinyent, in Valencia. They said they were going to play a musical concert, called Vivos Voco and which had been written specially for the town bells by a composer by the name of Llorenç Barber. He personally conducted this peculiar orchestra. In this way, between the smoke of incense and bits of coal, under the scrutiny of hundreds of puzzled looks and rocked by the breeze of the mountains of the Levante, Plurifocal Music was born.

The Plurifocal Music of Llorenç Barber (born in Aielo del Malferit, Valencia, 1948) is without any doubt one of the most refreshing and beautiful offerings within the panorama of artistic and musical creation in recent years. This unique way of composing for urban spaces transgresses the frontiers between "serious music", ars sonora, experimentation, sound installation, environment music and many other musical-sound manifestations, whether institutionalised or emerging. Plurifocal Music is the legitimate heir of different traditions of music for open spaces developed in the West, such as band music, cortèges and processions; the fanfares and royal entrances of the Renaissance; the cori spezzati of the Venetian baroque, the orchestral distribution and multi-orchestral combinations of the 20^th century, electroacoustic stereophony, and so on. But at the same time, this offering of continual reinvention of the collective space via sound is a tireless manager of new artistic behaviours.

The clearest manifestation, though not the only one, of Plurifocal Music is embodied in the City Bell Concerts. Roughly speaking, this concerns symphonies of fabulous proportions in which the bells of entire cities sound to the rhythm of precise minimal (or heterorepetitive) scores, rigorously coordinated by means of exactly timed instructions. Their internal structuring accords with the particular orographic-acoustic features of each space.

This novel creative behaviour in turn requires the positioning of alternative receptive behaviours. Plurifocal Music challenges the public to transcend its usual auditory practices, it exhorts them to contribute its thimbleful of risk and to complete a creative task which, being Utopian, will never become exhausted in the business of the composer. In order to witness these concerts, which last between 30 and 45 minutes, listeners have to be in squares and parks, or they climb onto roofs and balconies, they withdraw to the surrounding mountains and hills, or they walk freely along the streets, either following predetermined routes or improvised ones.

To enjoy this extended music, the listener has to put on some strong comfortable shoes, as well as being willing to use them. Here, music refuses to function as a precontracted service, something which we are overly accustomed to, and instead becomes a capricious and elusive maiden playing at hiding in alleys, behind columns, in balconies, who has to be caught by surprise. The plurifocal auditorium has to show that it is determined to awaken its auditory imagination, surely sunk into a state of lethargy after centuries of passive listening

Since the beginning of the nineties, Barber has been incorporating a range of different sound sources for counterpointing with the metallic timbre of the bells. Among this unusual set of instruments can be found wooden rattles, horns, fireworks, artillery salvoes, drums, ships’ whistles and sirens, metal, the booming of cannons, harmonic tubes and, in a spatial way, bands: symphonic bands, military bands, bands for processions and village bullfights, paso doble or school bands, and so on. They are all treated as a "mobile disciplined unit" willing to make lengthy journeys within a village or along rough routes such as the tiers of a bull-ring, or climb up to terraces and balconies in order to fire out their sounds left and right.

Barber has already composed over two hundred concerts for as many cities in Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Holland, Austria, England, France, Cuba, Poland, Argentina, Slovenia, Colombia, Belgium, Guatemala, Brazil, Denmark, etc. Each of his scores emerges from the orography, the urban development and the acoustic possibilities of each space. They are extensively studied by the author himself during the precompositional phase of each work. For this reason, no work can seem like any other. Nevertheless, the bulky chronology of Llorenç Barber’s plurifocal concerts does not seem at all like an exhaustive catalogue of autonomous works made individual by means of a series of distinctive features guaranteeing their identity. Rather, they recall the ramshackle diary of a wandering compère of village fiestas.

So, among those sheets punished by intensive use, marked by the prints of fingers dusted with rust, stiff with poorly covered rain, randomly splashed with wine and sprinkled with bits of cheese and rice, there spreads the retentive record of each of these fiestas which the insatiable Barber has attended, invitation in hand, driving a dusty truck full of scores, stopwatches, bells and other sound artefacts. Those urban musics which sweep along the paths of the world are like those houses of mirrors in fairs where one sees oneself deformed to the point of hilarity. The cities are contemplated in those sound concavities and convexities. They look, perplexed, transformed in a thousand ways by the playful counterpoints that the composer subjects them to. At the end of the acoustic tour made around it, the city rediscovers itself, beautiful and neat for a special fiesta, shining on the rubble of its history and mingling with the smiles of its people.

In this way, we find the colossal symphonies for more than 300 bells of Seville or Granada; the intimate spatio-musical serenades of Pollenza or Reims; "aquatic musics" in concerts for floating bells (Groningen, Holland); the devotions of the inordinate concerts lasting from sunset to sunrise (more than ten hours of solitary chiming) in the wood of Toledo or in the Sonambiente Festival of Berlin; concerts for mobile bells in Poznan (Poland); synaesthesic and multisensorial musics with aromas and flavours in Murcia; fictitious battles between sky (fireworks), earth (bells, drums and artillery fire) and sea (ships’ whistles) in sound Naumachias in Bahía de Cartagena, Funchal, Havana or Río de Janeiro; greetings to the aurora borealis in Scandinavia; heroic projects for resistant cities whose concerts took as much as seven years to arrive in Mexico City or Rome; celebrations of peace in Guatemala; eternal solidarity in Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires or unyielding hope in Popayán (Colombia), and so on.

Plurifocal Music

Plurifocal Music is one of those rare cases in the history of art in which the production of works is strictly simultaneous with a) the generation of the compositional technique making them possible; b) the development of theoretical instruments revealing the nature of the actual approach to this way of making music; and c) the continuous and necessary aesthetic reflection very much tied to in situ listening and to the phenomenic experience. None of these departments of musical activity takes one step without hauling the others along with it.

Barber’s Plurifocal Music implies a deepening and development in the musical handling of large urban spaces. Although the incorporation of space as a structuring element having a specific role within the work occupies a dominant place in contemporary music, the enormous dimensions, along with the particular acoustic characteristics of the spaces which Barber composes for, compels him to implement and develop a series of novel compositional-spatial resources and strategies. These resources have to smile on a series of complex and risky variables almost always unforeseen. But complexity, risk and unforeseeability are what defines the aesthetic search of Plurifocal Music. Among these we find:

1. The fortuitous distribution of the sound foci. The churches, with their bell towers, are there where history and town planning wanted them to be. Before writing each score, the composer finds himself with certain instrumental distributions defined in advance. Furthermore, each bell and bell tower is completely unique and different from the others. Each bell has to be studied, as does the bell tower as a whole, in order to obtain an idea of the power, timbre and general sound configuration of the focus. The same thing happens when cannon discharges, or ships’ sirens or whistles are introduced.

2. Various levels of structural articulation. Each score is conceived in Utopian terms: the sound intervention on the city is treated as being a whole "perceptible" by an ideal ear, from an ideal point capable of, ideally, reconstructing each macrospatial incidence planned in the composition. Nevertheless, the reality is always more complex. In fact, each focus could function as a centre in itself. But what is sought is for the listener to establish ties among various points and venture to decipher/produce structures of larger dimensions which give rise to organised sectors of sound foci. In plurifocal music, the decisions of the listeners are determining factors.

3. The unforeseeable and capricious phonoethology. In open spaces, sound behaves very differently from in domesticating concert halls. Throughout his compositional work, Barber has accumulated considerable experience in the observation of sound behaviour in outdoor conditions. This phonoethological knowledge has been acquired by empirical channels by means of antonomasia: trial and error. Nevertheless, each plurifocal score is not just another chapter of a small treatise on phonoethology. Rather, it constitutes a kind of irreverent incantation to the mystery of sound: an invitation to action which sound itself decides whether it heeds or attacks.

4. The compositional action of the weather. In the Cities Concerts, wind and humidity play a very definite role in the musical process. In a more humid atmosphere, low sounds gain in strength and penetration. Yet, when it is dry, high sounds find themselves with greater freedom. On the other hand, the wind is as unpredictable as it is implacable: it pulls the sound to where it wants, it sonorises or renders inaudible entire zones, it severely modifies the parametric characteristics of sound blocks, it creates glissandi where there was none, it articulates continua, it binds together or scatters sound planes.

 5. The three possibilities of listening to the City Concerts. There are three fundamental possibilities of listening to plurifocal music: a) Static audition: the public climbs on to the roofs or balconies or positions itself on corners and streets. b) Panoramic audition: the public leaves the town centre where the concert is being played and climbs mountains, hills or panoramic vantage points. c) Peripatetic audition: the public strolls around the city streets, paying attention to the echoes and rebounds, submerging itself in the sound tubes into which some of the narrow streets become converted. The location of each listener, as well as the type of audition they choose, completely reorganises the spatial structure of the work time and time again. Experience has shown that this last kind of listening is the most fruitful one for combining together and reacting towards the complex variables invoked in the works of Barber.

These are no more than a few small keys to the Plurifocal Music of Llorenç Barber. Music that is both nomadic and pedestrian, which helps us to transform everyday spaces into grandiose works of art. And with them our entire lives.