PRODUCTION CREDITS
Music concept: Pedro Alcalde
Musicians: Percussions de Barcelona (Ramón Torramilans, Robert Armengol, Ignasi Vila, Sebastià Biel)
Festival: Festival de Novas Sonoritats – Gong
Venue: Limestone Caves Collbató – Montserrat Mountain
Date: 25th July 2009
BACKGROUND
Albert Blancafort, organ builder, accompanied us throughout the process of recording the organ music for Cobalto. In the course of our many conversations, he invited me to participate at the Festival Gong for New Sonorities creating a special project for the Limestone Caves in the Montserrat Mountain near Barcelona. We decided then that the audience, rather than sitting in the huge space beyond the entrance, would make the tour of the caves during the length of the performance.
TITLE
If music has always been considered an art of time, with this walk the aim was to explore its spatiality by allowing music to become a map, a sound cartography of the site.
MUSIC
Since its origins, music had always been bound to the space where its execution took place. The creation of the concert hall represented a radical break with a tradition that linked the temporality of music to its spatial location. “Here time becomes space”, explained Gurnemanz to Parsifal in Wagner’s opera, referring to the process to access the sacred place where the Holy Grail was preserved (“Montsalvat”). The mountain of Montserrat has always been related to this sacred place where time and space coexist in this blessed conjunction. The formal musical plan of the walk was a journey from the sound line to the point and then back to the line again, placing five percussionists in different locations throughout the caves.
SOUND PALETTE
1- Vibraphone, tam-tam, Cristal Baschet
2- Antique cymbals, tubular bells
3- Waterphone
4- Effects and kalimba
5- Tree of beads
DURATION
45’ over a distance of 500 meters
