Barcelona's music scene is filled with experimental minimalism
Well-known musicians from the city perform at the Auditori the piece In C, by the North American composer Terry Riley, which is sixty years old.
Adriano Galante, the members of cabosaroque, Sara Fontan, Pascal Comelade... If the name of any other experimental musician from the Barcelona scene comes to mind, you may also find them on the programme of the concert at L'Auditori on Saturday, 11 January. All of them will perform a key piece of experimental minimalism composed by a great of the genre, the North American Terry Riley, some sixty years ago.
The musician, a Californian born in 1935, had been experimenting with recorded loops and group improvisation when, in 1964, he composed In C (in Catalan it would be something like El Do major), one of the first pieces considered minimalist, which gave rise to a whole change in the way of understanding music. The composition is made up of some fifty short movements that are repeated according to the musicians' wishes (hence the piece has no fixed duration) and is intended to be performed by a large group, preferably 35 players, although there is no problem in presenting it with a smaller or larger ensemble. The title refers to the note C, present throughout the composition, in which it acts almost like a metronome.
Conceived at the time of LSD and the most radical experimentation, Riley's composition has become a milestone in 20th-century music, a classic of musical modernity.
Here the distance between the musicians and the way they relate to each other are important. You will feel them creating complex rhythms and spontaneous melodies, all from a single score, performed alternating the passages and using different tones.
The Catalan underground scene, almost in its entirety, is responsible for bringing to the public a composition that is as surprising today as it was on the first day. They are, among others, Edi Pou (za!), Sara Fontan, Adriano Galante (Seward), Roger Aixut and Laia Torrents (cabosanroque), Pascal Comelade, Ramon Faura, Elsa de Alfonso, the trumpet Pablo Volt or the tenor saxophone Tom Chant.
Voice, electric guitar, bass, xylophone, carilon, synthesizers, percussion, clarinet, accordion, violoncello... The list of instruments that sound in this concert is as long as the list of performers, among whom we can find experimental song and independent pop, but also many musicians who have devoted their talent to improvisation.
If you want to know what a piece of experimental music from the last century sounds like, sixty years later, come and hear Terry Riley's In C at L’ Auditori, but first check out the information about the concert on the website.