© Fabiola Llanos
Pianist Ignasi Cambra.

Closing our eyes is a reflex action that we find ourselves doing when we hear good music because, unconsciously, we want to enhance our sense of hearing. Ignasi Cambra’s blindness has brought him closer to the keys and has given him a temperamental character that has been seen in venues throughout Catalonia, Spain, Russia, Japan and the United States, where he trained seven years ago.

He began his career alongside Maria Lluïsa Alegre, at the Escola de Música de Barcelona. Later he took classes with Albert Attenelle and when he was seventeen and eighteen he went to Indiana to do a summer course and was offered a place at the Jacobs School of Music, Bloomington University, where he studied for a Bachelor’s degree in piano and, at the same time, studied Business Administration at the Kelly School.

He then spent two years studying under the tutelage of Alexander Toradze in South Bend, a programme for just six students that introduced him to Valery Gergiev. And from the cold and solitude of South Bend, where he would often see the Amish carts passing by, he travelled to the cultural epicentre of the United States to enrol in what is considered to be the best music school in the world, the Julliard School of performing arts in New York, where he is currently studying for a Master’s degree.

Cambra believes he has now reached a very interesting point in his career, in which he is presented with an increasing number of professional challenges that require rapid changes in repertoire. Recently he has been in residence at La Pedrera and has performed at the Auditori with Valery Gergiev; and, he says, he is getting used to the fast pace. This is the only handicap of his blindness, as he only has two possible ways of studying, either using Braille or following one of the recordings that are often provided for him by his teacher Maria Lluïsa Alegre, or another of his colleagues. Braille music is slow to read, as it entails a very linear way of writing that makes full vertical perception difficult and makes it hard to interpret the movement of harmonies.

Although he used to take part in competitions when he was younger, Cambra is critical of the competitions that, recently, and due to the Asian influence, have introduced perfection into the judging criteria. Cambra believes there are two types of pianist, those that prioritise tidiness, such as Evgeny Kissin, and those that go for maximum expressiveness, such as Giorgy Sokolov. He includes himself in the second category.

© Fabiola Llanos
Mezzosoprano Marta Rodrigo.

With her mezzosoprano voice, Marta Rodrigo dedicates her life to creating music with historical criteria, taking into account the conditions in which it was performed at the time it was composed. Therefore, the instruments are either from the period or are rep­licas and she thinks about the sound qualities of the historical moment. Rodrigo is a singer who studied in Catalonia, Belgium and Germany and is half of a duo, together with the lute player Andreas Martin.

They recently released an album featuring the work of Ferran Sor, from the Early Romantic period, although their comfort zone is early Renaissance and Baroque music. On Amor en tiempos de guerra. The Spanish Romantic Song, Martin, who specialises in hand plucked string instruments, has used a replica of a Romantic guitar, model by René Lacotte, a copy of Ferran Sor, which, if the sound is softened, perhaps makes it sweeter as the strings are made from gut rather than metal. The album is the result of two years of concerts in Germany, Wales, Canada and Italy, which is why the result is so well rounded.

Rodrigo began his international career as a soloist with the religious polyphonic Currende Consort Chapel, and sang in Belgium, Holland and Es­tonia. In 2007, he first collaborated with the Collegium Vocale Gent (Flanders) and since then has been a regular member of Bart Vandewege’s La Hispanoflamenca, a Flemish–Spanish group dedicated to the religious polyphony of Charles V. He is also a member of Musica Reservata de Barcelona, a group dedicated exclusively to performing 16th-century religious polyphonic music.

Rodrigo has also dabbled in opera and contemporary music. As he points out, many early music artists play contemporary music at some point because, in early music, the voice is very naked, often a cappella, it involves a lot of polyphony, without vibrato, and therefore is requires extremely precise tuning. It is for this reason that he thinks singers of this type of music are sought to perform contemporary music, because you need to have a really good ear for the intervals found in the new 20th-century aesthetics, in which tonality has been exhausted.

His next projects take him eastwards, where he is keen to discover new audiences and new ways to make music.

© Fabiola Llanos
Composer or ‘sound artist’ Joan Bagés.

Joan Bagés calls himself a sound artist, a concept that, he believes, more fully reflects the task of contemporary music creators, as he understands his work to be a cross-cutting, interdisciplinary project, on a par with the concept of a visual artist and far from the work of the composer who practised an artisan craft.

Bagés, who studied in Barcelona and Paris and whose music has been heard in various corners of Europe and America, makes sound and silence interact with the visual and techno­logical revolution as a means of expanding the range of composition tools. His music is considered to be holophonic, a concept that aims to embody a global texture and includes performance tools that work together to create a series of relationships, encompassing visual and plastic arts, installations, dance, video, electro-acoustic and acoustic music, with or without microphones. Lately he has become interested in cultivating a cutting-edge sound phenomenon, acousmatic music, a refined version of electro-acoustic music in which the performance element turns the artist into a director who, from his sound desk, controls the dynamics of the various, carefully arranged speakers.

To the extent that we are unable to control our hearing in the way we can control our vision by closing our eyes, the sensations we perceive in this music often demand respect because we cannot identify their source. It is for this reason that Bagés believes the great sound revolution of recent decades has had an impact on the way we listen. In acousmatics, the creator works with a juxtaposition of elements so that we are constantly being surprised by the sounds and any expectations we may have about what we’re going to hear next can be thwarted, as the rules have dissolved, leaving room for multiple textural and musical possibilities and meta-musical morphologies that leave the listener feeling a certain degree of discomfort.

Electro-acoustic music represents a compositional revolution that enables the artist to instantly hear the results of their work and to interact with it, without having to pass through the sieve of time it takes for an instrumentalist to illustrate it. So the end result is already known at the moment of creation because it creates a feedback between action and perception. A process that involves all the elements of fast culture – the constant change in textures alludes to zapping, for example – and, beyond this, the loss of auditory references enables us to pick out the pulse of a global ideological crisis.