Sound and Music at MACBA

The Christian Marclay. Compositions exhibition examined Marclay’s work through his engagement with composition, understood as the ordering of sounds in time and space, but also as visual composition. Each piece shown will reveal the ways in which Marclay approaches the creation of a composition, and how this relates to other aspects of his work such as his deployment of the techniques of appropriation and montage, as well as his engagement in performance and his tendency towards inviting participation and collaboration.

The exhibition was interpreted by different musicians and artists. The British experimental musician Steve Beresford said that ‘when we are playing but also looking at pictures or printed words or mutated music notation, perhaps we engage bits of our brains usually not involved in playing music… Christian’s scores get us playing things we would never have thought of.’ 

Folklore at the end of the month was an invitation to explore the power of our shared oral memory together through direct messages that encourage encounters, coming together and merriment. This set of proposals addressed (or went beyond) the different possibilities of popular culture and folklore with care and lucidity. These were ternary rhythms to get lost in and see oneself, but above all to be enjoyed.

The participants were Xabel Ferreiro with the Ayalga project, Ana and Corazón with Ajuar, Oihana Altube and Javier Vaquero Ollero with Rojo pandereta, Sole Parody with Folclor del Porvenir. Le Parody and finally Marta Torrella and Helena Ros with the Tarta Relena project. 

The fourth episode of VARIATIONS provides an overview as the art music tradition of collage music is joined by the popular culture tradition of hip hop, which would establish many of the same aesthetics and practices solidly in the mainstream. Featured composers include Grandmaster Flash, the Latin Rascals, David Byrne & Brian Eno & Negativland.

In its third edition, Lorem Ipsum persisted in delving into the cracks and folds of both the musical and the ludic, intentionally articulated from the geo- and biopolitics of bodies and gestures. Where do we speak from? Who speaks? Perhaps we moved away from the kind strangeness with which we operated on previous occasions, to articulate it politically: listening to new female voices, embracing otherness, (con)fusing sensibilities, temporalities and geographies... From the perspective of what is (almost or very) danceable.

PROBES #26 looks at the pioneers who drew the soundscape of the world into the realm of music and, in so doing, eased the way for the emancipation - or aestheticisation - of noise, which led to the inclusion of everything from helicopters to roofing felt, ice to polystyrene, scrap-metal to fax machines in (non-electronic) music compositions and performances.

TUTU. The feet and brain; Folklore at the end of the month​​​​​​​; LOREM IPSUM; Afro-futurist Saturday... Music activities and concerts that you can check out on our Flickr profile!

Quaderns d'àudio (Audio Notebooks) is a collection based on texts relating to RWM programming. The objective of these publications is to complement the lines of work developed by the radio through the critical edition of hard-to-find works that are important for understanding and delving into sound art.

PROBES #25 continues to trace the importation of non-instruments into compositions and performances as, in their search for new sonorities, early jazz and blues musicians, contemporary composers, film composers, rock groups, sound artists and improvisers hit the toyshop and the hardware store.

One discovery that deeply marked the career of composer Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny took place before a lithograph by Joan Miró. After careful contemplation of the work,* Mestres Quadreny was surprised to see that what at first appeared as splashes of paint randomly thrown on the paper were in fact the result of a meticulous reconstruction drawn by Miró.

For Mestres Quadreny Miró’s combination of chance and intervention formed the basis of a meticulous creative system where randomness and structure produce an art that is innovative, polyhedral and cutting edge, nourished by both humanistic and scientific sources.

In this video, Mestres Quadreny talks about his theoretical and artistic references and guides us through his personal cosmic vision along the processes of composition and musical reception.

‘People call it noise – but he calls it music'; that was how the Chicago Daily News described the work of the young composer John Cage in a review published in 1942. That noise, made using wooden sticks, water containers, tin cans, iron pipes, whistles and other percussion objects, soon gave way to silence, culminating in the famous score entitled 4'33'' (1952). This catalogue demonstrates Cage's impact on developments in all the artistic spheres of his time.

In his artistic practice, Chris Cutler analyses the role of the written and biological memory and reclaims improvised music as a privileged language for its somatic connection to the interpreter and its direct relation to real time. In the same way, he argues that sound recordings are artefacts from the past by introducing study cases of works that could be situated ‘outside time’.

The exhibition explored the possibilities of musical notation, loosely understood as a means for musical and visual transmission, and brought together historical and contemporary scores as well as artistic creations not strictly from the field of music. Scores became a field of action, sound became artistic material, the boundaries between art, music and life blurred, and the powers of composers, performers and audiences merged.