A bold program to explore the boundaries between music and language

El Colón Contemporáneo closed its cycle with a bold programme Which included three experimental pieces, each exploring in its own way the boundaries between music and language.

in Essay on the origin of languagesRousseau imagines an enthronement period in which music and language were not yet separate. Before taxonomic reason, humans spoke song: Communication was a flow of accents, inflections, tremors, and modulations in which emotion and meaning were confused.

For Rousseau, sound—its vibration, its breathing, its color—is older than the word. Language is born from song. Rational expression is a delayed separation. This conceptual horizon, which suggests an emotional and physical lineage to the music, becomes a fruitful key to reading the program of this concert.

Schubert’s dances that open the concert serve as Rousseau’s first anchor: miniatures arising from an almost domestic bodily gesture, in which the piano seems to remember the movement that precedes the word. In this Deutsche Tanz and ExcerptsThe melody appears as a luminous chatter, a pre-linguistic song that does not yet seek to say anything, only to echo.

The first part of the program is set with alternating piano miniatures – intelligently and sensitively selected by the formidable pianist. Jonas Ahonen– And selected from the great cycle Voices and pianoWhich was started by Peter Ablinger in 1998 and reached its peak The piece was written this year, shortly before his death, and premiered: The shamanic songs of Lula Kibja, one of the last survivors of the Silkna tribe (the indigenous people who inhabited the large island of Tierra del Fuego, also known as the Onas).

The cycle’s pieces do not suggest a separation between the spoken voice and the instrumental voice: the piano “translates” the note. Brecht, Eisler, Pasolini, Cage and Feldman, Kipja also Carmen Balero. What is essential is not the content of speech, but its vocal material: the rhythm, the involuntary melodic curves of speech, its breathing. Uplinger returns to the instrument that Rousseau posited in The Origin of Language: speech which is music because of its vibrating and emotional quality.

Romantic miniatures are then heard under Uplinger’s projection: music appears as language—its inflections, articulations, and rhythms become clear—and language as music. This effect was strong and effective. Ahonen’s remarkable qualities as a performer made the piano “talk”.

the Albums and Romanzen Schumann’s works, following Bertolt Brecht, seemed like fragments of an inner discourse, scenes in which the piano speaks in a register between the confessional and the visionary. in Gesang der FrohiThe music appears as an awakening sound, now more lyrical, in resonance with the tones so typical of the Italian in Pasolini’s voice.

The broken English of the German composer Hans Eisler Preceded by Webern’s Extreme Language: Part II of Variations op. 27 It turns every gesture into a syllable, and every note into a sound unit laden with density. Webern searches for the atom of music, the point where sound and meaning remain inseparable. In this condensation, the music returns to its original sound: concise, precise, vibrant.

The first part ended with Second flagellum (trunk) to Raphael Langouillat, a local premiere, which takes the relationship between body and voice to the extreme. The composer starts from The flogging of Christ Caravaggio and the chiaroscuro technique. Langouillat works on the border between the musical and the visual: to what extent is music a visual element and how much is the visual a musical element?

The piece is a fast, repetitive sequence of notes. Without lyrical melodies or beautiful harmonies, the piano becomes pure rhythm. The room was dark, with a single beam of light on the pianist, whose face was projected on the screen at the back of the stage. Here the piano is a physical being that breathes, suffers, exhausts itself. If for Rousseau language is born of emotional excess, Langouillat imagines the opposite: Music is created when the body is about to stop speaking.

The second part opened with Vocals and piano: Alvin Lussier It culminates in symbolism I’m sitting in a roomIt is a work that reshapes the relationship between sound, space and resonance. Sound – flawless performance Maricel Alvarez– It is recorded and re-recorded until the words dissolve into pure acoustics, in the natural frequency of the room. What remains is not language, but vibration: a return to point zero, where speech returns to a whisper and the human being becomes once again a resonance in space.

However, in a room as spacious as the Cologne Room, the work lost part of its power: the resonance took some time to define, the sonic phenomenon became more diffuse and less intimate, and the piece—designed for small, almost domestic spaces—became large in scale. The necessary technological intervention has partly contradicted his original hypothesis.

Audio and visual design Sebastian Feriaand lighting Ariel Condeprovided an immersive dimension that complemented the program’s experimental gesture.

Contemporary Columbus Cycle

program: voices and piano, Peter Ablinger; Second flagellum (trunk)Rafael Languelat; I’m sitting in a roomAlvin Lussier Interpreters: Jonas Ahonen, piano; Maricel Alvarez, artist; Sebastian Feria, sound and audio-visual design job: Tuesday 2 December place: Kowloon Theater