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the calm of a medieval cloister at dusk on a July day, with the sound of running water, a breeze that is a caress, and the discreet singing of birds, enjoying the coolest hours, is the idyllic setting -it seems extracted from The Great Beauty- offered by the concert series Vespres Musicals al Monestir de Pedralbes. Impossible not to be carried away by the tranquility and open oneself to the excellently assembled pieces in this event, titled "Sounds in Space". A concert eminently dedicated to contemporary creators, from the renowned Morton Feldman and Arvo Pärt to others closer -even coetaneous- like Josep Maria Guix, guest composer of the current season at the Palau de la Música, or the young Joan Magrané. Without forgetting, of course, the rara avis -inspired and inspiring creator- that was Giacinto Scelsi. Even if the respective contexts are not always comparable, the interests and understanding of musical creation are perfectly compatible in them. The chosen works coincide in illustrating a certain dialectic between the repetition of cells, through rhythms and tones that suggest a pre-established harmony -the invisible order of reality that is audible, and which the Pythagorean thinkers already conceived- with a taste for improvisation; the openness to the unexpected, no less constitutive of reality -as that other pre-Socratic, enigmatic and oracular, named Heraclitus, knew. A success to start with La màquina celeste by Joan Magrané, a piece for vibraphone brilliantly performed by Miquel Vich. It marked the entry into the hard core of an apparently intangible question. Contemplative music, indeed, but also dynamic, perpetuating itself as forming concentric waves of diversely increasing diameter. Subtle or explicit reverberations, rhythmic and eventually breaking the expected progression. A work, Magrané's, which -as Vich explained- is inspired by the mystical tradition. It is the first, but not the only piece to do so, in the course of the evening. The sonic manifestation of the invisible, the embodiment of an ineffable reality with oriental reminiscences already seems to underpin Hyxos, composed by Giacinto Scelsi in 1955. To the percussion is added a wind instrument like the flute, which exemplarily declaims the dialectic between emptiness and fullness. The Italian composer, who could spend hours concentrated on a single note and who even declared himself a "fanatic of silence", promotes the coexistence of this free flow of air, an invisible element that makes sound possible, with the metallic object struck with greater or lesser subtlety. The most material, and potentially strident, can be evocative and even poetic; and also the absence of sound, which enables that perforated wood, to become an accomplice of a sense yet to be determined, with which the listener feels encouraged to converge. And we don't just think of people: in the monastery cloister, the birds contribute sonorities, topped by the intrusion of the bell. A doubling work of human artifice, which reconnects with nature. All elements, concerted.After a brief pause, to reorganize the instruments on stage (prepared on one of the four sides of the cloister's arcaded gallery), a piece for solo piano by Josep Maria Guix, On reflection, composed in memory of Mompou, was performed. As it could not be otherwise, silence makes an appearance at various moments, the notes that prepare it being no less fundamental: they remain in the air or question each other with an intentional sense of spontaneity -the aforementioned "sounds of space" abound in the allusive character- in the fantastic version by pianist Jordi Masó. Then came the most emotional moment of the evening. With the sun about to disappear and a transmuted luminosity, vibrant in the sky of a mirror-blue color, Arvo Pärt's piece Spiegel im Spiegel for piano and cello diluted the physical notion of time, based on a beautiful sequence of specular games. Minimalist reflections of maximum emotional depth, pointing directly to the inability of language to determine and fix what is, insofar as it happens (to us). Forty years have passed since its composition, the exact age -in barely two months- of the person writing these lines. Coincidences that mean nothing, it is obvious, but following the depth of the pieces performed -which, certainly, give much to think about- it is difficult not to become transcendent... and let oneself be affected by that unequivocal lyricism, which imposes metaphysical questions on one. Heideggerian questions about being and nothingness, or about a possible first causality, like the one -without going any further- my daughter asked me when she was about to turn four: "Dad, where was I before I was born?".
The transmigration of souls -a belief of the Pythagoreans, known as metempsychosis- would be a possible answer. Difficult, however, to affirm it with rotundity, no matter how much a mentality as ductile and perceptive as that of a child would find it perfectly plausible. Thinking in music -already in physical terms- the propagation of sound through waves also possesses something essentially mysterious, which reveals the other side of audition, the unmovable reality of silence. Morton Feldman in his work Crippled Symmetry (Region 1) arranges the dialogue between the three instrumentalists based on individual scores; they must unfold it in common from mutual listening, an interaction that creates ex novo the piece. The degree of attention to one's own and others' sonority is enchanting, that magnetism of nature propagates, which necessarily determines -but, as if improvising- what cannot not-be. Birds accompany us from beginning to end in the cloister of the Pedralbes Monastery, until night, in a vital becoming only interrupted by the solemn ringing of bells, the punctual and decisive percussion with which man tries to impose himself on the inscrutable order of physis, to set the rhythm of life, and in the best of cases to create beauty. But will we have to remember Rilke's captivatingly sinister sentence, in the first verses of the Duino Elegies? ["For beauty is nothing but the beginning / of terror that we are still just able to bear / and why we admire it so is because it serenely / disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible" (translation by Jenaron Talens, ed. Hiperión)].
Text originally appeared in Revista Musical Catalana
Featured images: 1. Cloister of the Pedralbes monastery. Photo by Maria Rosa Ferre 2. Photo by Jacobo Zabalo