Back Polonio and Berenguer bring us their recent publications in World Edition

Polonio and Berenguer bring us their recent publications in World Edition

Friday 18 November, 19:30h. Aranyó Hall, UPF Poblenou Campus. Free admission

19.10.2022

 

The publishing house María de Alvear World Edition has just published the book Eduardo Polonio - Del serialismo al multimedia, a tribute to this composer for his eightieth birthday and his nearly sixty years of compositional work. Eduardo Polonio is one of the pioneers of electroacoustic music in Spain. The book, beautifully edited and profusely illustrated, shows in its 196 pages a panoramic view of his work, from the first instrumental works of the sixties, in conventional or non-conventional notation, through the chapter on composition processes, installations and multimedia actions, electroacoustic operas, discography, as well as his activities as a cultural manager. The text is bilingual (Spanish and English).

 

video © Guido Schiefer

 

The same publisher also published, not long ago, Directional or not, el pensamiento modifica la materia sobre la que se asienta, a double CD by Josep Manuel Berenguer that explores, in the words of the composer, "the frontiers between continuity and discontinuity, the decipherable and the unspeakable, the numerable and the non-numerable; between what can be completely described by an algorithm and what cannot; between precise writings and those that only manage to be approximations to some phenomenon".

Taking advantage of this situation, on 18 November 2022 we will welcome these two authors - strongly linked to different periods in the life of Phonos - for the presentation of their respective works in Barcelona. In this evening, we will talk with the artists and other invited personalities, and we will have the opportunity to listen to some of their works in our multichannel audio system.

 

video © Nathalie Carton-Lou

 


Eduardo Polonio was born in Madrid in 1941. He left his studies as a Telecommunications Engineer to enter the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid, where he studied Piano, Harmony, Counterpoint and Composition. In 1968 he obtained the title of Professor of Composition. Between 1966 and 1970 he attended the Summer Courses in Darmstadt, where he studied instrumentation with Gunther Becker. In 1969 he received a grant from the Juan March Foundation for a stage at the Institute of Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music of the University of Ghent. The following year one of his first electroacoustic works (Rabelaisiennes, for prepared guitar, tape and filters) was selected for the Gaudeamus Festival Competition. As a composer and performer he is a member of the group KOAN in its first stage (1967-70). From l969 he worked at the ALEA Laboratory in Madrid and between 1970 and 1972 he was a member of the group ALEA MÚSICA ELECTRÓNICA LIBRE, the first Spanish live electroacoustic music group. In 1976 he moved to Barcelona and joined the PHONOS Laboratory in that city. In 1983 he founded, with Rafael Santamaría, OBERT-ART ACTUAL, which in 1983, 84 and 85 organised the Sis Dies d'Art Actual festival in Barcelona, dedicated to multimedia. In 1985, together with Gabriel Brncic and Claudio Zulian, he created MULTIMÚSICA, a group specialising in live electro-acoustic music.

Since 1969 his work has been characterised by the almost total abandonment of traditional instruments and the use of electroacoustic media. He often performs his own works in concerts in which he mixes tape recordings, synthesizers and real-time processors and includes videos and other elements made in collaboration with visual artists. The recordings of his works are distributed among more than 50 recordings. Recently La mà de Guido, on its label Ars Harmonica, has released its anthological edition 1969-2014 in two DVDs that include 48 works spanning a period of 45 years and, with the support of the Fundación SGAE, the DVD 1 + 1 = 1 Música Imaginada, which includes five of his works in collaboration with the artist Santiago Torralba.

Josep Manuel Berenguer is coordinator and professor of Psychoacoustics and Experimental Music on the Master's Degree in Sound Art at the UB and director of the Orquestra del Caos. Inter-media artist, founder of Côclea with Clara Garí - where for more than a decade he directed the Música13 Festival - and also of the Orquestra del Caos, collaborator of the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges (France), he was the designer and first head of the sound and music laboratory of the CIEJ of the Fundació la Caixa de Pensions, as well as professor of Electroacoustic Music at the Conservatoire de Bourges. Former President of the Electroacoustic Music Association of Spain, he is currently Honorary President of the International Conference of Electroacoustic Music of the CIM/UNESCO, President of Quantum Art Lab, Vice-President of the Fundació d'Artistes Visuals de Catalunya, member of the Académie Internationale de Musique Electroacoustique/Bourges, of the Academy of the National Music Council of the CIM/UNESCO and of the Board of Trustees of the Phonos Foundation.

In recent years, his work has been oriented towards installation and, despite his doubts about the appropriateness of these terms, towards real time and interactivity. The themes developed include questions related to the philosophy and history of science, the limits of language, ethics, life and artificial intelligence, robotics, information metabolism, as well as the very limits of human understanding and perception of the world. His works include installations and monographic concerts such as Silenci, Tránsfer, Mega kai Mikron, On nothing, Lambda/itter, with flautist Jane Rigler, Expanded Piano, with pianist Agustí Fernández, Sonidos en Causa. Expanded Voice and Desde Dentro are works based on texts from Walter Benjamin's Book of Passages, which were slightly adapted to be spoken and transformed electronically. Luci, who explores complex behaviours emerging from sums of simple elements, won the ARCO-Beep Electronic Art Prize in February 2008. Her installation @bienenVolk receives information from the behaviour of bees in a hive installed in the old Zoology Museum in Barcelona and sends it to a sound space delimited by 16 loudspeakers anywhere in the world. It was presented at the Akademie der Künste - Berlin on 30 September 2017 with a live concert entitled Bienen. Makina 7, premiered in October 2019, is one of his latest works where the musical gesture directly influences the behaviour of sounds in an electro-acoustic cut composition.

Supported by:


Multimedia

Profiles of the protagonists:

Polonio in Maria de Alvear World Edition
Berenguer in Maria de Alvear World Edition
Eduardo Polonio's website
Josep Manuel Berenguer's website
World Edition in Bandcamp

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