A scenic approach to the musical gesture. Apparently natural and organic movement that has to be strongly mechanized. That thing that we call technique. How do we involve with it? Once I was a pianist and sometimes I still am. Other times, not any more. The piano is not on stage but anyway, it echoes loudly. What is sound if not gesture? How do I relate sound to body? Sound as a consequence of the embodied impulse. Without a body, a movement, a gesture, the sound doesn’t exist. It tries to be.

MANUAL (Hands as Instruments) talks about a personal journey and is the result of an investigation about what it means to be a musician through the embodiment of the instrument. My own meaning reflected onto the hands that collide with the polysemic of the collective.

Instruments and technology create our relationship with technique and the hands appear to be the meeting point of all the possible lines. Hands are medium, communication, representation of the senses, memory, instrument, tool, creation, construction and destruction. They are also feelings, touch, mechanization, expression, organicity, (anti)naturalness. If we eliminate all the objects, machines and technologies that have taken part in the process of becoming a musician, the hands appear to be a constant used as a relational interface between the objects and myself as a pianist. Beyond the aural experience, hands have imprinted all kind of sensorial meanings. This way, erasing the object that defines me a priori as a pianist (the piano), I reveal a new way of being a musician. Can a pianist be without a piano? How do I interact with the technologies and mediums that live in it through the sound experience? How does the learned and taught technique relate to the new created one through the conceptual, the virtuality and the gesture?.

Programme

Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca (1976) Music from Somewhere (2017) for pianist’s hands, lights and tape [10’]

Haize Lizarazu (1988) E&N&D (2019) for performer [10’]

Manuel Badás & Haize Lizarazu DRIN (2019) hands choreography with tape [10’]

Michael Beil (1963) Key Jane (2017) for a pianist without piano with live video and tape [12’]

Bio

HAIZE LIZARAZU. Pianist, performer and improviser focused on contemporary and experimental music. After studying in Vitoria, Barcelona (Esmuc) and Madrid she moves to Basel (Switzerland) - Hochschule für Musik- where she gets her Master SP in Contemporary Music and takes lessons of improvisation with Fred Frith. Later she moves back to Barcelona, where she lives now, and completes the Master in Sound Art at the University of Barcelona. She is currently a PhD student in the UdG.

in collaboration with:

and kind support from: