Alberto Bernal – 300kg of music
For performer, 2 percussion players + car; with at least 100kg of printed music (2016)
Premiere: 16th July 2016 @ Festival Sirga (Amposta, Spain)
Duration: 25 min
300kg of music
This piece articulates a discourse in between the realms of music and performance. Weight (load) and tradition dragging are the main ideas of the piece.The car is converted into a huge percussion instrument, housing several instruments distributed inside and providing also its own sounds. While this instrument is played, a performer (the composer in the premiere) will gradually fill the inside of the car with hundreds of scores of the whole music history; they will add increasing music layers through the attached loudspeakers and also their own weight, until the vibration of the instruments and the speakers get completely saturated. This silence through saturation finishes the first part of the piece.
During the second part, the performer should try to pull and drag the loaded car (ca. 300kg, 1000 years of musical tradition). The musical weight of the tradition should thus become a physical weight; the musical discourse of the first part of the piece turns here into a performative discourse, in which the composer will try to deal with his own tradition.
