Hanne Darboven Reinterpreted by EVOL

Opus17aSlimeVariations

From 11 to 15 February 2019 - from 5 to 8:30pm (check programme)
EVOL, Opus17aSlimeVariations, 2011-2019
EVOL, Opus17aSlimeVariations, 2011-2019
Admission

Workshop: free, with prior registration via email at sonido@museoreinasofia.es

Lecture and concert: free, until full capacity is reached

Organized by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
Madrid’s Escuela Municipal de Música
Curatorship
José Luis Espejo

Throughout her life, German artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) produced different compositions with scores stretching across – in much the same way as her installations – large-scale numerical tables on paper. According to Darboven, her “systems are numeric concepts that work according to the laws of progression and/or reduction in the manner of a musical theme with variations”.

The starting point of Opus 17a is a series of music pieces Darboven began in 1984 under the title Wunschkonzert, a kind of calendar where the numbers are replaced by notes. This four-part opus work for cello is also divided into 36 poems comprising 6 pages each, thus creating a 1,008-page score, performed, on numerous occasions, across around 100 minutes of music. In 2007, Robert Black performed the piece for an album released by DIA Art Foundation.

Since 2014, EVOL – Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp – have conceived 13 variations of Darboven’s score, the first of which was performed at the UnSound Festival in New York. On this occasion in the Museo Reina Sofía, EVOL will perform a concert of two of these variations, and will also give a lecture on folds’ capacity to transform reality and conduct a workshop for acoustic bass instruments.

The name EVOL comes from the Catalan word for Sambucus Ebulus, a herbaceous species of elder with a characteristic foetid smell. Under this moniker, Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp make what they call 'computer music for hooligans' or 'rave synthesis'.

Programa

Actividad pasada Monday 11, Tuesday 12 and Wednesday 13 February 2019 – from 5 to 8pm
Workshop
Opus17aSlimeVariation#14 for acoustic bass instruments

Conducted by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (EVOL)
Registration at sonido@museoreinasofia.es

This workshop is organised as a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía Education Department and Madrid’s Escuela Municipal de Música and is aimed at musicians who play acoustic bass instruments, for instance the bass drum, the double bass, the bassoon, the double bassoon, the tuba, the bass flute, the double contrabass flute, the bass sax and the contrabass sax. The workshop’s experimental methodology focuses on producing a new variation of Darboven’s work. 

Actividad pasada Thursday, 14 February 2019 – from 7 to 8pm
Lecture
Folds

Given by EVOL
Free, until full capacity is reached

This lecture is an approach to the idea of folds on multiple levels, frequently jumping between the physical act of folding and other purely metaphorical folds to trace an imaginary network of interconnections between the act of folding and the warping of reality. The fold is one of the simplest and most effective methods of transformation – simply folding a piece of paper allows us to divide it into new segments, alter its stiffness, change its volume, modify the information contained within. To fold means to mutilate, but not solely on a physical level. The Latin word flectere, from which the word fold derives, points to a more metaphorical bending, to the curve, to torsion. Each time we imagine the impossible, we curve and twist possibility. Each time we modify our notion of reality, we are folding inside it.

Actividad pasada Friday, 15 February 2019 – from 7:30 to 8:30pm
Concert
Opus17aSlimeVariation#14 for acoustic bass instruments and Opus17aSlimeVariation#15 for computer

Free, until full capacity is reached

EVOL’s computer reinterpretation of Darboven’s work entails adding different layers to an already complex work by the very nature of its length. Yet on this occasion, one further difficulty is added: retransforming the musical notes from acoustic instruments to EVOL’s computer programming language. What is put forward is a seemingly paradoxical exercise between computer-based performance, supposedly with delay, and interpretations with supposedly live acoustic instruments.