Through the wall departs from a particular situation in order to deconstruct it inwards and outwards. The context situation is the departure point of the piece: a string piano trio and a percussion trio in a concert hall, with their connotations and expectations.

This situation is deconstructed inwards through two basic procedures taken to the extreme: fragmentation and redundancy. An apparently “normal” discourse -derived from the gestural repertoire of the string piano trio literature and several free-jazz solos- is literally spread through the staves, becoming a pointillistic grid with two possible interpretations: in their original shape and in their new “clothes” that are share with other origin’s materials. On the other side, the resource of redundancy contributes to the emergence of the interiority of sounds: time detentions over several instants that extend through several seconds, mechanical repetitions of some gestures…

Together with this “inward deconstruction”, the piece at the same time (and above all) a deconstruction towards the outside through the crossing of the forbidding wall that separates the music from its surrounding world, not being only the “fourth wall” that separates public from stage, but another that would separate what happens inside the concert hall with what is happening outside. The world bursts into the space reserved for the musical contemplation, either implicitly -through field recordings that reinterpret the sounding instrumental “music”- or through a recoding of these recordings of the outside in form of instrumental music.

More info at: http://www.albertobernal.net/through-the-wall

through the wall (trío arbós + neopercusión)

The present piece takes place in a realm in which the duality between state and process looses its sense. The whole work is located in a place in which the perception “doesn’t know” if what it’s hearing is a series of static states or a gradual process. The extreme stretching of the temporality of simple processes places them in a fascinating border in which they cannot be perceived neither as processes nor as states.

More info at: http://www.albertobernal.net/wi-e-der

wi(e)der (extract) | SWR Orchester

The series G8 consists of relectures of the national anthems of the G8 countries. Each piece takes as only departure point and material the corresponding national anthem. The anthem is "read" in slow motion from the beginning to the end through a moving window that repeats small fragments of the original material following the time movement, a kind of "walking loop". This fragments are overlapped over themselves in a texture of several layers that swings between the recognizebility of the original material and the new discourse that emerges from its own saturation. It would be like observing microscopically an object while we run our sight through all its surface.
With clear influences from the realm of visual arts -the "accumulations" of Arman or the iconography of Jasper Johns- this saturation through magnification -of the object, of its temporality- tries to penetrate in its immediate functionality and the principles it represents. The "heroical" and patriotic energy of the military is here imposed over itself, overlapped, saturated... aesthetically neutralized.

More info at: http://www.albertobernal.net/g8

G8 - God Save The Queen

G8 - Il Canto Degli Italiani

G8 - La Marselleise

G8 - Lied Der Deutschen

G8 - Stars And Stripes

Instrumentation of a discourse is literally that: an instrumentation (for piano) of a discourse, the one George W. Bush pronounced the 14th September 2001 in the Grund Zero. At the same time, instrumentation of a discourse implies also that which, years later (2005), this discourse is as well, maybe reinforced by the characteristic staging of an instrument managed through words and patriotic symbols, maybe also reflecting a certain utopia in the way in which the reaction or non-reaction of the instrument is taken into the extreme in the second part of the piece, a kind of reverse of the first one.

More info at: http://www.albertobernal.net/instrumentation

instrumentation of a discourse (midi)

piece for recorder, saxophone, guitar accordion and live electronic

More info at: http://www.albertobernal.net/27-scenes

27 scenes for 4 spectators

Music, in traditional sense, only happens through a selective perception, that filters every non-musical event and push it to the outside of the impenetrable microcosmos.

“Musik” uses the non-selectivity of the perception of a computer program, in order to recode the non-musical events in form of music: in the white and black keys of a piano. In addition to the musical content of an old vinyl recording of Chopin’s nocturne Op. 15/2 of Chopin -Claudio Arrau at the piano-, their non-musical d (mechanical) disturbances are sounded through the piano as well, and coexist with the music at the same level:
– the rotation tempo of the vinyl record -hearable through the scratches of its surface- makes a kind of rhythmical counterpoint to the original tempo of the nocturne
– the articulation created by the dust of the vinyl merges with Arrau’s
– the human factor of the interpretation materializes itself in an objective way
– the a priori intact harmony of Chopin is drastically tinged by the sound spectrum of the disturbance (mechanical and electrical noise) and by the wear of the vinyl caused by time.

More info at: http://www.albertobernal.net/musik
More info at: 

"musik"

  The present piece belongs to a series of sound studies on the word NO.
This second piece of the series takes as only material a one-second extract recorded in a demonstration in Madrid in the date and instant indicated by the subtitle. The piece is a time amplification in 4 minutes of the original recorded second, in which thousands of people shout the work "NO". 

More info at: http://www.albertobernal.net/no-studies-2

NO studies #2. Madrid, 2011/5/20 23h44m43s

Although in other art fields is rather usual the existence of approaches whose main departure point lays in the concrete, the quotidian, the social… in the real, the music field seems to be almost always pushed to the expression of the so called inner world, at the expense of this other world of the outside. This deliberated building of contention walls that separate -or even more: negate: the different outside worlds, seems to have become one of the main pillars of the contemporary society; without them, this world -our world, the inner world- seems to stop working. The present piece stages the breakdown of that wall, of the border, the contention, the inner consonance.
The departure material, the “Land of hope and glory” (Elgar) is repeated insistently in short fragments and multiple layers, building a weave which swings between the original material and the new discourse that emerges from its own saturation. A quasi evocative repetitivism that bursts the reality of the inner world, allowing in this way the irruption of the outside material: the audio recorded by a webcam in Gaza the 11th January 2009 (one of the worst days of the Gaza War of the so called Operation Cast Lead), in itself and through its instrumentation in the orchestra.
The title comes from the book poem by Peter Handke “the inner world of the outer world of the inner world”, with identical wandering but inverse way: from the outside to the inside and again to the outside.

More info at: http://www.albertobernal.net/outer-world

the outer world of the inner world of the outer world (antares ensemble)

The configuration of the performance space itself, with its characteristic opening towards the outside, constitutes the departure point of the piece. It is not usual to have the opportunity of hearing the so called “serious music” in half-opened places; they place a first obstacle for the conservation of the musical inner world, as idyllic as unreal, so closed towards the outside, and being continuously polluted by the outside sounds.

The permeability between inside and outside is the raw material of the present piece; musical composition as a search and deconstruction of the border between the inner and the outer; the “world” is heard in a realm of “musical” attention, music is send back to its original context.

The work is thus a found object in itself. The place, the situation; the inner and the outer; the closed and the opened; the questioning of a praxis that leaves the outside outside; the instrumental sound and the real sound; a window from the inside to the outside, or from the outside to the inside.

In this place full of objectes trouvés, of ready mades, the present piece is the place; the place is the object trouvé.

More info at: http://www.albertobernal.net/open-cloisters

claustro abierto [open cloisters] (Julián Elvira, flute)

Composer and sound artist of classical formation and several influences, with works framed near the turning point between traditional concert situations and other disciplines like installation, performance of videoart. His work is, above all, a search and deconstruction of borders: between the aesthetic and sociopolitical realms, or between the different conventional perceptual fields (sound, image, word, quotidian perception). www.albertobernal.net 

alberto bernal

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