Parroting premieres. Lá nas Árvores

Par­rot­ing pre­miered this week­end, in ​“Lá nas Árvores”, a week­end-long music fes­ti­val in Évo­ra — the dis­trict cap­i­tal of my home­town, where I don’t think I had ever been performed.

“Lá nas Árvores” was the first pub­lic event of ​“Évora_​27”, Euro­pean Cap­i­tal of Cul­ture. It was pro­duced by dear friends Pro­jec­to DME, under the artis­tic direc­tion of the bril­liant Ana Telles. The cycle will reoc­cur through­out the whole project, and I’m delight­ed to learn that con­tem­po­rary and elec­troa­coustic music will fea­ture so promi­nent­ly in this kind of plat­form, and par­tic­u­lar­ly in this kind of social milieu.

The fes­ti­val put togeth­er a quadro­phon­ic set­up in the pub­lic park’s gaze­bo. Being a pub­lic space, it was hard­ly acous­mat­ic in a strict sense, but I’m sure it was many vis­i­tors’ first expe­ri­ence of acous­mat­ic lis­ten­ing — for its sud­dent erup­tion into the pub­lic sphere, with such a large con­tact sur­face with a dif­fer­ent pub­lic, if for no oth­er reason.

In the pro­gram notes for the piece, I men­tion the ​“non-spaces” of artis­tic pro­duc­tion: the con­cert hall, the muse­um gallery, what have you. This was very much not that (rhetor­i­cal hyper­bole aside): this was a noisy pub­lic park, inhab­it­ed with its own peo­ple and fowl — just like the sound­scape. With the piece’s vol­ume floor matched to the ambi­ent noise, the piece was basi­cal­ly trans­par­ent: nev­erend­ing, ema­nat­ing from beyond the loud­speak­ers, with seem­ing­ly unlim­it­ed spa­tial res­o­lu­tion. We know that every record­ing bears wit­ness to the con­di­tions of its pro­duc­tion, and of elec­troa­coustic music’s capa­bil­i­ties in evok­ing and engen­der­ing fan­tas­ti­cal sen­sa­tions of space, but tac­ti­cal­ly abdi­cat­ing that abil­i­ty (a spa­tial jiu jit­su, if you will) made the piece all the more poignant — espe­cial­ly when you remem­ber it is large­ly about acoustic ecology. 

I’d like to con­grat­u­late the team for a suc­ces­ful pro­duc­tion. Look­ing for­ward to the next cycle!