Josep Sanz: IRR_STUDY#2

Caesuras or changes of direction in a composer’s artistic life can, as with Zad Moultaka, lead to surprising results. Josep Sanz recently decided to wipe the slate clean. He posed the fundamental question as to the sense and purpose of art and defined his premises for an art music: it had to be irregular, irrational and irreverent. Thus he began his series IRRStudies.
The core of the first work, for two pianists singing and playing at different, manically fast tempi with keyboard and percussion, was the irrational aspect of the tempo variations, which essentially made the piece unplayable. This phenomenon interested him, and he took it as the starting point for IRR_Study#2, which has now been composed for Mediterranean Voices. This time, however, he did not confront the singers with the problem of having to perform something unsingable. He placed them in the passive position of mere suppliers of material, pushing the virtuosic entanglements further in his own studio. First he had the singers record the basic elements of the piece, all manner of musical gestures and interjections, both in audio and on video, and then he processed them in the studio to create a hypervirtuosic ‘irr’-filled work that could only be reproduced medially.
The image of the solitary artist has been a realistic one in Spain since the collapse of the economic system, and thus also arts funding–all the more so for a Catalan who distances himself consciously and resolutely from the motherland of Spain. Sanz banishes the real performers to video screens, thus achieving independence from non-existent concert organizers. He can put on his work, an installative performance that nonetheless locates itself very much in live concert music, at any time and with the lowest budgets.
The score for the first part of the work’s genesis consisted of five similarly-structured solo parts for the singers–short fragments of a virtual piece of music whose character Sanz himself did not yet know, as the actual com-position of sounds and motifs still lay ahead. The open-endedness of his study was important to Sanz: »If I already have a clear idea of what I want to write, if know every step of the process and know how it will sound at the end, composing is uninteresting for me. For me the journey is more important than the final result.«
The expressive markings for the singers point to a theatrical intention: »with fury«, »with energy but not angry«, »observing a beautiful landscape«, »humorous, funny«, »cold, stoical«, »with internal violence«, »unquiet, nervous«, »yelling like a vegetable seller«, »religious«, »explaining something important«, »angry«, »invoking, peaceful«, »lament«, »disgusting«.
One can tell: the Mediterranean, with its temperaments, sensibilities and clichés was the force behind the pool of ideas for the later piece, for which the composer also invented a form of Mediterranean Esperanto »with the intention of somehow achieving the phonetic qualities of the Mediterranean languages.«
The final montage gave IRR_Study#2 a dramaturgically convincing, almost narrative form. Layered loops from various motivic constellations lead to charges and discharges of energy, and there are escalations, concentrations, a stretto and a form of coda. And yet peculiar discrepancies arise, most of all the incoherence of visual and acoustic dynamics, a restlessness that is caused by the zapping images, but is often without sonic results, as the sounds of the individual motifs flow into one another. By cutting off the attack and release of each note, the vocal sounds take on an almost electronic quality–yet retain a theatrical gesturality. And although the singers act in complete isolation and independence from one another, one senses their chamber music-like cohesion, a non-prearranged yet shared notion of sound and dramatic gesture.
The composer consciously takes these discrepancies on board, and they even become a metaphor: »The idea of distance was one of the piece’s primal ideas. At the first Mediterranean Voices symposium, we already spoke about the «Mediterranean” quality. It was very important to me to describe the simultaneous distance and closeness that makes us all friends. We don’t know one other, but even if we don’t speak the same language, there is still a »friendship« among the Mediterranean.”