The Chairs of Tàpies: Difraccions Series

The Chairs of Tàpies is a series of multidisciplinary sound actions organised in the context of the Tàpies Centenary Year, with the collaboration of Pompeu Fabra University. The proposal focuses on the voice and words to create a sound accompaniment to oral memory. In this way, each of the thirteen sessions will feature a creator whose starting point will be the chair, taken as a performative object, linking back to the creative universe of Tàpies through the expressive languages and settings of the present day.

The eleventh sound action in this series is entitled Fleeting Listening, a proposal that is part of the Difraccions Series. Starting with the music of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905—1988), performed by students of the ESMUC as part of the project The Suitcase of Antoni Tàpies, the Difraccions Series has invited guitarist Amidea Clotet, who proposes a dialogue of sound and movement that encourages us to reflect on listening in the context of generative improvisation. How do performers listen to themselves when improvising, and how do they react to their own deviations, mishaps or newfound solutions when playing live? How does movement react to sound and sound to what is postulated by movement? Listening, the central action of the musical event, is presented to us, in this context, in its full intensity.

Amidea Clotet (Malaga, 1997) is an emerging figure in the generative improvisation scene in Barcelona. She studied electric guitar at the Liceu Conservatory, as well as a year of contemporary composition in Denmark, where she began to forge her own path in improvisation. She creates spontaneous soundscapes using expanded techniques and objects; the result is a music that is raw, emerging as a response to the times we live in, in a play between risky, sound experimentation and the beauty of subtlety.