Conference: “City Concerts by Llorenç Barber” by Rubén López Cano.
“Listening and Plurifocality”, a session dedicated to Llorenç Barber as part of the exhibition Llorenç Barber. Arxiu d’escoltes and the #IVAM35 program. Held on 9 February 2024 at the IVAM Centre Julio González.
In 1988, Llorenç Barber realized an idea as simple as it was powerful: to make the bells of entire cities sound according to perfectly structured scores, in an open-air composition exercise he called City Concerts.
These urban concerts propose the city as an object of aesthetic experience through its transformation into sound—a form of sonic Land Art that, to date, has taken place in over five hundred cities worldwide. They have generated a series of processes that require analysis from multiple perspectives.
Barber has undertaken an in-depth material and symbolic study of his instruments: bells, churches, and their history. He has developed unusual instrumental techniques capable of producing unprecedented sounds, incorporating the whims of natural elements such as wind, humidity, and topography, as well as human factors like urban planning.
Barber understood that ringing bells awakens a collective memory that, while dormant, has never disappeared. He has built a highly powerful and personal aesthetic discourse—a poetics capable of activating municipal and diocesan authorities, creating new audiences for previously unheard music, and mobilizing thousands of bell-ringers worldwide who, as collaborators, have accompanied him for the past 36 years.
Rubén López Cano is a researcher in musical rhetoric and semiotics, embodied cognition in music, musical recycling, memes, and digital music culture, as well as artistic research and the epistemology of music research. He is the author of Música Plurifocal (1997), Música y retórica en el Barroco (2012), Música dispersa. Apropiación, influencias, robos y remix en la era de la escucha digital (2018), La música cuenta. Retórica, narratividad, dramaturgia, cuerpo y afectos (2020), and De los videomemes a Tom & Jerry. La música cuenta en el audiovisual (2024). Since 2003, he has been a full-time professor at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya.
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