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Putting an End to the Armchairs > B250

Date
1 December 2020
Putting an End to the Armchairs > B250

Putting an End to the Armchairs A sound action for public space on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the birth of L. V. Beethoven

Martín Virgili Bariloche, 2020

For Rodolfo Acosta R., and his half century of life.

Commissioned by the MAR Museum, the action consists of parking 32 cars at equal distances along the four streets that form the perimeter of a city block — in this case, the streets bordering the MAR Museum. With their doors open, each car will play a sonata from L. V. Beethoven’s catalogue, with the car in position 1 corresponding to Sonata No. 1, and so on through all 32 positions.

The audience can traverse the 32 sonatas as they walk the streets surrounding the Museum. It is a chronological journey through the most significant musical corpus of Beethoven’s work, but the action also invites listeners to link, along the way, the building’s architecture, the incidental sounds of public space, and the piano sonatas.

Performers

  1. Araceli Coty — Sonata No. 1, Op. 2 No.1 (1793–1795)
  2. Carlos Pérez Benito — Sonata No. 2, Op. 2 No.2 (1794–1795)
  3. Carmen Morilla — Sonata No. 3, Op. 2 No.3 (1794–1795)
  4. Diana León — Sonata No. 4, Op. 7 (1796–1797)
  5. Fernanda Múgica — Sonata No. 5, Op. 10 No.1 (1795–1797)
  6. Manuel Morilla — Sonata No. 6, Op. 10 No.2 (1796–1798)
  7. Daniela Muttis — Sonata No. 7, Op. 10 No.3 (1797–1798)
  8. Yamandú Rodríguez — Sonata No. 8, Op. 13 “Pathétique” (1798)
  9. Santos Copello — Sonata No. 9, Op. 14 No.1 (1799)
  10. Mariano Darrichon — Sonata No. 10, Op. 14 No.2 (1799)
  11. Susana Cosorte — Sonata No. 11, Op. 22 (1800)
  12. Marcelo Farenga — Sonata No. 12, Op. 26 (1801)
  13. Facundo Pereyra — Sonata No. 13, Op. 27 No.1 (1801)
  14. Daniel Besoytaorube — Sonata No. 14, Op. 27 No.2 “Moonlight” (1801)
  15. Valeria Gopar & Daniela Santamaría — Sonata No. 15, Op. 28 “Pastoral” (1801)
  16. Mauricio Arco — Sonata No. 16, Op. 31 No.1 (1802)
  17. Pamela Guruciaga — Sonata No. 17, Op. 31 No.2 “Tempest” (1802)
  18. Lili Gelman — Sonata No. 18, Op. 31 No.3 “The Hunt” (1802)
  19. Ana Clara Manera & Martín Umerez — Sonata No. 19, Op. 49 No.1 “Leichte Sonaten” (1804)
  20. Julio Vita — Sonata No. 20, Op. 49 No.2 “Leichte Sonaten” (1804)
  21. Leo Juanes — Sonata No. 21, Op. 53 “Waldstein” (1804)
  22. Sebastián Flores — Sonata No. 22, Op. 54 (1804)
  23. Inés Drangosh — Sonata No. 23, Op. 57 “Appassionata” (1804)
  24. Matías Fajardo — Sonata No. 24, Op. 78 (1809)
  25. David Bressan — Sonata No. 25, Op. 79 (1809)
  26. Leandro Paolicchi — Sonata No. 26, Op. 81a “Les Adieux” (1810)
  27. Pedro Tauzy — Sonata No. 27, Op. 90 (1814)
  28. Gustavo Christiansen — Sonata No. 28, Op. 101 (1816)
  29. Gustavo Morales — Sonata No. 29, Op. 106 “Hammerklavier” (1818)
  30. Leonardo Salvini — Sonata No. 30, Op. 109 (1820–1822)
  31. Mariano Losi — Sonata No. 31, Op. 110 (1821)
  32. Martín Virgili — Sonata No. 32, Op. 111 (1820–1821)

Production Team

Mario Gemin, Jorge Ihlenfeld, Diego Izquierdo, Maximiliano Gutiérrez, and members of the MAR Museum.

Two More Notes on the Piece and Its Relationship to Mar del Plata

In our city, public sound space is a space of tension and construction, especially along the coastal boardwalk, in a shifting stretch that runs from Playa Varese (and the Paseo Jesús Galíndez) to Avenida Constitución. Along that stretch, citizens park their cars and mark out a given space with music-sound, which they also fill with their bodies — a “territorial and sonic bubble” without clear boundaries. Placed side by side, the groups arrange themselves one next to another, building a sonic field linking independent genres and sonorities.

It is quite compelling to move through these virtual spaces of gestures, partial theatricalities, and musicalities. That weave sonically informs us about our community. It is an unreflected emanation of how sound generates social relations, while also describing contemporary identity traits. And it is precisely on this everyday behavior of sound that the Beethovenian sound action operates.

On the other hand, there is the relationship between the stroll, the music, and listening.

For thousands of years, Western culture has formalized an armchair listening, in which sounds moved around a fixed listener like insects drawn to light. Listening to a landscape while walking through it reveals multiple overlaps and correlations between sounds and other agents of the landscape — the wind, unexpected scents, dips in the terrain, sudden temperature changes, and so on — which seem to reshape the known quadrants of sound and present them within an active space in constant transformation. A sound that carries within it other forces of the landscape added to it. This search points to a current direction in work concerned with the soundscape at its crossing with dance and choreography, classical forms for marking movement in space. A sound, one great integral sound, that may be showing its crown in the 21st century.

Putting an End to the Armchairs > B250