Tuesday, Dec 3, 2024

Toposonia

urban massive sound art

Topos (place) Sonos (sound): Toposonia is a 45 minutes sound intervention designed by the composer Ángel Arranz in order to celebrate 1000 years of the Foundation of Peñafiel City. Toposonia is conceived by understanding the architectural layout of Peñafiel as the only resonant instrument, where circa 200 musicians are spread around several places of Peñafiel and participate all together in a sound choreography that plays with the spaces from a acoustic, organic point of view.

Toposonia is a collaborative project that unifies in a whole several disciplines and functions: performance and improvisation (Katsunori Nishimura), sound painting (David Merino), conduction (Alfredo Calvo), ringer bell master (Daniel Sanz Platero), temporal and spatial design, electronics (Ángel Arranz). The concert in turn is officially circumscribed to the celebrations of Año Dual 2013-2014 between Spain and Japan.

Parque de San Vicente is chosen because is an ideal environment to listen and watch with absolute clarity, as if it was about a live orchestra, the resonances of Peñafiel’s four bell towers: Covento San Pablo, Parroquia de San Miguel de Reoyo, Iglesia de Santa María de Mediavilla -nowadays Museo Comarcal de Arte Sacro- and la Torre de San Esteban -also known as Torre del Reloj-. Within the perimeter is distributed a fleet of trucks and groups of musicians interspersed around the bell towers, castle’s battlements and mountains. Other interior group of musicians is deployed nearby the park, together with an 8-channel loudspeaker set distributed irregularly and a group of handbell players, as a sort homage to the sounds from Castile, generating several spatiality patterns through these elements.

The percussionist Katsunori Nishimura is the performer leading the narrative of the piece, releasing as well, certain acoustical envelopes. A small army of controllers, so-called messengers of time, synchronize their clock watches moving individually to each multiple places where musicians are set ready to play. The aim of this is to conduct each one of the parts that intervene in the space-time design using a short list of instructions.

The poetical idea that inspires the work is to awake the city after its 1000 years long dream, by doing it resonate in a deep, harmonious way, trying to recover that vibration radiated from Castilian austerity and novelty.

Official photo set Toposonia in Flickr