A few weeks ago, TV3 broadcast Jaume Bratolí’s documentary, Les músiques d’Obama, a journey through the legislature of the outgoing president of the United States, based on the music that has accompanied him at every political moment and has been consciously used to reinforce certain messages, from the hip hop of “Yes, we can” to the Gospel that accompanied “Black lives matter” denouncing police violence against the African-American community.
Music is part of our lives, it is the soundtrack that, as in films, intensifies emotional, intellectual and vital states. There are a thousand ways to work music in cultural productions. It can be used from an exquisite selection that reinforces and enhances certain aspects (Julio Manrique does this in each of the plays he directs). Playlists can be created to accompany exhibitions or can be incorporated into the exhibition space itself, contextualising and reinforcing the works (Valentín Roma did this at MACBA in 2014, in the exhibition La herencia inmaterial. Ensayando desde la colección). The programme can focus on the relationships between music and popular culture (as Ferran Barenblit did during his time directing CA2M in Madrid). And exhibitions can be dedicated to figures who move between the two spheres (and here the list can be very heterogeneous: John Cage, Raymond Pettibon, David Bowie, Martin Kippenberger, among many others).
Some artists use music as a reference element: in The History of the World (1997), Jeremy Deller created a diagram on the social, political and musical connections between house music and brass bands, which showed the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial society. And a subsequent, and logical, step was to ask a brass band to play pieces of house music.
In our immediate surroundings, El Viatge Frustrat by Enric Farrés Duran first featured the participation of the group 13 Magic Skulls on the soundtrack and, later, the production of a vinyl in collaboration between musicians and artist arose.
Another example, in the process of production, is 12 Canciones Concretas by Gonzalo Elvira, a multidisciplinary project that seeks to create a relationship between visual arts, architecture and music in a kind of rhizomatic process, based on the monument to the fallen workers in Kapp during a demonstration on May 1, 1921, which ends up becoming 12 musical pieces, formalized as drawings.
Also recent is The Touching Community, the project by Aimar Pérez Galí that brings together dance and research into the impact of AIDS on the dance scene since the 1980s, which would not be the same without the letters read by the artist to the missing dancers, or the music of Arthur Russell, which could also be the soundtrack of this article.
[Article published in Bonart, 2017]
