This Friday will see the premiere of “Stealing time B”, the second piece in a cycle of four, composed by Spanish composer Octavi Rumbau, at the Théâtre Municipal de Perpignan.
This coming Friday, 30 June at 19:00, the Spanish composer Octavi Rumbau (Barcelona, 1980) will premiere Stealing time B, a concert for marimba and electronic device that will be performed by the French musician and researcher Philippe Spiesser, at the Théâtre Municipal in the French town of Perpignan. The concert programme will also feature another work by Rumbau, En Rythmoi (2012), for vibraphone and electronics, along with pieces for percussion and electronics by Gilbert Nouno (FeedBack), Pierre Jodlowski (Mad Max Vibra), Steve Reich (Electric Conterpoint) and Till Lingenberg (Corpus).
The world premiere of Rumbau’s work is part of a cycle of four pieces of variable format called Stealing time, which began at the end of 2022, with Stealing time A – a seven-minute work for percussion instruments (metal drum, wood block, vibratone, cowbell and foot drum) and electronics, commissioned by the Spanish percussionist Miquel Bernat, which was premiered on 1 March at the Brussels Ateliers of the Belgian organisation Music Fund.
The project will culminate in 2023 with a composition for piano trio under the name Stealing time D. According to the composer on his website, the complete work “aims to articulate a discourse around the contraction of musical time and its particular perception. ‘Stealing’ time as a metaphor for a musical time in a constant process of transformation with the idea of creating a fluid form that seems to advance in time irremediably but, paradoxically, never goes anywhere. It is a search for an undirected linearity”.
Contrary to his previous works, Rumbau, who currently teaches at the Conservatori Superior de Música del Liceu in Barcelona, continues, “in Stealing time the form is articulated cyclically and, at the same time, in permanent transformation. The starting point is a neutral idea that is permanently transforming, but without establishing a straight path, but rather an oblique one”.
Each of the four pieces in the cycle approaches the aforementioned question from different points of view, taking into account, fundamentally, the characteristics of the instruments on which it is written. In the specific case of Stealing time B, says Rumbau, “the starting point is the field of the historical organology of the marimba. Specifically, the aim is to investigate the chonta marimba, a paradigmatic instrument of the traditional music of the Colombian Pacific. With the creation of Stealing time B I wanted to reflect, on the one hand, on the duality between the two chonta marimbas with different tunings and to highlight the ‘conflict’ that is established between the two from a strictly musical perspective. At the same time, this ‘conflict’, which transcends the instrument itself, reflects an even deeper phenomenon: the loss of the memory of a cultural fabric, that of the Colombian Pacific, which is progressively losing its identity to the detriment of an increasingly homogenised Western culture. Without going into ethical questions, what interests me with this project is to reflect this ‘conflict’ through the manipulation of musical time, which acts as a metaphor for a socio-cultural time, that of memory and its roots, which is gradually slipping through our fingers”.