The sixth edition of Vang concludes this evening at Madrid’s CentroCentro, with the concert “Goebbels, Glass, Radigue”, by the bagpiper Erwan Keravec.
The last concert of the sixth season of the programme Vang. Músicas en vanguardia – which has been curated by Sergio Luque and Victor Barceló – will feature the French piper, composer and improviser Erwan Keravec (Auray, 1974). The Breton musician will offer at Madrid’s CentroCentro a programme entitled Goebbels, Glass, Radigue, which corresponds to the album of the same title released in November 2020 on the French label Buda Musique. The disc, and therefore the concert, is made up of versions for bagpipes by Keravec of pieces by Heiner Goebbels –No. 20/58-, Philip Glass –Two Pages– and Éliane Radigue –Occam Ocean XXVII-.
Keravec is regarded as the leading – and almost the only – piper in the field of avant-garde music. Not only has he liberated the Breton bagpipe from its limited role in traditional music, but he has also opened up countless sonic possibilities for choreographers and dancers, as well as taking part in free improvisation projects with musicians such as the Norwegian saxophonist Mats Gustaffson, the Klangforum Wiem and the Spanish pianist Agustí Fernández.
Keravec has also been a pioneer in commissioning works for solo bagpipes from contemporary composers. This is the case of No. 20/58, a work composed in 2018 by the German Heiner Goebbels for solo bagpipe. In tonight’s concert the piece will sound completely different, because the recording on the disc was made outdoors, with rain and thunder.
In the case of French musician Éliane Radigue, Occam is a huge project that began in 2008 and has grown to include dozens of collaborative pieces (for solo musicians or chamber configurations), christened Occam Rivers (in duo format), Occam Deltas (trios) or the most complex, always open-ended, Occam Ocean. As the Scottish musicologist Kate Molleson recounts in her book Sound Within Sound (Faber, 2022), “every new piece in the Occam series begins with Radigue and a performer sitting down in her apartment and talking about water. They talk about oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, waterfalls. This is the starting point. It might be just a corner of some pond – it has to be a place that has meaning for the performer. ‘Music inspired by a huge torrent won’t sound the same as music inspired by a little mountain spring,’ she points out. […] – ‘The first question I asked all of them was: please, make some waves. Just waves. With some of them I knew it would be all right after about three minutes. With others it took more time.’”. Radigue calls these collaborating musicians her “chevaliers d’Occam” and, evidently, Keravec is her bagpipe chevalier, with whom she composed Occam Ocean XXVII.
Finally, Keravec performs Two Pages, a work by the American composer Philip Glass, originally composed for piano or electric keyboard in 1968, at the height of his strictly minimalist period, and which Keravec reconstructs for solo bagpipe.