Alvaro Nunez Carbullanca

Breathing paces

I am a composer, and I love walking. 

In the past, I walked, creating unlikely paths: following rivers from the source to the mouth, crossing forests without marked paths, following homeless dogs in town, and zigzagging on the streets. Now, I try to walk-compose. Immersed in this experience, I arrived to pay specific attention to three physiological aspects of my body involved in the process of walking: paces, beats, and breaths. From that suggestion, a question came out: How do you compose a piece of music in which the rhythm is comparable to the variable speed of paces, beats, and breaths of a human being walking? Radicalizing: How do you create a residual walking trace with sounds?

I have created four possible answers to these questions in the form of music. For the Saari Residency program, I will start the composition of the fifth and final work of this suggestion, for string quintet and electronics, that will be commissioned by Movimiento Pu Joa of Paraguay, to be performed in 2024. But this time, the acoustic material will be done by my own paces, beats, and breaths: my body will become an acoustic walking trace immersed in the soundscape of Saari.

This project will be carried out in three steps: 1. walking along the same path in the surroundings of Saari almost all days during the two months of residency, recording the walking-landscape sounds; 2. elaborating the recordings; 3. composing the first three minutes of a work for string quintet and electronics. 

BIO
Chilean Composer and bell ringer based in Italy, interested in the resulting sounds, perceptions, images, and mechanisms derived from recursive human body movements. 

He has received the first prize of the XIII Premio Andrés Gaos de Composición Musical (Spain, 2019), has been finalist of Breaking Music composition competition, Ensemble Syntax (Italy 2019), and he has received grants by MacDowell Foundation (USA, 2024), Kone Foundation (Finland, 2023), Now&Next Tanzhaus Dusseldorf (Germany, 2019), Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi di Milano (Italy, 2017-2018), Fondazione Adolfo Pini (Italy, 2017), Ministry of Culture, (Chile 2006-2008; 2015-2016; 2022), and Subantartic Biocultural Conservation program (Chile, 2012-2014).