Alvaro Nunez Carbullanca

Breathing paces

I am a composer, and I love walking.

In the past, I used to walk, creating unlikely paths: following rivers from the source to the mouth, crossing forests without marked paths, following homeless dogs in town, 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, breaths. From that idea came a question: how to compose music in which the rhythm is comparable to the variable speed of the paces, beats and breaths of a human being walking? Radicalizing: How to create a residual trace of walking with sounds?

I have created four possible answers in the form of music to these questions. At the Saari Residence, I will start the composition of the fifth and final work related to this idea, 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 created through 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 every day during the two months of residency, recording the walking-landscape sounds; 2. adding to 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 won the first prize in the XIII Premio Andrés Gaos de Composición Musical (Spain 2019), was a finalist in the Breaking Music composition competition, Ensemble Syntax (Italy 2019), and he has received grants from the 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 the Sub-Antarctic Biocultural Conservation Program (Chile 2012–2014).