The MNAC organ stopped playing in 1974, the day the organist Montserrat Torrent had to climb out to avoid a cornice falling off her head. Since then, what is listed as one of the most monumental organs in Europe has remained silent, awaiting a restoration that the museum cannot budget for. But what would an instrument that will soon be 100 years old sound like today? What voice would it have? Fito Conesa (Cartagena, 1980), a visual artist who is not a musician but looks very similar, decided to prove it by blowing tube by tube, blowing his own breath into it until the sound was ripped out and finally brought back to life through a two-act composition that will reverberate this Saturday in the Oval Room (there are two screenings, at 4:30 p.m. and at 5:00 p.m.).
Oval. (Closing), which is the title of the sound installation by Fito Conesa, is the result of a one-year residency in which the artist, first alone with the sound engineer Marçal Cid and then accompanied on increasingly frequent visits by the singer Maria Arnal , has practically lived inside the organ (it is a saying). "Because how do you relate to an instrument that by default is much bigger than you?" Was the question. At first, the organ reminded him of a dead lung or a wrecked ship. For months he has gone up and down the steep stairs that connect the three floors countless times, going in and out of the different rooms and making sounds of hundreds of tubes (he has 11,117), "some the size of a pen, with a tone so high-pitched that Only dogs hear it, and others are so serious that they cannot be heard but are felt throughout the body”.
The latter was pointed out by the organ builder Albert Blancafort, who continues a family saga of four generations dedicated to music, "a key character in this story, someone who builds instruments and not only helps us understand how the organ works but also puts words to things that we cannot express and our heads explode,” says Conesa. The recording sessions took place during the day, “but we realized that the reverberation at night changed because there was no one in the museum, and when you launched the sound it took up to ten or twelve seconds to disappear. It was brutal, but those nocturnal sessions did not last long..." Fear got the better of him.
Once the sound of the tubes had been recorded, Conesa composed a score in two acts: Prelude Evigilantes in tanta terra (awakening on this earth) and incipiunt Resonare (beginning the reverberation). The first is just organ music, while in the second Maria Arnal introduces her voice as if it were one more musical note. "It's a living being and it's going to wake up," he says excitedly, "because it's impossible to talk without passion about an instrument that welcomes you". Inaugurated for the Universal Exposition of 1929, "it has witnessed a good part of the museum's history , from Primo de Rivera to the Olympics or the junkies who camped on Montjuïc. A witness who also does not speak and who, unlike most of the organs that are in the area of the Church or large concert halls, this one is in a public square”.
Today Conesa will once again enter the bowels of that "abyssal animal" to project the pre-recorded composition from there with the hope that the sound that will flood the Oval Room will activate its restoration. Trust that it will not be the last. "I'm going to need time to say goodbye."
