Eduardo Polonio, pioneer of Spanish digital music, dies | Culture | EUROtoday

Born in Madrid on January 5, 1941, this at all times “young” minstrel of Spanish digital music is simply eleven days away from reaching the age of 84. He died the day earlier than yesterday, Christmas Day, within the Huelva city of Valverde del Camino, the place he had lived since earlier than the tip of the century through which that creative substance to which he devoted his creative life was born: electronics.

He was a really tall and lanky man, with a everlasting smile and a really notable propensity for taking part in. At the Alicante Festival, after I directed it, one yr there was a workshop on inflatables for kids to which I added all types of sounds—digital, in fact—relying on the route or the free will of the glad childhood that didn’t It occurred to him to ask what music was about. But, on the similar time, he was a tremendously critical particular person, who had an unwavering religion in that creative type that he noticed born, develop and nearly die within the phrases of aesthetic hypothesis that he practiced.

Eduardo Polonio was born in Madrid and studied music on the Conservatory of his metropolis, abandoning his research in telecommunications engineering which, in any case, supplied him with a technical base that he preferred to cover. Polonio was one of many first, within the Madrid space, to immerse himself in stay electronics, the one through which a few creators who seemed like sound technicians manipulated mysterious units in entrance of the viewers, making an attempt to persuade that that is also a live performance He fashioned a partnership with the Argentine Horacio Vaggione in ALEA Música Electrónica Libre on the finish of the sixties. He was on the prodigious Encuentros de Pamplona in 1972 and instantly offered a piece signed by Luis de Pablo and José Luis Alexanco in Madrid. Interrupted Solitudehowever with the 2 mysterious operators on the units that spit sounds between Alexanco’s inflatable sculptures. It was one of many paradigmatic items of these Meetings.

From then on, Polonius grew to become a stressed soul. In 1976, Polonio moved to Barcelona and joined Phonos, ALEA’s rival laboratory in Catalonia. It did not have as a lot influence as when the footballer Figo went from Barça to Real Madrid, however, on a scale, it was one thing related.

But Polonius was promiscuous by nature, maybe following within the elusive wake of the electron, that elemental particle that had given its identify to the primary genuinely new musical motion of the twentieth century. In 1983, he based, with Rafael Santamaría, Obert-Art Actual, and collectively they proposed the Sis Dies d’artwork present pageant for 3 years. In 1985, with Gabriel Brncic and Claudio Zulian, he created the group Multimedia, specialised in stay electroacoustic music.

Since for Polonio creating teams and festivals was virtually interchangeable with the manufacturing of his personal works, through which collaboration with all types of artists was the norm, he developed a dizzying exercise of which I solely dare to say the oldest and essentially the most present. : To Kill it, efficiency with the painter Ferrán García Sevilla, on the Sala Zeleste in Barcelona, ​​in 1977; till you attain A day like at presentvideo in collaboration with Ana de Alvear, in 2023.

He has been co-founder of the Electroacoustic Music Association of Spain and was its president between 1988 and 1994. He has additionally acquired worldwide awards such because the Magisterium of the Bourges International Grand Prix of Electroacoustic Music.

In 1996 he moved to Huelva and started to fire up the South of Spain. He based Musical Creation and New Technologies, in addition to the electroacoustic music studio Diafano. In 2000 he created the cycle Confluences, artwork and know-how getting ready to the millenniumwith the assist of the Junta de Andalucía. In 2006 he created and directed till 2008 the International Congress of Music and Contemporary Technologies of the University of Seville.

And, as if time have been an elastic materials for him, Polonius doesn’t cease activating. In addition to dozens, maybe a whole bunch of works or interventions, he leaves an infinite recording legacy and really fascinating written publications, of which the latest look of a book-record on the event of his eightieth anniversary stands out: From serialism to multimedia.

Eduardo Polonio leaves, together with the gale of his innumerable actions, a bunch of associates who at present really feel like free electrons and remorse his absence like that of a founding father. But, founding father of what?, and with Polonio a debate closes, that of the standing of electroacoustic music: is it an artwork? Is it a sport? Is it the continuation of avant-garde music with different media? ? An outdated pal, now deceased, director of the Institute of Valencian Music, as soon as instructed me that an necessary political chief from the “ye ye” period of Mayor Rita Barberá, instructed her at some point: “I really like electrocaustic music. (sic)”. Surely Eduardo Polonio would have laughed heartily.