Klarinette in B (Bíos)

The Greeks - as Giorgio Agamben points out - had two concepts for life, Zoé means life as something common to all living beings, the simple fact of living, while Bíos is the meaning that allows the emergence of the social, the polis. Bíos is a piece that I wrote on commission of the Compañia oblicua for its 15th anniversary in 2019 and is based on the concept of the minimum possible concertación, the chamber music duo, that which inaugurates music as a phenomenon of social creation.

The piece seeks to develop the greatest instrumental possibilities of two performers playing three different types of their own instrument. One performer plays the piccolo, the flute in C and the bass flute, while the other plays the piccolo clarinet, the clarinet in Bb and the bass clarinet.

During the piece, from an almost silent introduction, the greatest heterogeneity unfolds from the use of instrumental techniques that expand the possibilities of the use of timbre as a resource. But also the change of register between instruments or of timbre in each register zone of each one, configurations with inharmonic spectra such as the cluster or with the presence of a lot of noise such as simultaneous playing and singing or the striking of keys. The change of tempo also emphasises the contrasting character of each fragment that joins with the following one without any solution of continuity in the change from one instrument to the other. In short, there are two complex colours that unfold in a possible dialogue, that is the duet.

This piece was premiered in the cycle of music in the dome of the Centro cultural Kirchner (CCK) in Buenos Aires on 28 June 2019.