Llorenç Barber

Llorenç Barber is a musician, composer, writer, researcher, performer and pioneer in the conception of sound art in Europe. As a musician with an academic background, Barber has worked ever since as an independent composer, sound artist and initiator of festivals. His work is inspired by Cage, Fluxus, Zaj, minimalism and takes the form of free improvisations, sound poetry, and public interventions. He has co-founded many art groups, initiated various festivals, concerts, and projects that primarily work outside of the establishment and classical contemporary music canon. His international sound actions include a portable bell tower conceived in 1981 with which he has already performed in courtyards, auditoriums, classrooms or in re-enactments of naval battles.

In over 40 years of creation, Barber has developed unique performance and presentation forms for bells as resonating bodies, including STADTKONZERTE, first performed in 1987/1988 in which primarily bells, marching bands, sirens and fireworks were sounded throughout entire cities. Incorporating the different resonances of cities and landscapes. Llorenç Barber proposes sound interventions and space-time compositions of great magnitude. He created the concept of Plurifocality, with which to enter the interstices of cultural communities and sound art in public spaces, thus conceiving “the city as an orchestra.” In 2017 his work SOUND RITES for bells, tubular bells, processional children’s choir, and five Muazzin Nasheed, received the Guinness Award for its “exceptionality and beauty”. In the same year, he received, together with Carles Santos, the first Bankia Award for Musical Talent in of the Valencian Community. In 2018, he received the title of Doctor for Liberis Artium Universitas with an outstanding cum laude. Since 2005 he is Academic Corresponent of the Catalan Academy of S. Jordi and since 2011 he is Professor of the Master Sound Art of the University of Barcelona.

Together with Montserrat Palacios, Barber has published and authored articles and books that turns the official presentation of Spanish music and subsequent trends in sound art since its break with music in the 1970s and 1980s upside down.