The unclassifiable, multidisciplinary and admirable oeuvre of Carles Santos produced over more than thirty-five years still remains for the most part unknown. A pianist, composer, conceptual artist, performer, musical and stage director, filmmaker and scriptwriter, designer of stage sets and impressive visual images and props for his musical productions, Carles Santos is one of the most inquiring and surprising creators in Catalan culture today. Although he has obtained a well-deserved reputation both in Spain and abroad as a musical and dramatic author, and has a loyal and enthusiastic audience that is becoming increasingly larger, the fact is that in spite of their artistic value, neither Santos’ multiple oeuvre nor his consistent personal career are well-known among the general public.

As a result of both the ephemeral nature of performance, of musical and dramatic actions, and of Santos’ own vital and untamable spirit— opposed to any form of categorisation, often prone to improvisation yet at the same time extremely perfectionist towards his works—many of his sound, text, stage and visual creations have never been put down in writing, recorded or stored. Consequently, there is scant evidence of his works from the late sixties, the seventies and the early eighties. Fortunately however, above all from the beginning of his creative relationship with Mariaelena Roqué in 1985 and from the founding of the Carles Santos Company in 1995, a number of documents guide us through Santos’ extraordinary poetic oeuvre. No doubt, this survey of his vital and creative evolution that recovers and reviews his filmic, musical, textual, theatrical and artistic works, not to mention his multiple collaborations with other creators, will afford us a clearer, more precise though complex image of this oeuvre.

The Musical Actions.
The Concert irregular by Joan Brossa

At the very start of Carles Santos’ musical oeuvre, of his work as a composer, we come across Joan Brossa’s Concert irregular(Irregular Concert, 1967). After a brilliant career as a performer, as a professional pianist, this is the first time that Santos appears as the composer of a musical work. Joan Brossa, the poet and author of the inexhaustible Poesia escènica (Stage Poetry), was responsible for prompting and furthering Carles Santos’ musical and dramatic oeuvre as we know it. Before Santos began to work with Brossa as a musician and performer of the Concert irregular, two important events took place that no doubt favoured the friendship between the two artists: the première of Suite bufa (Suite Buffa, 1966), a musical action in two parts by Joan Brosssa with music by Josep M. Mestres Quadreny, and the making of No compteu amb els dits (Don’t Count on Your Fingers, 1967), the first film by Pere Portabella on which Brossa worked as scriptwriter.

The success of Suite bufa encouraged Brossa to write a new piece, Concert irregular, where he extended his findings, eliminating the character of the female dancer and granting more freedom to the dramatic relationship between the pianist and the singer. Brossa’s whole world of carnival and play comes into action in Concert irregular, which was presented in a chamber version with music by Santos on the 22nd of July of 1968, performed by Anna Ricci and Carles Santos under the stage direction of Pere Portabella at the opening of the Joan Miró exhibition at Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, to commemorate the seventy-fifth birthday of the painter of the Constel·lacions (Constellations).

In the programme produced when Concert irregular was premièred at Barcelona’s Romea theatre on the 7th of October of 1968, Brossa wrote, “Although the composer believes that the piano has become a useless piece of furniture in the evolution of contemporary music; although the poet doesn’t consider it in the least important to add music to a text; and although in modern musical theatre the theatre is either degraded or else disappears completely, music and action are merged in the show you shall see and somehow replace lyrics. The piano and song are staged with all sorts of allusions and are not devoted to any specific technique. The action supports the music in favour of poetic force, without trying to compete with ballet or pantomime but endeavouring to afford the concert the demystifying appearance it requires and which constitutes its irregularity. So the idea is not to reconstruct a story or to dramatise anything. Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine—the pianist, the piano and the singer—seem to be puffed up by the spirit of Fregoli, swelling in and out at the source of a show in which unwarranted fantasy and obsequious imitation withdraw before creative imagination.”

Brossa, in fact, transforms the piano into a live object, one other character, as Santos himself would do later. The forceful yet unexpected opinion that Brossa attributes to Santos—“the composer believes that the piano has become a useless piece of furniture in the evolution of contemporary music”- betrays a crisis as regards the piano. In essence, the ideas and creative imagination behind Santos’ actions and musical productions stem, originally, from Brossa’s stage poetry. The first scene of Concert irregular, entitled “Homage to Leopold Fregoli”, as in the poems in Brossa’s book Frègoli i el seu teatre (Fregoli and His Theatre), contains the idea of the transformations suffered by the character that Santos develops in one of his most well-known films, La-Re-Mi-La (1979). A few other actions and ideas such as that of the ‘reading’ of musical notes, which is the starting point of Pere Portabella’s film Play back (1970) and of the film Divertimento (Divertimento, 1979) made by Santos in Mexico, or that of placing the actress or the pianist inside the piano, appear in Brossa’s Accions musicals (Musical Actions, 1962-1968), compiled in one volume in 1975.

In any case, Santos has always expressed his gratitude to Brossa, as well as his affection and admiration, as exemplified by his première of the musical action Divertiment-Homenatge a Brossa (Divertimento-Tribute to Brossa, 1978) at the Catalan Conference in Berlin, or by his inclusion of Brossa in the dialogues of the opera Ricardo i Elena (Ricardo and Elena, 2000).

L’àpat: The Beginning of a Unique Filmic Oeuvre

If the impact of his meeting and friendship with Brossa proved definitive, we must say that the upshots of his collaboration with Pere Portabella following his performance at the piano of Mestres Quadreny’s music in the film No compteu amb els dits were also enriching and fruitful. Portabella, who was not only a director but also a film producer, gave Santos the opportunity to make his first short films. We must say that in point of fact Santos was a film auteur before he was a composer, even though his first film, L’àpat (The Meal, 1967), consisted only of sounds- the image is totally black, and all there is to see are the scratches on the negative. The murmur and sounds of a meal are the only significant elements in a black and white film that lasts twenty-seven minutes and twenty seconds. Other short films present images and no sound. Such is the case of the collective film by the Grup de Treball, entitled Preludi de Chopin, opus 28, núm. 18 (Chopin’s Prelude Opus 28 No. 18, 1974) made by Santos, that breaks down Chopin’s prelude into two hundred and sixty-four black and white photographs that correspond to the two hundred and sixty-four positions the pianist adopts playing the piece. Alongside other films such as L’espectador. Habitació amb rellotge. La llum. Conversa (The Spectator. Room with a Clock. The Light. Conversation, 1967), La cadira (The Chair, 1968) or Preludi de Chopin, opus 28, núm. 7 (Chopin’s Prelude Opus 28 No. 7, 1969), L’àpat and Preludi de Chopin, opus 28, núm. 18 are clear examples of Carles Santos’ most radical and conceptual research in the fields of film and music. As Beckett would do in his most minimalist work, Santos experiments with the limits of both soundtrack and visual language.

The Origins: Vinaròs and the Piano

But in the beginning there was always the piano. The piano and music. The piano and Vinaròs.

Carles Santos was born in Vinaròs in 1940, just one year after the end of the Spanish Civil War. He began to play the piano at the age of five, in a family atmosphere favourable to music. His father, Ricardo Santos, a doctor, and above al his uncle, Pepe Santos, were among the founders and event organisers of the Concert Society in Vinaròs. At a historical period that was rather difficult, the musical life in Vinaròs was quite remarkable for a city of 6,000 inhabitants. Santos, an only child, combined his studies at the state school in Vinaròs with private piano lessons. Extremely gifted for the piano, he immediately confirmed his flair for music and for following the strict discipline required by the instrument. Aged ten he would perform for the first time at a public concert in Vinaròs, where he played pieces by Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Chopin and Albéniz. Three years later, in 1954, having been awarded the Extraordinary Prize granted by the Conservatoire of the Liceu in Barcelona, he performed his first solo concert at the Concert Society in Vinaròs, and photographs have survived of a teenaged Santos signing autographs after the concert. Santos had been presented on this occasion by the canon Vicent García Julve, a noteworthy musicologist who had come into contact with the works by the ViennaSchool on his trips to Zurich, and would soon introduce Santos to the piano works by Schönberg and Webern. Later on he would be awarded a grant by the French government that would enable him to further his education in Paris. He would complete his musical training with sojourns in Switzerland under the pianist Harry Datyner, whom he remembers fondly. Santos excelled in the classical and Romantic repertoires. In 1961 he began his career as a professional musician, embarking on a noma-dic existence as a concert pianist marked by frequent travels to the rest of Europe, the United States and Latin America. However, the memory of Vinaròs, with its vitality, sensuality and brightness, would remain ever present in Santos and his oeuvre. Santos always ends up returning to Vinaròs.

The Musical and Artistic Avant-Garde in Barcelona

 In Barcelona Santos soon gained access to the Catalan avant-garde. He met Joan Prats, Joan Miró’s great friend and organiser of the series of concerts at Club 49 that reinstated the modern cultural environment of Barcelona during the SecondRepublic. Santos began to make a name for himself as a performer of contemporary music by artists such as Cage and Stockhausen, mixing with composers such as Joaquim Homs, Josep Cercós, José Luis de Delás and Josep M. Mestres Quadreny, whose works he premièred. As we have seen, in 1966 he struck up a friendship with Joan Brossa and Pere Portabella, with whom he began to work closely, and would soon meet Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró. It is a well-known fact that for a number of years Joan Brossa and other friends such as Pere Portabella and, occasionally, Lluís Maria Riera would meet at Tàpies’ house each Thursday to watch silent films and great classics. Receptive and reactive, Santos- younger than his friends- was gradually fine-tuning his artistic sense.

New York, John Cage and Musical Minimalism

Eager, active and in need of a change of air, Santos moved to New York for six months for the first time late in 1968, thanks to a grant awarded by the Fundación Juan March. Shortly after that he would spend almost a whole year there. He met John Cage with whom he built up friendly relations, and showed an interest in new American avant-garde composers, especially the minimalists La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. Upon his return from New York, Santos introduced musical minimalism in Spain.

As opposed to the established European avant-garde, represented by composers like Boulez and often anchored in the orthodox of post-serialism, Santos valued the freedom of sound developed by Cage and the new paths explored by minimalist composers and the musicians close to the Fluxus movement. In fact, Santos has performed numerous works by Cage and his library contains original editions of Cage’s texts, including Silence (1961) and A Year from Monday (1969).

But Santos went his own way. In a letter to his friend Joan Brossa, sent from New York and dated the 14th of December of 1970, he wrote, “Here we’re receiving a lot of artistic information, etc., but I’ve now reached a point when it’s like water off a duck’s back to me; I know very well what I want to do and am aware that seeing so many different things is getting in my way.”

Santos would return to New York on several occasions. On the 14th of May of 1978 he would hold a solo concert at Carnegie Hall. In the late seventies, when he decided to perform only his own music, he personally identified with musical minimalism. Apropos Bujaraloz by Night (1978), one of his most well known themes, the critic Tom Johnson described Santos as a“Romantic minimalist”, a fortunate expression. Titles of compositions by Santos such as Minimalet- Minimalot (Minimalittle-Minimalot, 1982) or Minimalet i prou (Minimalittle and That’s It, 1981) or that of the video Minimalet sur mer (Minimalittle upon the Sea, 1988) reveal how the Valencian artist takes classifications and reductionisms in a humorous and ironic vein.

In the early eighties New York would definitely become an important juncture in Santos’ creative and vital trajectory. In April 1980 he took part in the 12th International Sound Poetry Festival in the capital, where the following year he released the first LP of his own music, Voicetracks (1981), a compilation of vocal themes as idiosyncratic as “To-Ca-Ti-Co-To-Ca-Ta” (1978), “Pepa” (1980) and “Autoretrat” (Self-Portrait, 1981). On the 14th of March of 1981 he performed one of his most notorious shows, Sound Fight, a musical combat with the American composer Charlie Morrow held in the ring at New York’s Bobby Gleason Gym.

In La meua filla sóc jo (I Am My Own Daughter, 2005) Santos introduced a heartfelt tribute to John Cage. At a certain point in the work the characters stand still in silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, just as if they were performing Cage’s famous piece Silence (1952) in which silence must be kept for precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

Pere Portabella, Film, Music and Drama

 Over the years Pere Portabella has become one of Carles Santos’ most loyal friends and companions. Starting from Cuadecuc-Vampir (Worm’s Tail-Vampire, 1970) Santos would create all the soundtracks for Portabella’s films. The two artists share the desire to reflect on the language of film and music, the will to transcend traditional narrative and seek new relations between sound and image. The two short films Play back (previously mentioned) and Acció Santos (Santos Action, 1972), directed by Portabella, interpreted by Santos and the result of joint reflection, are excellent examples of the need to reconsider the links between the material nature of musical language, its execution and its recording. Acció Santos was made when Santos and Portabella were members of the Grup de Treball, one of the most important groups devoted to conceptual art in Catalonia and in Spain. Acció Santos presents, in a clear, precise and direct fashion, some of the concerns central to the conceptual musical practice of the artist from Vinaròs, visualising the technological elements that enable music to be recorded and reproduced, the need for virtuous command of the instrument, the figure of the performer who brings the musical score to life and creates sound hic et nunc, and the figure of the spectator who gives meaning to the communicative act. The film contrasts live music with its recording, stressing the difference between private individual listening and open collective listening. What makes live music special is precisely its real and ephemeral nature, unique and unrepeatable, which grants it a powerful communicative value, direct and personal, that is lost in recording. This explains why Santos is so hostile to recording and favours, whenever possible, live music. Furthermore, if we think of the body language and drama that add even greater expressive force to the music we find ourselves before one of the most important reasons behind the extension of his musical practice towards the stage and art in a desire to attain, in an extremely personal way, the total work of art- the Santos opera.

In addition to his involvement as the creator of the soundtrack, Santos played an important part in Portabella’s last two films, Informe general sobre algunas cuestiones para una proyección pública (General Report on a Few Matters for a Public Screening, 1976) and Pont de Varsòvia (Warsaw Bridge, 1989) as co-scriptwriter. It came as no surprise that the stage direction of Santos’ first opera, Asdrúbila (1992), should have been entrusted to Portabella, or that along the lines of this creative complicity, Portabella should have made a short film, La tempesta (The Storm), for one of Santos’ most recent productions, El compositor, la can-tant, el cuiner i la pecadora (The Composer, The Singer, The Cook and The Sinner, 2003).

Paris and the Films Made with Clovis Prévost for Galerie Maeght

 Besides Barcelona, Paris is one of the cities in which Carles Santos has spent longer periods, performed more concerts and presented more shows. One of his latest spectaculars, the circus opera Sama Samaruck, Samaruck Suck Suck (2002) was produced and premièred at Parc de la Villette in Paris. Between the years 1969 and 1975 Santos would work actively with the French photographer and filmmaker Clovis Prévost, who was head of the film section at Galerie Maeght. From the creation of the soundtrack of the film Tàpies (1969) to L’arôme du chemin: Eduardo Chillida (1975) the alliance became increasingly stronger, to the point that Santos co-directed Prévost’s films Miró sculpteur (Miró, A Sculptor, 1973) and Miró, un portrait (Miró, A Portrait, 1974).

The experience of working with Prévost proved especially interesting for it enabled Santos to familiarise himself with the working procedures of artists as noteworthy as Tàpies, Miró, Pol Bury, Ubac and Chillida, but also because he had an opportunity to experiment with the relations between sound and image in a continuous and totally free fashion, as he had previously been offered by Portabella.

The Silences of Joan Miró

 Joan Miró was a man of few words but his silences were no doubt meaningful. Santos met Miró on several occasions on account of the film projects in which he took part as the author of the soundtracks. The first was Portabella’s film Miró l’altre (Miró, The Other, 1969), which documented the creation and destruction of the ephemeral pictorial mural for the glass façade of the School of Architects in Barcelona. The others were the films he made with Prévost: Miró, lithographie d’une affiche (Miró, The Lithograph of a Poster, 1971), Miró sculpteur, Miró parle (Miró Speaks, 1974) and Miró, un portrait. Miró parle is the filming of an extraordinary interview with Joan Miró conducted by Clovis Prévost in the artist’s studio in Son Boter. As it seems that Miró was responding laconically to Prévost’s questions, the latter asked Portabella and Santos to try and make Miró more talkative. No sooner said than done—Portabella and Santos went to Majorca. Portabella would ask the question in Catalan and Miró was supposed to reply in French, although he always began in Catalan. Santos was in charge of the sound. Miró’s last reply sums up his personal ethics and his understanding of the creative act, performed without a safety net. Miró declared, “I am an ordinary man but when I work I leap into the void.” This is the lesson Miró taught Santos.

Some of the scenes in Miró sculpteur show the artist modelling the sculpture he is working on and making incisions on its surface with a huge nail, insistently and precisely, and I can’t help relating this nail to those that appear in Santos’ photographic series La polpa de Santa Percínia de Clavicònia (The Pulp of Santa Percínia de Clavicònia, 1994). The body is a score. The body is a sound sculpture.

The Grup de Treball and the Assemblea de Catalunya. Conceptual Art and Politics: No Piano and No Fingerprints

Back in Barcelona in 1971 after New York, Santos made a radical decision—to stop playing the piano and to sell his instrument. With the money he was paid he bought a motor bike. There is a sequence of three photographs of Santos taken in 1973 in which he appears riding the bike. The iconic and stylistic similarities between this personal work and the collective piece Recorreguts (Trajectories) made the same year by the Grup de Treball are clear to see. In a Duchampian gesture that was at once a personal and an ethical pledge, Santos turned to conceptual art and to political engagement in his attempts to bring about the end of the Franco dictatorship. He thus became a member of the Grup de Treball, entered the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, known by the abbreviation PSUC, in order to take part in underground activities, and joined the Assembly of Catalonia. Santos, who had first-hand knowledge of conceptual practices, having come into contact with them in both New York and Paris, played a significant role in what is considered to be the first Grup de Treball activity, entitled Informació d’Art Concepte 1973 a Banyoles (Information on Concept Art 1973 in Banyoles). Santos wrote a theoretical text that would subsequently be adopted by the whole group, and performed a sound-action at La Llotja del Tint hall. In the text Santos spelt out his proposed artistic practice: “Conceptual works can be materialised in many ways: through film, photography, a typed page, post dispatches, body actions, etc., that are used as supports or documentation of an idea that proposes a process of mental production for sharing with the viewer- reader of results that were not envisaged or determined in the initial proposal.”

The sound action held at the Tint hall, of which a few photographs and copies in Spanish of the specific proposals have luckily survived, analyses the sound act as an act of communication or non-communication and stresses the need for public participation. The text reads, “Proposal of sixteen situations of total or partial communication starting from three elements that, in short, define the ingredients of an act or show (concert, theatrical representation, sport event, etc.). Definition of the ingredients:

• a subject who makes the proposals (actor)
• an instrument of representation (tape-recorder)
• a critical-sensitive subject who receives (audience).”

These actions and reflections would be consistently used by Santos later on, when the time came to consider his own musical, theatrical and artistic practice.

On the 28th of October of 1973 Santos and Portabella were among the one hundred and thirteen arrested at the Assemblea de Catalunya (Assembly of Catalonia, a multi-party common platform set up in opposition to the Franco régime) meeting held in the church of Santa Maria Mitjancera. He spent three months in prison, long enough to reflect on his situation and consider his future. Upon entering the prison the officials were surprised by the fact that Santos’ fingertips left no prints.

The Piano, Contemporary Music and Audiences

After being released from prison, Santos decided to go back to playing the piano. His first concert was held at the Catalan SummerUniversity at Prada de Conflent in August 1974. The presentation text stated, “The concert is still one of the places or platforms that offer the possibility of directing musical practice according to specific ideological premises.” Soon afterwards he would prepare the concert held at Palau de la Música in 1975 in support of the Commissions Obreres trades union, which would be advertised by a poster designed by Josep Guinovart and presented by a text written by Pere Portabella. Santos returned to music and its discipline with renewed energy that granted him an extraordinary communicative and expressive capacity. He approached Josep M. Mestres Quadreny to propose the founding of a group that would perform contemporary music at the recently opened Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona—Grup Instrumental Català (1976-1979)—and took up again his professional activity as a piano player and composer. That’s when he made the record Carles Santos: piano (1977), recording works by Cowell, Cage, Webern, Stockhausen and Mestres Quadreny, that confirmed him as a brilliant performer of contemporary piano music, published with a sleeve designed by Antoni Tàpies.

In 1978 Santos decided to devote himself exclusively to composing and performing his own music. His response to the crisis of modernism, when conceptual practices begin to be called into question, involves an uncommon creative energy and a surprising eclectic capacity to assume multiple traditions that grant him the utmost degree of freedom outside of all orthodox. Since then, Santos has continued to create a highly personal imaginary sonic, textual and visual universe that is still expanding.

Santos manages to free himself, in a humorous and ironic fashion, of the prejudices with regard to his classical musical apprenticeship, as reflected in the film El pianista i el Conservatori(The Pianist and the Conservatoire, 1977), and of his own self and his image, as revealed by the chameleonic, repetitive and extremely funny film La-Re-Mi-La.

The Avant-Garde, Provocation, Risk

 Scandal and provocation are inherent in the spirit of the historical avant-garde. In July 1968 the presentation of Concert irregular in Saint-Paul-de-Vence caused a diplomatic incident. Brossa finished his musical action with a “Homage to the Viet Cong”, shaving with an electric shaver and using the United States flag as a towel. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War the American delegation left in outrage at Brossa’s provocation. The première in Barcelona was also stormy. Santos’ music was harshly criticised by a number of well-known composers.

Since the première of Concert irregular many of Santos’ concerts and spectaculars have been considered provocative. Suffice it to think of the famously tumultuous concert held on the 9th of March of 1970 at the French Institute in Madrid, at which Santos performed the repetitive music of Steve Reich’s Piano Phase for one hour and three quarters. The scandalous action greatly annoyed Luis de Pablo, who was unable to première one of his own works. Santos thereby took his stance against the official avant-garde represented by the Alea group in Madrid. Luis Carandell published a splendid chronicle of the event in Celtiberia Show, “In their turn, two young chaps got up to hammer the piano at each side of Carlos Santos. ‘What vandalism!,’ I hear someone say. The pianist, this should be clarified, doesn’t improvise. That’s what Steve Reich’s piece is like, endless, although it was supposed to have been completed in good time, to enable the French pianist to perform Sequenza IV and both pianists to première Luis de Pablo’s four-hands concert in Spain.”

The controversy between the Grup de Treball and Antoni Tàpies is also well known. Santos now takes a distanced and humorous look at that period, which was in any case very interesting. He doesn’t conceal his admiration for Tàpies’ oeuvre.

Provocation is never unwarranted in Santos, but obeys profound convictions and very often a continuous investigation that leads him to break down the borders between genres and styles. Unorthodox in the fields of music, drama and film, Santos has rigorously managed, not without risk, to open new paths in a number of unexplored areas and create his own language that finds expression in multiple forms.

An Iconoclastic Renewer of the Arts

 Two of the sequences in film Miró sculpteur, co-directed by Clovis Prévost and Carles Santos, are clearly indebted to the latter and in my opinion are highly representative of his musical and artistic thinking. The first of these is the short film’s opening sequence, a close-up shot of a mouth that utters an address, a few words in Catalan, “Joan Miró, Son Abrines, Cala Major, Palma de Mallorca, Balears, telèfon 232013” (Joan Miró, Son Abrines, Cala Major, Palma de Mallorca, Balearic Islands, telephone 232013). At once, another mouth makes an utterance in Japanese, then another makes an utterance in French, and finally another does the same in English. The effect is clear and simple. They all pronounce the original address in a different accent, and yet revert to their own language when they say the telephone number. These four close-up shots are followed by the sequence of credits, in which we see the four characters, three men and a woman, who repeat the address simultaneously, at the pace marked by Santos who is directing them. The idea is forceful: the same score, which in this case is an address, is performed in a totally different way, in a different accent, according to the interpreter. In this way, the voice, the performance, is at once an individual and a collective act, although each voice is unique and unrepeatable. The same can be said of music, of creation—there is no repetition because each moment and each place in which it surfaces is different. The greatest freedom and authenticity lie in singularity and difference. In another sequence towards the end of the film we witness an action that consists of the destruction of a wall piano inside a swimming pool. The piano is broken into pieces and thus rendered useless. Obviously, the action is a metaphor that can be compared to Miró’s famous assertion regarding the murder of painting. In the vein of the great revolutionaries, the celebrated modernists, renewers of art, poetry and music who have often been labelled iconoclasts, like Miró, Brossa or Cage, Santos needed to murder the piano in order to rediscover it and all its potential and freedom. Now, he’s had the occasion, Santos has repeated the action of wrecking the piano, transforming it into an objectified and conceptual artwork in its own right. To remind us that to really play the piano one must begin by breaking it into pieces, reaching down into its entrails and familiarising oneself with its properties, in order to rediscover it in its plenitude. To play the piano passionately is an act of love, an act of destruction and of creation.

Long Live the Piano!

 On the 12th of November of 1981 Santos premièred Vive le piano (Long Live the Piano) at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, which was announced as a spectacle de piano, de voix, de film et de mouvement (“a piano, voice, film and movement spectacular”). A few months later the production was presented under the Catalan title Visca el piano! at Barcelona’s Teatre Regina, along with a new work entitled Què no donaria jo per una miqueta de sol (What Wouldn’t I Give for a Little Sun). In the programme of Vive le pianoSantos stated, “My practice is based, on the one hand, on the austere code in which the traditional concert is developed and, on the other hand, on the experience I have accumulated over the past few years working within the musical avant-garde. Rather than the decipherment, deconstruction or decontextualisation of musical language and the conventional concert, what interests me is the construction of not an idiolect but of a personal language that will manifoldly manage to make a deep impression on the auditorium without resorting to theatrical and therefore manipulative procedures. The interrelationship, based on the specificity of music, that I create on different semiotic levels (piano music, singing, mime, etc.) produces a structure that is difficult to classify, the parts of which are inseparable and the over- determining feature of which is my attitude before the musical phenomenon.”

Santos lucidly analyses his situation and verifies the will to create a personal language characterised by this structure formed by different semiotic levels, and in reference to his relations with the piano, the stage space and the audience, he goes on to say, “In these relations, surprise and humour—a humour that is at times tender and subtle, at others as startling and brusque as a piece of nonsense—play a continuous role, always profoundly connected to the character of my homeland, like the gesticulations I make and like the phonemes I sing, derived from onomatopoeia typical of the Catalan language.”

Santos had certainly found his voice, multiple and unclassifiable, full of humour and surprise. Artistic plenitude and satisfaction arrived with his praise of the piano, with the undeniable expressive freedom that enables him to modulate all sorts of feelings. From that moment on, Santos and the piano, the piano and Santos would be inseparable. Obviously, the force of a unique oeuvre of these characteristics lies in its live performance, which is lyrical when voices and gestures are modulated, and brutal and spectacular when it attains a fever pitch. This explains why Santos has always been so reluctant to record. However, the videos of the actions Anem, anem, anem a volar (Let’s Fly, Fly, Fly Away, 1982), in which he drags a grand piano on top of which the singer Pilar Zamora is seated, up the Rambles in Barcelona, and Minimalet sur mer, in which he plays the piano on a raft at sea in front of Vinaròs, are the two most famous playful and radical images of Santos. With no limits, beyond the body and the piano, Santos’ oeuvre unfolds with these elements at the core of his musical, theatrical and artistic productions.

Music, Theatre, Art and Everyday Life

 Santos would progressively move away from the cultural space reserved for contemporary music, confined to orthodox modern tradition, towards those theatrical spaces that were more open to experimentation and enabled him to expand his work with the voice and gestures. Gradually introducing theatrical elements, Santos felt increasingly at ease in the company of actors and dancers. After performing alone in Vive le piano, in Què no donaria jo per una miqueta de sol he would be accompanied by the singer Pilar Zamora. The daring and colloquial title of his following show was a declaration of principles, Beethoven, si tanco la tapa què passa? (Beethoven, What If I Close the Lid?, 1982). Five actresses and an actor—the pianist Agustí Fernández, who would become a regular collaborator from then on—took part in this humorous mocking of classical music.

As a performer and a composer Santos had worked with the actor and mime artist Albert Vidal in the show L’aperitiu (The Aperitif, 1980) and subsequently began to work in collaboration with the dancer Cesc Gelabert in the production entitled Recital de piano, dansa i veu (Piano, Dance and Voice Recital, 1982). His relationship with Gelabert was continued in a number of shows, among which mention should be made of Belmonte (1988), in which the artist Frederic Amat also took part.

Santos certainly felt at home in theatrical space and linked several musical spectaculars, such as Té xina, la fina petxina de Xina (1984) and La boqueta amplificada (The Amplified Little Mouth, 1985), that enabled him to perform and stage his own musical creations. The more or less steady flow of work in Barcelona offered him the possibility of residing in Vinaròs and of rediscovering the pleasures of everyday life, including that of fishing and his other hobbies. His interest in popular culture led him to revisit popular language and to experiment with sound poetry. He met up with old friends and Grup de Treball members such as the poet Carles Hac Mor and the artist Jordi Benito, with whom he would work on several ventures including the spectacular Cabaret Voltaire (1985), a tribute to the legendary origins of Dadaism. A special bond was formed with Benito, as a result of which Santos would contribute to many of his works and performances.

Berlin. Arganchulla, Arganchulla Gallac. Mariaelena Roqué and the Carles Santos Company

 His sojourn in Berlin in 1986, invited by the Berlin Artists Programme, offered Santos the opportunity of presenting his music and shows outside of Catalonia. In Berlin he worked on the musical production Arganchulla, Arganchulla Gallac (1987), premièred in February 1987 at the Akademie der Künste. This was the first show in which Mariaelena Roqué assumed responsibility for the wardrobe and stage props and was co-author of the artistic direction. The aesthetics of Santos’ productions underwent a radical change thanks to the chromatic richness and sensual materials introduced by Mariaelena Roqué into the wardrobe and stage props. Santos appeared on stage dressed up in a costume made of oranges and wearing horns on his head, while Roqué pretended to urinate from the top of an altar dressed in white, making the water overflow over the stage. The impact and success of the show were considerable. As a result of his relationship with Mariaelena Roqué, Santos’ oeuvre acquires a sensuous and sexual dimension that had been insinuated in La boqueta amplificada, where sexual intercourse was simulated. The body and desire assume a prominent role that will lead to the sexual fantasies explored in La grenya de Pasqual Picanya [assessor jurídic- administratiu] (The Lock of Pasqual Picanya [Legal and Administrative Adviser], 1991/1993). In addition, Santos rediscovered photography at this time and interested himself in the image of his works. Suffice it to think of the record entitled Perturbación inesperada (Unexpected Disturbance, 1986), where Santos appears on the front sleeve, dressed and made-up as a woman in a baroque costume designed by Roqué, an on the back sleeve can be seen upside down, his skirt slightly open to show his penis. Another powerful image in black and white is the one Santos created for La grenya de Pasqual Picanya…, consisting of a woman’s metal stiletto heel on the piano keys, treading on the pianist’s tongue.

After Arganchulla, Arganchulla Gallac, Roqué became an indispensable collaborator in all of Santos’ spectaculars. Carles Santos’ association with Mariaelena Roqué is unstoppable. Over eighteen years Santos and Roqué, with their own independent company, have premièred fourteen highly complex original productions consisting of totally different stage and dramaturgic structures- a very unusual and admirable fact bearing in mind the cultural framework of the country and the scarcity of public resources they received. Founding the Carles Santos Company with Mariaelena Roqué in 1995 enabled Santos to free himself of the aspects of production and devote more time to creation, broadening his horizons paying special attention to photography.

Each new work by Santos is a surprise and a considerable artistic challenge. Santos abandons neither risk nor provocation. While Tramuntana Tremens (Tramontana Tremens, 1989) is a work for a choir of thirty-two singers, structured in eleven scenes or sequences, La grenya de Pasqual Picanya… is a work for a soprano, actors, piano and percussion. As usual, Santos wrote the text and the music, assumed the stage direction and shared the artistic direction with Mariaelena Roqué. In this case, Santos also created the unique stage space composed of a red room accessed through side doors, in the middle of which stood a piano and over the instrument hung a strange lamp. This cruel, sadistic and humorous satire of a legal and administrative adviser is a feverish and dream-like show structured in various scenes, representing the folly of the stage. Santos, at his prime, creates a highly personal and veritable musical theatre in the tradition of the most radical avant-garde exemplified by Artaud, Kantor and Pina Bausch.

The Santos Opera

Santos’ international acclaim and increasing prestige prompted a succession of performances and artistic proposals. On occasion of the celebration of the Olympic Games in Barcelona he was commissioned his first opera, Asdrúbila (1992). The project enabled Santos to exploit his brilliant imagination to the full, in a mythological story in which the leading role was played by a hermaphroditic character, symbolised by a dog called Asdrúbila. Inevitably, Santos creates an anti-opera, taking the musical and stage resources of traditional opera to the absurd.

Nonetheless, Santos finds opera’s ability to encompass all the arts starting from music especially attractive, which explains why many of his subsequent musical productions- Figasantos- Fagotrop, missatge al contestador: soparem a les nou (Figasantos- Fagotrop, Message on the Answering Machine: Dinner at Nine, 1996), La pantera imperial (The Imperial Panther, 1997), Ricardo i Elena (Ricardo and Elena, 2000), L’adéu de Lucrècia Borja (The Farewell of Lucretia Borgia, 2001), Lisístrata (Lysistrata, 2003) or Sama Samaruck, Samaruck Suck Suck (2002), the latter described as a circus opera by the composer himself- are, in fact, open works that expand the field of opera to embrace new artistic challenges. Just as we have expanded sculpture, which culminates in installation art, we have expanded opera: the Santos opera.

Santos has even accepted to stage, together with Roqué of course, operas from the traditional repertoire such as Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville, 2000) departing from his own theatrical and artistic language, an experience that led him to explore the oeuvre of the Italian composer in greater depth, thereby giving rise to El compositor, la cantant, el cuiner i la pecadora.

In actual fact, in a broad metaphoric sense, the term opera—derived from the Latin opus or work—is particularly suitable to define the unity, diversity, and complexity of Santos’ mature oeuvre. Thanks to the music, a persuasive and highly personal imaginary universe unfolds in the theatre, in art and in life. The same energy and freedom that Santos conveys through his work are exercised in his professional and personal life.

His participation as a composer and musical director in the ceremonies in connection with the Olympic Games in Barcelona and the Exposition Universelle in Seville in 1992 made him extremely popular. On these occasions Santos revealed his versatility as a composer and his ability to recreate popular music and to renew the presentation of music in public spaces. Santos resorted to the ceremonial and festive essence of the theatre as a space for collective celebration in unique musical productions such as Promenade Concert which, derived from an proposal made by Xavier Olivé, occupied the entire Fundació Joan Miró building in an audacious use of architectural space at the official opening of the centenary celebrations of Joan Miró’s birth in 1993. The cantata La veu de la terra (The Voice of the Earth, 1997), a tribute to the writer Joan Fuster premièred at the Valencia Bullring on the 26th of April of 1997, along with other events organised by his friend the Valencian activist and editor Eliseu Climent, reaffirmed Santos’ ideological and cultural commitment to the Catalan Countries.*

From La pantera imperial to the Goldberg Variations

 La pantera imperial is perhaps the most internationally successful production by the Carles Santos Company, establishing his reputation as an invaluable asset to contemporary theatre. La pantera imperial is a special homage to the great musician Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), whose compositions are one of the peaks of Western music. Upon reaching maturity, Santos decided to revisit one of the great masters of classical music. With a secret intention, he included the following legend, in brackets, as the subtitle of the show: (Dedicated, as in 1802, to the “Patriotic Admirers of True Musical Art”). The phrase is taken from the first biography of Bach published in 1802 by Forkel, considered to be one of the creators of modern musicology. Santos’ profound and ironic rereading of Bach is a genuine updating of the latter’s music starting from theatrical play. “The first step is to take Bach out of the specific field of music and take him to make-up, wardrobe, lighting, words, if necessary to the inevitable movement, the theatrical game—in short, to the dramatic reading of a musical giant,” wrote Santos in the text that presented the show. Far from a weak or superficial post-modernist stance, Santos’ critical rereading of Bach is extremely personal and sincere. At one of the key moments in La pantera imperial, Santos knelt down with his back to the audience to play Prelude No. 2 in C minor, one hand on the keyboard of each of the two grand pianos facing him. Having completed his performance, he remained lying face down, his arms open in the form of the cross. Offering the body of the performer to the spiritual genie of the music, Santos stresses the performer’s extreme humility and discipline faced with the mysticism of Bach’s music. The triumph of music in La pantera imperial is not an imposture but the personal conviction that music and musical practice form an essential part of his existence. A similar gesture—Santos lying face up on the grand piano, his arms in the form of the cross emulating the figures of Christ crucified portrayed in Renaissance and Baroque painting—has inspired the image chosen for this exhibition entitled Carles Santos. Long Live the Piano!

Learning about the creative process involved in the making of La pantera imperial proves to be extremely interesting, for it provides an insight into how Santos’ oeuvre expands in multiple directions. This rhizoid process may grow in all directions, triggered by accumulation and by derivation, and yet it always returns to its original nucleus: music, the piano. From music to the theatre, from the theatre to photography, from photography to film, from film to music. The latest project involving Bach is a film inspired by the German composer’s Goldberg Variations and conceived in collaboration with Pere Portabella, the shooting of which will begin at the Fundació Joan Miró as a part of the Carles Santos. Long Live the Piano! venture. As is the case with other Santos productions, although perhaps more explicitly, the various stages of production of La pantera imperial (a true work in progress) have been shown in public. In the form of a New Year’s Eve party, on the 31st of December of 1996 a first approximation to La pantera imperial was presented, on a dining-room-cum-stage flanked by bars of ice, at La Vinya de Comediants art centre in Canet de Mar under the title Sopar Bach (Bach Dinner). A second approximation, in a form closer to that of the end result, took place at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt in May 1997. It included the show’s regular cast, two grand pianos, the harpsichord, the violin, the tenor and the actresses, as well as the large busts made of foam rubber that reproduce the most well-known image of Bach and are the most important part of the scenery, demarcating the performance space. At a third longer approximation, premièred at the Peralada Castle Festival on the 13th of August, Santos added a choir to the usual ensemble.

During the process of creation Santos took the photographs that formed the Sèrie B-A-C-H, Tema amb variacions (B-A-C-H Series. Theme with Variations, 1997-1998). Santos placed a small bust of Bach made of white plastic, an enlarged version of which was used in the scenery of the show—a metaphoric icon, a souvenir or a fetish—in the most unlikely of spots that form a part of his everyday life. Wrapped in silver foil, in the middle of two fresh hen’s eggs, amidst sardines, under tap water, inside a goldfish bowl, in the middle of a henhouse, inside a vagina, inside a fridge, buried in the ground… Bach is alive. He is not a corpse from the history of Western music. The idea is clear—Bach’s music had to be brought into everyday life. For Santos, music, art and life are one and the same thing. In this sense, his concept of creation and of cultural practice can be likened to that of Michel de Certeau, the author of The Practice of Everyday Life.

Carles Santos’ ways of doing are those of a musician who extends his research to other multiple forms of creation. For Santos, music, the stage, art and film are forms of cultural combat, dissidence and resistance against the violence of established power and of the homogenising and impoverishing cultural industry. The bases of liberating cultural practice and action must be sought and created in everyday life and labour, in popular lifestyles and cultural tradition.

Popular Culture, Humour, Eroticism and The Sacred

Like Miró and Brossa, Santos is a great lover of popular culture—his instrumental and band music clearly derives directly from popular Valencian music. In addition to music, verbal language and cooking are perhaps those aspects of popular culture that are more deeply rooted in Santos’ oeuvre. Plays on words, alliterations and the invention of a personal language are constant features in the verbal art of Carles Santos, a veritable sound poet, as exemplified by the splendid titles of his spectaculars: Arganchulla, Arganchulla Gallac, Tramuntana Tremens, Figasantos- Fagotrop, missatge al contestador: soparem a les nou, Sama Samaruck, Samaruck Suck Suck and La porca i vibriàtica teclúria. Or by the surprising and sonorous names of his characters: Asdrúbila and Reblata Reblata Chovera in Asdrúbila, Desidèria Caxau, Antonio Bragot de Llibòria and Dagadok in L’esplèndida vergonya del fet mal fet (The Splendid Shame of Doing Wrong), Fetapoc la valenciana, Purilla Cáceres, Muac, Muec, Muic, Muoc, Muuc, Figasantos-Fagotrop and Macrino in Figasantos- Fagotrop, missatge al contestador: soparem a les nou, Lligotària the pianola in L’esplèndida vergonya del fet mal fet and La pantera imperial, Donaxona, Badobar and Virila in Ricardo i Elena, Adonala-Naladona, Duranga, Culatre, Robafina and Xacota in Sama Samaruck, Samaruck Suck Suck, Sorelló, Xoxània, Xoxònia, Xixínia, Xixònia, Fotrilla, Babúrnia, Virulat de Catralla and Potranca in La meua filla sóc jo. Santos’ verbal inventiveness clearly embraces the carnival world of Joan Brossa, the French Surrealist tradition of Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel, the Valencian tradition of burlesque, satire and eroticism and the sound experiments made by members of the Fluxus group, although the verbal, rhythmical and musical imagination are features unique to Santos.

The presence of food and of the sensual pleasure of eating as an integral part of everyday life is another of the characteristic features of Santos’ oeuvre. The Pantagruelian meals and the colourful and baroque presence of food in Asdrúbila, Figasantos- Fagotrop, missatge al contestador: soparem a les nou, Ricardo i Elena and El compositor, la cantant, el cuiner i la pecadora play a fundamental role in the action and the props of these unique operas. Suffice it to mention the backcloths that appear in Ricardo i Elena, with photographic enlargements of pictures of a salad, king prawns and arròs a banda, a Valencian rice dish made with fish and shellfish.

Santos’ satirical and absurd sense of humour, his interest in food and revelry and his festive vision of the world partake of the transgressive and anti-authoritarian tradition of popular culture, studied by Mikhail Bakhtin in his dissertation The Work of Rabelais and the Popular Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Inspired by Valencian and Mediterranean customs, Santos views this tradition in a personal, critical and contemporary light, recreating it in his oeuvre.

However, one of the most impressive elements in Carles Santos’ most recent oeuvre is the importance granted to sex and eroticism, as in the productions Ricardo i Elena, L’adéu de Lucrècia Borja, Sama Samaruck, Samaruck Suck Suck, Lisístrata and La meua filla sóc jo, or in the photographic series La polpa de Santa Percínia de Clavicònia and Caligaverot (1998), made in collaboration with Mariaelena Roqué. The symbol of the nails in the Nazarene tradition of the Passion, clearly visible in the image of the two hands nailed to the staffs, forms a sharp contrast with the fish hooks, phalluses and red high-heel shoes in La polpa de Santa Percínia de Clavicònia, granting these images a marked sadistic and fetishistic air. The mixture of religious iconological elements with others taken from popular tradition, music and pornography opens the door to multiple interpretations. In the case of Caligaverot it is the actual arrangement of the photographs in the form of the cross and the insistence on the use of the crucifix, along with the images of lasciviousness and sensuality such as the lipstick or the anal penetration, that grant an obscene and anti-religious air to the images. Often at the limits of representation and excess, close to kitsch and bad taste, Santos’ photographic images follow in the anti-clerical and licentious footsteps of unorthodox Surrealists such as Bataille and Buñuel.

Can any sacred image resist Carles Santos’ iconoclastic and carnival enthusiasm? In L’adéu de Lucrècia Borja the host becomes an orange and in Ricardo i Elena the cross is sensitive to all sorts of fetishism. We must not forget that Santos was born in 1940 and suffered the omnipresence of the Church and of religious symbols in all the spheres of private and public life that characterised those dark years. In many photographs we see concert halls of the time in which crucifixes were prevalent features. It is therefore not surprising that over the years Santos should have raked up the personal traumas triggered by an age characterised by repression to an extreme barely conceivable today. For a materialist epicurean such as Santos, perhaps only the image of woman and of music survive in the category of the sacred, as a source of fertility, love and human pleasure.

Ricardo i Elena

Even though Santos’ oeuvre contains numerous autobiographical elements, in no work are these as explicit as they are in the opera Ricardo i Elena. “Ricardo and Elena were my parents’ names. Ricardo i Elena is the title of this work.This might lead people to think that it’s an autobiographical work or at least has some reference to my family background. However, that is not the case.This work, like all the previous ones, doesn’t have a linear plot, although the music acts as a narrative thread; on this occasion, the music is shaken up by the bold aesthetics,” declared Santos, with notable irony, in the programme of the show. Ricardo i Elena is undoubtedly an autobiographical introspection, a journey back to his origins, to his personal, musical, religious and cultural roots, a return to Vinaròs. To such a point that Santos himself, in the show, performs Laurentio Perosi’s Creed of the Pontifical Mass seated at the harmonium, a piece that he himself had repeatedly played at the church in Vinaròs. In another surprising sequence in the work, the spectators witness the gradual appearance on stage of a host of family portraits, landscapes and pictures painted by Ricardo Santos, the artist’s father, hanging by threads. As occurs in all autobiographical works, the borders between reality and fiction in Ricardo i Elena are indiscernible—the only possible truth to be found in the ten sequences of this unique opera sung in Latin lies in the mythicisation of moments, conversations and specific acts.

Unpredictable and original, as always, Santos surprised everyone with Ricardo i Elena. Stunning images such as a large iron cross falling on top of the piano sum up the cathartic spirit of the opera. Little could viewers suspect the appearance of tightrope walkers in the work was the premonition of a subsequent spectacular, the circus opera Sama Samaruck, Samaruck Suck Suck. Even less could they imagine that one year later the Carles Santos Company would première a work such as El compositor, la cantant, el cuiner i la pecadora inspired by Rossini’s oeuvre.

 No al no

 On the 24th of August of 2002 Carles Santos premièred No al no (No to No, 2002), a long piece for a solo piano, at the Edinburgh Festival. After having presented the spectaculars L’esplèndida vergonya del fet mal fet, La pantera imperial and Ricardo i Elena, he decided to concentrate on his work as a compo-ser and piano performer. In the end, there will always be the piano. Since his recording of La porca i vibriàtica teclúria in 1994 Santos had composed and performed a musical continuum, a long piano piece that could be considered a work in progress that he modified over the years. Under different titles such as Codi o estigma? (Code or Stigma?, 1998), No al no or Transfer (2005) Santos continued to work on his piano work, posing complex technical challenges, incorporating his profound know-ledge of the oeuvre of Cage, Stockhausen and Ligeti while advancing along totally personal paths that involve musical and theatrical action, in some cases even playing the keyboard with his fists, his arms, his head or what looks like a billiard ball.

No al no is a very meaningful title. It could be the slogan of Santos’ confrontational aesthetics. At a time of ideological and modernist crises, faced with self-indulgence, the return to order, post-modern rhetoric and sterile nihilism, Santos emphasises the creative imagination, a critical and combative culture that is more propositional than nostalgic or conservative. “Singularity is subversive,” wrote the poet Edmond Jabès. Santos’ entire oeuvre appears as a unique, multiple and fascinating vital chant that seduces and excites, rises up, singular and subversive, against the alienation and consumerism of our post-capitalist society, in favour of knowledge, pleasure and creative freedom.

The Art of the Piano.

Pianos intervinguts

On the one hand we have piano artists and on the other, artists who have made the piano into a work of art. Santos’ case, as Josep Ruvira has written, is unique. In Santos no borders exist between music, drama and art. The piano is not only Santos’ key instrument, as a musical composer and performer, it is also the most emblematic symbol in his imaginary universe, an important presence in his films, musical productions and visual images. The piano becomes the most forceful of metaphors in Santos’ multidisciplinary language, which is why this instrument is the focal point of the exhibition Carles Santos. Long Live the Piano! Well-known pianos include those by Dalí, such as the one in the famous painting Hallucination partielle: Six images de Lénine sur un piano (Partial Hallucination. Six Images of Lenin on A Piano, 1931), or the pianos covered in felt by Joseph Beuys. Now, in addition, we have Carles Santos’ pianos. With his ‘tampered pianos’ produced in 2006, Santos extends his creative energy towards the field of sculpture. In fact, he has already created a number of sculptural objects, often with Mariaelena Roqué, for the theatrical spaces in his productions. One of the most outstanding items of furniture in the house in Ricardo i Elena, for instance, made of large-scale metallic structures, is the huge wall piano that collides with other theatrical elements and with the actors as it makes its way round the stage. However, the most spectacular stage artefact of those created by Santos is no doubt the mechanical pianola, Lligotària, the extraordinary character in L’esplèndida vergonya del fet mal fet and in La pantera imperial.

Santos alters and transforms the pianos, turning them into powerful devices that sum up his fascinating, poetic and transgressive universe. These include a piano with a propeller, a piano with enormous ears, a pornographic piano, a piano made of oranges, fish hooks, fishing lines and a net, or the conceptual piano that consists of the life-size photograph of a wall piano and that same piano wrecked, smashed to pieces. In this conceptual piano Santos revisits the action he performed for the film Miró sculpteur made with Clovis Prévost. A piano is a piano is a piano…

The Exhibition and the Catalogue

 Carles Santos. Long Live the Piano! intends to introduce into the exhibition space music, drama, film and art in action, in short, the wide range of disciplines that have shaped Santos’ rootlike, versatile oeuvre that has no clear-cut borders.

The show has a documentary dimension, consisting of works of art, posters, programmes, magazines, books, records, scores, films, videos, texts and photographs that cover Santos’ entire creative trajectory. Art works by artists and friends whom he admires or with whom he has worked, such as Joan Brossa, Antoni Tàpies, Josep Guinovart and Jordi Benito, are displayed in the first section of the exhibition. The films by Pere Portabella and Clovis Prévost, made in collaboration with Santos, alongside Santos’ own films and videos, are screened in areas specifically devoted to the cinema.

The exhibition also has a more playful and theatrical dimension that will favour the viewers’ immersion in Santos’ imaginary universe, offering them the possibility of being present at (and sharing) the show and live musical performance as a key part of his creative philosophy. A wide range of stage props and costumes made by Mariaelena Roqué for productions such as La grenya de Pasqual Picanya (assessor jurídic administratiu), La pantera imperial, Ricardo i Elena, L’adéu de Lucrècia Borja and Sama Samaruck, Samaruck Suck Suck, presented in a theatrical atmosphere, seem to draw us closer to his dramatic and oneiric space. The mechanical pianola, Lligotària, becomes a surprising mobile artefact that moves around the exhibition halls. Carles Santos’ own piano, a magnificent Imperial Bösendorfer, is placed in one of the sections so that the artist, or anyone else, can rehearse or play in situ, thereby converting the exhibition into an experimental laboratory, a space for exchanging communication with the audience at certain specific times.

Finally, Santos himself has created new works especially for this project -the tampered pianos, wall pianos that have been altered or transformed to become artistic artefacts or possible fictional characters for a new musical production.

Moreover, the project has prompted the shooting of a couple of short films by Pere Portabella, in collaboration with Carles Santos, inside the Fundació Joan Miró galleries, shortly before the installation of the exhibition: some scenes for the new film Variacions Goldberg (Goldberg Variations) and a recording of Santos’ piano actions which, after the processes of montage and editing, will be screened inside the show.

As regards the catalogue, the most distinguished experts, connoisseurs, friends and collaborators of Carles Santos have been invited to contribute their thoughts and know-ledge. The book assembles and documents the works on display and presents a selection of Santos’ own theoretical and creative texts, a catalogue of his musical, theatrical and filmic oeuvre, and a biographical and bibliographical summary to facilitate the access to and the study of his oeuvre.

Along these lines, mention must be made of the contributions of books such as Finestra Santos (Santos Window, 1982) by J. M. Garcia Ferrer and Martí Rom and El caso Santos (The Santos Case, 1996) by Josep Ruvira, of the studies published by Marta Cureses, the catalogue of the exhibition dedicated to Carles Santos that officially opened the Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló in 1999 and many other facts, documents and photographs provided by a number of people, without which the catalogue would have remained incomplete.

I should also like to thank, of course, the institutions and individuals who have worked on the exhibition over more than one year, but above all, I am grateful for the patience, the passion and the friendship shown by Carles Santos and Mariaelena Roqué, the true architects of the project that has now materialised.

T. N.

* Països Catalans, in the original, are the Catalan-speaking territories.