sound installation / listening session
part 1 of 6:
part 3 of 6:
part 6 of 6:
In 2012, during artist Sarah Vanhee’s performance The Great public sale of unrealized but brillant ideas, Jacques Toulon bought The Adagio piece, a proposal by Sébastien Roux. For the thirtieth birthday of Foundation Cartier, Sébastien Roux proposed to realize his idea with the agreement of Jacques Toubon.
The Adagio Piece is a text score: “Collect every adagio written by a composer born between 1750 and 1850. Transpose them so that they all fit the same key. Stretch them to 2 hours. Superimpose them.”
This first realization is based on Beethoven’s adagios. Each adagio was tuned to C major, stretched to hours and then placed on a loudspeaker. The position of each loudspeaker was determined by the year of creation of the adagio it is playing back. The curved line formed by the loudspeakers becomes a time line that starts in 1794 (first adagio) and ends in 1826 (last adagio). The greater the number of instruments for each adagio, the larger the loudspeaker is.
The audience was free to move around the adagios, in order to create their own mix of the piece.
