Tàpies’ Chairs. Concert of MUOM

Tàpies’ Chairs is a multidisciplinary sound action organised by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, in collaboration with the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, as part of the Tàpies Centenary Year. It focuses on the voice and the word as a sound accompaniment to oral memory. In each session, out of a total of thirteen, an artist will produce a performative exercise, using the chair as the main element, in order to reconnect with Tàpies’ creative universe by means of expressive languages and a contemporary staging.

Concert of MOUM

The first session will be conducted by MOUM, an overtone singing vocal ensemble based in Barcelona. MUOM’s music is unique and atemporal, inspired by contemporary currents as well as diverse traditional cultures. Rich in clearly perceptible harmonics, without using the word, it explores the full potential of the human voice in its purest state. MUOM creates sound landscapes by means of slow and sustained polyphonies, the superposition of harmonics, the use of visual elements and an unconventional treatment of the stage. 

One single note, like a single chair, may not seem much. But as Tàpies said, if we look deeply and let ourselves ‘be carried everywhere by whatever offers itself to our gaze’, we will perceive the implicit life in an object, ‘the hands and the sweat of the person who carved the wood that was once a robust tree, […] the loving work of the person who made it, […] the weariness it comforted…’. Equally, if we listen to a single note with an attentive and innocent ear, we will discover an unsuspected richness that superficial listening can never capture. A world of intensities, harmonics and a thousand and one oscillations that we had never heard, yet were always there waiting to be perceived, will be opened to us.