Juan Hidalgo
Tamaran (Gocce di sperma per dodici pianoforti)

Among the composers and performers of avant-garde music from the early days, the Spanish (Canary-born) Juan Hidalgo is one of the least known, even though his production of serial works, concrete music, automatic performances, experimentalism inspired by various 20th-century schools (including the modernist eccentricities of Erik Satie) is vast and notable. Eventually, he opted for composition based on free association of ideas, an aleatoric form of sound-making very close to the golden (and philosophical) period of the American John Cage. Simultaneously, he dedicated himself to teaching, mainly in Spain and Canada, but also at the Venice Biennale (1976), photography, painting, poetry, and writing, publishing five volumes as a musicologist between 1957 and 1987, some of them funded by the sponsorship of the Canary Islands government, lands where he continues to be taken seriously.

Among his mentors and various collaborations, notable names stand out like Bruno Maderna, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, David Tudor, and Walter Marchetti with whom he started a long and fruitful collaboration in the field of sound and musical research, culminating in the various representations of "open music" and the international project/festival inspired by the Fluxus movement named Zaj (1964-1992). In his native Canary Islands, but also in Barcelona, he organized from the late '50s a series of events totally dedicated to "new music" and is likely the first Spaniard to engage in musical avant-garde, to the point of bringing in 1957 to the Darmstadt festival "Internationale ferienkurse für Neue Musik" a youthful and appreciated serial composition for chamber orchestra. In Italy, he is remembered mainly for the various collaborations with Marchetti and with Demetrio Stratos at the Re Nudo festival (Milan, 1974), for participating in various days of Milano Poesia, and for being among the organizers of the "treno preparato" (Bologna, 1978) in homage to John Cage. The farsighted and lamented Gianni Sassi of the independent label Cramps produced the two LPs of Juan Hidalgo printed in Italy: Tamaran "Gocce di sperma per dodici pianoforti" (1974) and Rose Sélavy (1977), in both Hidalgo appears as a composer but also as a performer.

Talking about serious avant-garde music (uncontaminated) is not easy, the matter is delicate and mandates an analysis that goes beyond what is normally seen (or perceived) as the result; listening to a record like "Tamaran" is not worthwhile unless an effort is made to delve into the context and mechanics that contributed to the creation of the written work at the base. Almost always, those who put records like this on the turntable are people who, beyond being interested in avant-garde, attempt within their limits to recreate it; I’ll be frank: it's more fun to perform Tamaran than to listen to its final result. But let's proceed in order, Hidalgo (unlike Stockhausen or Cage) was a politicized character, obviously of the left; this suggests that behind the extravagant title lies a specific meaning, a political meaning if you will. Indeed, by reading some notes present only in a very old CD edition one discovers a "sort of myth" according to which the ensemble of the twelve islands of the Gran Canaria archipelago (Tamaran precisely) arose following the ejaculation of Atlas, a God who apparently amused himself with self-arousal; some drops of sperm fall into the great ocean forming the noted islands, from Fuerteventura to Lanzarote, from Tenerife to Roque del Este, and so on. Continuing with the reading of the notes written by Hidalgo himself one ventures into an inexplicable cauldron of words that seem more like the modern version of the Nordic myth of "The Fatal Gold" than a rational explanation of the work. Perhaps Tamaran lacks an explicit meaning but I wanted to insist on that subtitle. After some research, more historical than musical, I think I’ve understood (but I'm not sure) to be facing a sort of homage to the native "land" that the composer wanted to launch through a subliminal message. An homage in the form of a warning, it seems; almost a piece of advice aimed at preserving a popular identity, tribal if you will, and simultaneously a political advice to avoid a contamination between the Spanish State (at the time still governed by "Franco's regime") and the self-determined archipelago of Tamaran.

Having said this I will try to explain how the entire sound material present in the album was produced and divided into two distinct suites only for necessities related to technical factors (side A and side B); live, Tamaran remains a single suite lasting forty minutes. The classic score (staved) has disappeared, replaced by a scheme in which the X-axis measures time divided into seconds while the Y-axis distinguishes the events to be generated through 12 grand pianos, among these events also appear parts of "silence" which will however add to the resonances produced by the preceding events. The performers are no longer required to know how to read music, they will only have to know how to precisely use a stopwatch and know how to produce harmonics through the piano strings. Total freedom is allowed in terms of choice, any note can be used as long as the harmonic scheme is respected throughout the passage of time; the division on the graph (X-Y) of the harmonic parts is distinguished by a series of numerical values, every identical number must correspond to the same note that the performer wishes to use. With each performance, in this way, Tamaran will always yield a different result but beware, no improvisation is allowed to the composer; the fact that the combination of sounds is in essence aleatoric does not mean that the pianist is completely anarchic, they must always rely on the above scheme. We are thus in front of an open, free work, but at the same time far from the concept of improvisation; those familiar with John Cage will more easily understand this contradiction. The twelve performers are required to perform an exercise in concentration at the human limit: follow the passing of time granted by the stopwatch in a "millimetric" manner, read the scheme, remember the seven chosen notes and perform the harmonic sounds by first pressing the finger on the three points (always marked in the scheme) of the chosen string (plus the point of the fundamental frequency) and only then pressing the relative key. Harmonics can also be generated by lightly touching or plucking the strings provided that all three touched points always generate submultiples of the entire length of the fundamental frequency which in the scheme is marked as the first point. From what has been described it can easily be understood how interesting and fun it is (even for those who are not pianists and do not know notes) to perform a composition like this, listening is most likely aimed only at measuring the degree of precision, concentration, and relaxation of the men in front of the twelve pianos. Now many will wonder how the final audio result is; assuming the version on record was made in the studio and not live, imagine the first prepared piano works of John Cage, remove the rhythm, remove the notes, remove the almost imperceptible melodic parts, remove everything that is not harmonic, the result is Tamaran.