"Economic Concert" Oier Etxeberria at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge

Whether outdoors, in an open field or in the empty part of a theater; whether it is an invitation to tread through mud or walk on the firmament, the murmur of the concert always brings us back to the same question: what kinds of states does music produce? And, from here, the questions multiply. Especially because the word "state" refers not only to the ups and downs of the soul, but also to Reason with a capital R: the organization that administers and shapes a territory. That is why any notion of stability must be spelled out, punctuated, and vocalized.

In principle, we lack evidence to understand how sonic forms become archetypes for jurisdiction. Nevertheless, no matter how weak these indications may be, at some point affinities are resolved in a "golden rule," a melodic line that affirms how the harmony between the fluctuation of money and the formation of meaning is not purely accidental. Then, upon voicing certain names, things seem to be resolved: oikos, echo, economy. Their arithmetic excesses produce folds, cosmological structures, civic forms. This is how Pythagoras understood it when he discovered the foundations of harmony by following the ringing of five hammers. A foundry, a space destined for lavoro, a staging in the style of Einstürzende Neubauten, the Berlin band from the eighties. Can anyone imagine a more fitting setting for a scholar determined to dissect, with numerical exactitude and calculation, tonality and atonality, the concert and the disconcert?

The magic of numbers conveys many levels of mystical intellection. In time, it will become an indispensable tool to produce shared lessons, as well as a general perception of the common good. It must be acknowledged that, in this respect, Christian mysticism has always had a certain aesthetic predilection for musical forms. For the Church Fathers, hymns are artifacts capable of giving shape and direction to the formless. A suprasensible/statistical science in a latent state. In the end, a mass only arises when we have many counted units-whether a people, a flock, or a choir, all count the same-and what constitutes a person as a unit is simply the song of praise, since only by being totally committed to the object of their praise does a person constitute themselves as the center of their being.

Economic ideals that operate as they access the inner chamber of intimacy. Where theology, unperturbed, waits-in the closet-or a certain divinization of the sacred, if you wish. In this way, any approach to the unknown can be reduced to idolatry of something already existing. Shouts, whistles and applause, angelic choirs and algorithms. Wonders, in any case, that succeed in invoking the voice of the people-what is not known what it is or how many there are-and displaying it as a single political body.

The success of physics in defining and stabilizing pitch as an acoustic phenomenon gave rise to a new prism through which to view nature. From this examination emerges a new economy or, rather, a metaphysical force based on mathematical awakening and the progressive mathematization of things.