“Les Temps inachevés” of Patrick Bernatchez
* This post is also related to an article I wrote and published in magazine ETC MEDIA, which can be found on ÉRUDIT, here.
© Patrick Bernatchez. Image used courtesy of the artist.
Goldberg Experienced.01 has set Patrick Bernatchez on a sonic and plastic quest related to the qualities of music, allowing for a sense of time to be made visible, while articulating the gestus between the archaic and the modern.
In this particular work, the artist explores the elasticity of Johann Sebastian Bach’s original score of the Goldberg Variations by integrating a still life in the Dutch Baroque style into the workings of a grand piano—more or less in the manner of John Cage—in order to generate potential audio material.
Such re-envisioning of musical counterpoints resultes in a series of horizontal listening experiences of music to be made possible for the visitor, while the harmony provides us with a vertical experience, reminiscent of works by Steve Reich and Morton Feldman.
Through making the creative process of Goldberg Experienced.03/77k available to the visitor, Bernatchez allows for us to get a glimpse of his fascination with opposing various notions of time—past, present, and future, lived time, performative time, time travel, the space-time continuum; his modes of “composition” culminating, until now, with Goldberg Experienced.04 . Full article
