The Fishes

Time, temporality and interiority in the constitution of a content for music

Abstract

The electroacoustic work Los Peces, by the Chilean composer Juan Amenábar (1922-1999), proposes a set of transformations of the piano sound that redirect our attention both to the timbre and the constitution of a temporality of the subject. Because one of the most relevant aspects of the work is that the procedures that aim to make the piano sound indistinguishable find their foundation not only in acoustics and electroacoustics, but also in temporal processes that compromise both the musical material and the subject who listens. In this sense, the work makes it clear that it is the activity of the subject's interiority that sustains both sound and time and that, due to the nature of music itself, ends up assigning content to the work. Particular attention will be paid here to the role of technology, since this is the territory where these processes and the relationships that constitute them are generated.