Intemperie n°1, by Nicolás Carrasco: the power of a verbal score that emerges as a listening device

Abstract

The question about what becomes audible and visible in the emergence of a musical encounter in which performers, instruments, score, sounds, place and audience come together has appeared in recent decades as an impulse that has energized both the creation of works such as musical practices and speeches. This is how an incessant production of verbal scores has arisen –composed exclusively by words– that in their actualizing process allow us to think not only about the sound plane that emerges from them, but also about the multiplicity of the qualities of the situation in the one that can be done. This problem has opened up various reflections about the power of a score as a text, that is, about the ways in which we can make sense of the signs, the margins, what the writing of this device says and hides. This article aims to stress these issues based on the analysis of a verbal score by the composer Nicolás Carrasco, called Intemperie n°1, whose notation dismisses all interpretative delineation focused on emitting sounds to give way to the deployment of a unique listening practice.