Músicas habladas

Músicas habladas (spoken musics) emerges from the desire to create a musical experience based on the two lectures John Cage composed in the mid-20th century. Building upon Cage’s work, Llorenç Barber, Montserrat Palacios, and Asier Puga have developed a new approach to these celebrated lectures, revealing the musical potential of language through an exploration of listening.

In the 1950s, composer John Cage wrote and presented two fundamental texts for understanding his artistic thinking: Lecture on Nothing (1950) and Lecture on Something (1951). Although the two lectures appear to move in opposite directions, together they form a diptych that reflects on art, silence, language, and listening.

Lecture on Nothing challenges the traditional idea of a lecture as a transmission of information. From the outset, Cage states that he has nothing to say, and that precisely because of this, he is speaking. The central idea is not the communication of a message, but rather the creation of an experience of time and listening. The text follows an extremely precise rhythmic structure—with repetitions, pauses, and sections—similar to that of a musical score. In this way, the lecture becomes a kind of sonic composition, a laboratory of listening made of words, silences, and durations.

By contrast, Lecture on Something functions as an ironic and complementary response to the previous text. If in the first lecture Cage insists that he has nothing to say, here he seems to acknowledge that, in some way, one always ends up saying “something.” Yet this “something” is neither a clear content nor a fixed message. The text continues to employ similar formal procedures—repetition, rhythmic structures, and fragmentation—while adopting a more reflective attitude towards the very act of communication.

Drawing from this foundation, Barber, Palacios, and Puga’s proposal unfolds as a scenic and sonic device in which the spoken word becomes musical material: rhythm, timbre, duration, and silence function as structural elements of the performance. Through a precise exploration of tempo, accents, breathing, and extended silences, each fragment of the text emerges as a sonic event. Listening thus ceases to be a passive act and becomes the central axis of the experience, both for the performers and for the audience, who are invited to inhabit the temporalities, pauses, and voids that shape the discourse.

Rather than a recreation of Cage’s original lectures, this proposal offers a living and contemporary re-reading that transforms the stage into a laboratory of perception. Here, the audience experiences the text as an open score and the act of listening itself as a creative practice.

As Llorenç Barber writes in his book on John Cage: “Cage is not novelty, he is history. And a history that, in any case, we affect, cage, and colour.”

Artistic and technical team

Músicas Habladas (based on John Cage’s lectures)
with: Llorenç Barber, Montserrat Palacios, and Asier Puga

Translation: Marina Pedraza (Árdora, Madrid, 2000)
Production: Javi Yond – Klang Company

Premiere: Festival Ensems, Valencia (27-09-2026)

Pictures

Pictures: Contra Vent i Fusta

Commentaries

15/10/2026

«In this lecture-happening, the three musicians intervened in the texts by incorporating a wide variety of noises and numerous self-quotations: cowbells, jingle bells, little bells, cymbal crashes and whistling kettles, all woven into an apparently free-flowing discourse that was, in fact, meticulously fitted into a structure with a distinctly theatrical rhythm. Even Cage himself was present, in the form of a recording.

There was irony, a critical gaze towards the avant-garde of the 1950s, and a sense of memory: it was difficult not to recognise, in the playful exploration of voice, word, gesture and sound, the spirit of Flatus Vocis Trío, the experience that brought Barber together with Fátima Miranda and Bartolomé Ferrando (who was present in the room) in the 1980s to explore vocal experimentation.

Particularly beautiful was the performance of Only for Palacios, a song by Morton Feldman set to verses by Rilke, amid a general call to embrace slowness. The phonetic deconstruction of words, the echoes, reverberations and silences called for an active listener, compelled to construct their own experience.

Throughout, an idea by Feldman hovered over the proceedings in the form of a quotation: “sounds are just like shadows”.»

Bachtrack – Daniel Martínez Babiloni (critic) Read the full review here