Tacet

By Tomás Brantmayer

100x58 cm Digital Image Inkjet printing on Canson Photosatin 270 gsm paper A.P.

"Tacet" is composed with two elements taken from the imaginary of sound as a physical phenomenon and music composition. Firstly, a spectrogram was generated from the recording of a real death rattle, a type of drowned breathing that appears in people who are in their last hours of life. Secondly, the musical indication "Tacet al fine" (from Latin, "He who remains silent until the end"), characteristic of the orchestral repertoire, which signals in the score the moment in which a musician must be silent, remaining like so until the end of the piece, while the rest of the orchestra continues playing. In musical composition, the idea of silence is also associated with “rest”, or simply put, a pause between two distinct sounds. In that sense, the work "Tacet" is nothing more than a symbolic manifestation of eternal rest, by referring to an explicit and natural “sound of death” and simultaneously to its linguistic representation in traditional musical scoring: Silence as the absence of life and at the same time as the absolute sound experience.