Beats of all times About the earliest music of all time, musicologists can only guess. There are no scores, there are no written sources, and with archaeological finds it is often unclear in what way objects could have had a function as musical instruments. So we do not know for sure what the first music might have sounded like, but we do know that music was always made. One of the most primary ways of making sound is by tapping or rubbing objects against each other, which today we would call percussion. Once there are two consecutive sounds, we can speak of rhythm and tempo. If the time interval between several rhythmic impulses is stable, there is a 'beat', a heartbeat in the same way that our heart pulses at a more or less constant speed. In The Well Tempered Circle, Stefaan Quix starts from the observation that rhythmic patterns were among the first building blocks of music, and that this is still the case today. Even though the sources of sound have changed, the beat is still an important component of much music, especially in popular culture. Here, as in other works, where he takes primary colours or unambiguous counting systems, for example, he also opts for an essentialist concept. He builds the music entirely out of beats, which, however, are combined with each other in complex ways. Thus, the sounding result becomes anything but monotonous (or better monorhythmic).

For this special performance, the audience is placed in the centre of a circle and surrounded by eight musicians. They only play with carefully selected boulders at first and then explore other materials such as wooden sticks and triangles. The introduction of electronics is not a disruption of the starting point, but rather a logical continuation. Just as the first tools (musical instruments included) were an extension of human hands, electronic devices today are an extension of our daily actions. Besides, the underlying heartbeat of the composition is determined by a computer, and not by a conductor or human timekeeper. When listening to The Well Tempered Circle, you can constantly switch between different listening positions. Sometimes you can discern rhythmic patterns within one voice, other times you can hear the interaction between two or more musicians producing a composite rhythm together. At times, all the rhythmic impulses merge into one overall sound, like the paint dots of a pointillist painting can make areas of colour and shapes. The spatial distribution of the sound sources literally and figuratively provides an extra dimension.

Klaas Coulembier