Astor Anacrónico (Anachronic Astor) is a sound and light installation that pays homage to the work of Astor Piazzolla. Conceived as a pagan temple, the installation offers a transverse reading of the thinking and poetics of the Argentine composer, inviting the spectator to a transtemporal listening of his work. In it, four moments of his career are intertwined, each of them identified with recordings of his voice and his glorious musical ensembles. As an epiphanic experience, the installation “brings up” milestones of Piazzolla’s career, incarnated in four of his groups: the Typical Orchestra of 1946, the Quintets, the Electronic Octet, and the nonet with which he performed at the Colón Theatre in Buenos Aires.

In a square room divided in four zones organized around the corners, each zone corresponds to a historical time, where the sounds of each ensemble come from a different speaker. In this multichannel composition, diverse pasts coexist and show their consonances and discordances, proposing a new and mystical temporality. The light choreography accompanies the sonic development, signaling the activation of those space-times and contributing to the dramatic and transtemporal experience proposed by the installation.

The orchestration was thought of as the literal arrangement of sounds in space. A large part of the experience of Astor Anacrónico is constituted by the possibility of simultaneously listening to these four Piazzolla bands. The processes with which I manipulated the fragments of music were guided by the challenge of making the heterogeneous sonorities from which I started coexist. These treatments come at times to blur the original identity of such fragments, favoring timbre aspects and the construction of a more minimalist narrative. At other times, the fragments of music appear without modification and allow to illustrate what Piazzolla says.