2026
THE SOUND BEFORE THE MUSIC
A 440 is an acoustic work by Vicens Vacca, released as a limited-edition CD, which continues his exploration of the boundaries between music, conceptual art, and listening. The piece begins with an extremely simple gesture: the collective performance of the note A —440 Hz— by every instrument available in an orchestra. What is usually nothing more than the tuning that precedes a concert becomes the work itself.
The first performance took place in 2018 at Iklectik in London, performed by the London Improvisers Orchestra. Three years later, in 2021, the Orquestra Simfònica de Castelló presented a new performance at the Auditori de Castelló. The version included on this CD, however, is the recording Vicens Vacca made in late 2016 at Dènys Sanz’s studio.
None of these realisations —neither the CD version nor the concert performances— has adhered strictly to the written instructions for A 440. This gap between the conception of the piece and its actual execution is not an external accident, but rather a characteristic that Vicens Vacca seems to embrace in some of his works and compositions. The instruction establishes a situation; the performance shifts it, introducing deviations and variations in timing, intensity, tuning, and physical presence. The work is not invalidated by this imprecision: it works “wrong, but right.” It mutates.
The piece can be associated with a tradition of twentieth-century musical avant-gardes that shifted attention away from composition and towards the conditions of listening. It echoes John Cage and his desire to listen to what lies outside musical discourse; Giacinto Scelsi and his extreme focus on a single note; La Monte Young and the persistence of sustained frequencies; and Yves Klein and his orchestral experiments.
There is also a more personal reference: No Pussyfooting (1973), by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. Vacca heard the recording played in Granollers in 1973, immediately after King Crimson’s legendary concert on their Larks’ Tongues in Aspic tour. As the concert had ended and the audience began to leave the venue, the recorded music acted as an invisible extension of the event. It was an experience that remained alive for decades and indirectly led to the composition of A 440.
Within Vicens Vacca’s artistic trajectory, A 440, now marking its tenth anniversary, extends a sustained investigation into the transformation of ordinary actions, cultural conventions, and seemingly insignificant gestures into devices of perception. It is not so much about producing new sounds as it is about changing the conditions under which we listen to them.
A 440 is not a work about music; it is the result of exploring the precise moment when music has not yet begun, but sound already completely occupies, and affects, the space.