Pere Vicalet is clear about it. It does not follow fashions. Nor does he make music for all audiences. "That would lead me to make art cake”. And none of that. He prefers risk. "Art must be next to the precipice, you can fall or not but at that moment you think and grow."
At only 29 years old he managed to be the youngest Director of the Young Symphonic Band of the Federation of Musical Societies of the Valencian Community. In addition, he is a professor. Opposition that I manage to approve being also the youngest in the Valencian Community to achieve it. He has won the Young Talent Award of the Valencian Community and thus, a long list of achievements make him one of the promising young Spanish in the technological-musical field.
We chatted with him at one of the stops to his hometown, Gata de Gorgos. Now his "base of operations" is in Valencia, although it is rare on the weekend that he is not in one or another city directing.
Vicalet is not a musician. Is much more. He is a multidisciplinary artist who perfectly combines his three facets: direction, composition and digital artist. Therefore, its growth and public recognition is unparalleled.
But how did Vicalet start? It occurs to me that so much passion for music has to come from the family, but I'm wrong. “In my house there are no musicians. When you are little you sign up for several things and in the end you decide. I decided the music ”. He was clear about it but wanting is not always enough, you also have to have talent and he had it. He entered the Conservatory of Music a year earlier than usual. Dénia. “That already meant a change for me because when I was 12 I had to go to school in Dénia and I took the train every day to go to study.”
But the conservatory was not the only musical touch of that adolescent Pere. There was another kind of music. The electronic. The one of Cat took advantage of the time they let her go out to party to DJ in the bars and pubs of the moment in her town. "I played two records, controlled the lights ... For me that was a world apart," he tells me.
Although, as in any other profession or stage of life, there are stops. And Gata's musician needed one. He finished the conservatory and left music to study Industrial Engineering. That impasse It served him to catch air and strength. “The first year of my degree it was clear to me that he wanted to leave it to me. I did it and I went to study Composition and Musical Teaching ”.
DJ continued a while longer. He was DJ of the Terra in Ondara and created the radio program House Distortion with Simon Mas on Activa FM. With him, he toured all the towns in the area.
Then came the Erasmus to Budapest, a journey in which he delves into Electroacoustic Composition or, what is the same, compose through a loudspeaker.
A concert in which the performer is a speaker? I ask him. "Exactly. There the sound possibilities are many ”. He explains it with passion, he almost makes what he does seem easy to me but you have to have talent for it and Pere has it.
Talent to create the software All in one, which coordinates music, lights and video using sensors in a nightclub. Or another, Collapse, a work of music that is a computer program that emits everyday sounds. "Depending on the time, day and moment you open it, it sounds one way or another."
And ingenuity, to make the Wii or XBOX remote a sensor that, after reprogramming it, makes the sound he wants. "I was going to DJ at the discos, I would connect the remote to the computer and shoot. There I began to mix the two worlds, acoustics and electronics."
Pere Vicalet is an artist of the present, but also of the future. It is always one step ahead. It creates synergies of the classic and the current, fuses sound, video and lights and achieves surprising results for the most knowledgeable, while awakening the curiosity of the general public.
As I said, is Professor of Performing Arts in the specialty of Musical Technology by the Superior Conservatory of Music of Valencia. There, he is now a professor of Sonology.
“There had been no competitive exams for 30 years. I applied and approved. The curiosity that I have always had has helped me a lot. Seven years before, I had been going as a listener to Jazz Harmony classes, musical perception classes between specialized courses and all that added up ”.
Now he combines teaching with his three facets (direction, composition and musical artist). "But which one do you prefer?" And as if it were his three daughters, he is unable to choose. Of course, each time focuses on one because "all three at the same time do not work." "I do not go straight, I go spiraling and that allows me to have a much broader vision."
Theirs is the risk. That is clear to me. You work in a difficult sector. In fact, very few manage to live solely on it. The style of music he does is not easy either, something totally different and less known. But despite this, At 34 he has already achieved achievements that many never reach.
Although for him, "talent in management reaches 80 years"So if we listen to him, this is just Vicalet's principle.
