In 1922 composer and self-described “noise-maniac” Carmen Barradas gave a groundbreaking piano recital in Madrid. There she performed her elegant, unsettling piano miniature Esperando el coche (Waiting for the car), which called for a small bell to be tied around the wrist of the performer. Her request was strikingly similar to the prepared piano techniques that John Cage would make famous a generation later.
Barradas was also fascinated by the idea of graphic notation, an interest spurred by her long collaboration with her artist brother Rafael Barradas. Her work with graphic notation pre-dates Morton Feldman’s Projection 1 by nearly thirty years.
You’d think someone who had explored these ideas so early in the century would be well-known and fêted. You’d be wrong. Scholarship on Carmen Barradas is relatively scarce, and almost none has appeared in English. (Accordingly, take everything in this entry with a grain of salt; I’m no great Spanish speaker.) Despite the dearth of information, one thing is clear: this impoverished Latin American daughter of immigrants was a strikingly original musical pioneer, and her ideas deserve a closer look.
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Song of the Lark 