Born in Madrid on January 5, 1941, this always “young” minstrel of Spanish electronic music is just eleven days away from reaching the age of 84. He died the day before yesterday, Christmas Day, in the Huelva town of Valverde del Camino, where he had lived since before the end of the century in which that artistic substance to which he dedicated his artistic life was born: electronics.
He was a very tall and lanky man, with a permanent smile and a very notable propensity to play. At the Alicante Festival, when I directed it, one year there was a workshop on inflatables for children to which I added all kinds of sounds—electronic, of course—depending on the route or the free will of the happy childhood that did not It occurred to him to ask what music was about. But, at the same time, he was a tremendously serious person, who had an unwavering faith in that artistic form that he saw born, grow and almost die in the terms of aesthetic speculation that he practiced.
Eduardo Polonio was born in Madrid and studied music at the Conservatory of his city, abandoning his studies in telecommunications engineering which, in any case, provided him with a technical base that he liked to hide. Polonio was one of the first, in the Madrid area, to immerse himself in live electronics, the one in which a couple of creators who looked like sound technicians manipulated mysterious devices in front of the audience, trying to convince that that could also be a concert He formed a partnership with the Argentine Horacio Vaggione in ALEA Música Electrónica Libre at the end of the sixties. He was at the prodigious Encuentros de Pamplona in 1972 and immediately presented a work signed by Luis de Pablo and José Luis Alexanco in Madrid. Interrupted Solitudebut with the two mysterious operators at the devices that spit sounds between Alexanco’s inflatable sculptures. It was one of the paradigmatic pieces of those Meetings.
From then on, Polonius became a restless soul. In 1976, Polonio moved to Barcelona and joined Phonos, ALEA’s rival laboratory in Catalonia. It didn’t have as much impact as when the footballer Figo went from Barça to Real Madrid, but, on a scale, it was something similar.
But Polonius was promiscuous by nature, perhaps following in the elusive wake of the electron, that elemental particle that had given its name to the first genuinely new musical movement of the 20th century. In 1983, he founded, with Rafael Santamaría, Obert-Art Actual, and together they proposed the Sis Dies d’art current festival for three years. In 1985, with Gabriel Brncic and Claudio Zulian, he created the group Multimedia, specialized in live electroacoustic music.
Since for Polonio creating groups and festivals was practically interchangeable with the production of his own works, in which collaboration with all kinds of artists was the norm, he developed a dizzying activity of which I only dare to mention the oldest and the most current. : To Kill it, performance with the painter Ferrán García Sevilla, at the Sala Zeleste in Barcelona, in 1977; until you reach A day like todayvideo in collaboration with Ana de Alvear, in 2023.
He has been co-founder of the Electroacoustic Music Association of Spain and was its president between 1988 and 1994. He has also received international awards such as the Magisterium of the Bourges International Grand Prix of Electroacoustic Music.
In 1996 he moved to Huelva and began to stir up the South of Spain. He founded Musical Creation and New Technologies, as well as the electroacoustic music studio Diafano. In 2000 he created the cycle Confluences, art and technology on the brink of the millenniumwith the support of the Junta de Andalucía. In 2006 he created and directed until 2008 the International Congress of Music and Contemporary Technologies of the University of Seville.
And, as if time were an elastic material for him, Polonius does not stop activating. In addition to dozens, perhaps hundreds of works or interventions, he leaves an enormous recording legacy and very interesting written publications, of which the recent appearance of a book-record on the occasion of his eightieth anniversary stands out: From serialism to multimedia.
Eduardo Polonio leaves, along with the gale of his countless activities, a group of friends who today feel like free electrons and regret his absence like that of a founding father. But, founder of what?, and with Polonio a debate closes, that of the status of electroacoustic music: is it an art? Is it a game? Is it the continuation of avant-garde music with other media? ? An old friend, now deceased, director of the Institute of Valencian Music, once told me that an important political leader from the “ye ye” era of Mayor Rita Barberá, told her one day: “I love electrocaustic music. (sic)”. Surely Eduardo Polonio would have laughed heartily.