Writings
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I’m a queer, Quechua/Latinx composer from Washington, D.C. I am also non-binary, and use they/them pronouns. As the child of community organizers, I grew up immersed in concepts of critical consciousness and popular education, descendants of Paulo Freire’s work, and practices such as facilitation, active listening, and community music-making as daily exercises. My musical focus is centered on reconnecting those freedom-based practices to their applications commonly manifested in new music spaces such as agency-based procedures, perception-based decision-making, audience or communal participatory music-making, and Deep Listening (a practice developed by the late Pauline Oliveros). My background as a multi-racial, gender-queer musician puts me in a unique position to integrate my lived experiences into practical frameworks of empowerment and radical music-making.
I am developing a new musical Practice centered on the integration of intersectional feminism, liberation-based work, and critical pedagogy with compositional structures and interactions. Through expansion on ideas codified in the 70’s such as aleatoricism and agency-based communal music-making, I seek to reconnect the aforementioned applications with their roots in freedom-based social movements. By creating musics that explicitly manifest those ethics in musical spaces, I work closely with historically marginalized communities (the very small pockets who’ve gained access to ‘high-art’ musical spaces and institutions) to radically center their voices and musical decisions, subverting the effects of hyper-visibility and the white-washed nature of the classical canon. Locally, I seek to further expand that work in my home city of Washington, D.C. by facilitating opportunities for collaboration between trained and non-trained musicians in local community arts spaces. In parallel, I continue to create notated, timbre, and technique-rich musics that specifically center women of color and queer people of color in spaces traditionally not accessed by people of color in any practice other than ethnic or folkloric musics. Recently, in my recent piece amplify | augment there is a clear spatial setup that centers performers of color. The work further perpetuates that visibility through a performance-based relationship which centers the musical and aesthetic decisions of the inner quartet of POC while giving white performers a role of ‘supporter’ or ‘listener and responder’. This relationship directly manifests ideal methods of conversation around such topics as racism, cultural imperialism, and/or hypervisibility where the voices and narratives of people of color are radically centered rather than saturated with the voices, fragility, and ‘I’m one of the good ones’ type stories that often derail these dialogues. These efforts in the material manifestation of values reflect a deep belief that radical music-making must have a social and empowering function. I reflect that both in the values that underlie my compositional materials and procedures as well as subversion and recontextualization of common practice notation and canonical values and the pedagogy that perpetuates them. I seek to hold ‘forward-pushing’ musical spaces fully accountable and manifest celebration and centering rather than fetishization and perpetuation of other structurally oppressive practices. My process of reclaiming and resynthesizing frameworks of music with freedom-based practices, experiences, and ideas remains mostly heuristic. As my experiences and research expand, so too does my music and its why; a nuancing as I learn and further dig into my diasporas, ancestry, communities, understandings. _______________________________________ As most of my music requires experience with critical lenses and understanding for deeper engagement, I’ve provided a few links below that I consider required reading for critically conscious music-makers. List (no order) ‘White fragility’ - https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116 ‘Music and Neoliberalism’ - https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mp/9460447.0011.202/--amazing-together-mason-bates-classical-music-and-neoliberal?rgn=main;view=fulltext ‘Improvised music after 1950: afrological and eurological perspectives’ - https://www.jstor.org/stable/779379 Teaching to transgress - education as a practice of freedom - https://academictrap.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/bell-hooks-teaching-to-transgress.pdf Feminism is for everyone - https://excoradfeminisms.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/bell_hooks-feminism_is_for_everybody.pdf Just Vibrations - https://quod.lib.umich.edu/u/ump/14078046.0001.001 Toward a queer phenomenology - https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58ad660603596eec00ce71a3/t/58bec800b8a79b7c599de24a/1488898050432/Orientations+Toward+a+Queer+Phenomenology.pdf Take up less space - http://www.theliberatedmathematician.com/2017/06/get-out-the-way-part-2/
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Experimental Projects A primarily explores relationships between sound, determinacy, and euphony.
In gap of dunloe, an improvisation on seven out of tune notes on an old piano is paired with uncut samples of field recordings. As horses trot, people walk, wind blows, and people yell into in the mountains, the piano's notes beat with a simple melody. In Open, soft tam-tam and bass drums mallets are repeatedly struck against the lower register of a baby grand piano. By slightly expanding the range of the attacks, a full droning texture is created with eventual sympathetic upper harmonics rising above the low rumble. In Rain Music, cut up recordings from a summer storm in Washington, D.C. are layered to great effect. With the field recorder under a resonant steel bowl, polyrhythms and indeterminate attacks are at the forefront of the piece with thunder, fire engines, and a vocal dog providing some incidental expansions of register and texture. In Beating, using physical properties of sounds, low register, close interval organ pipes are used to create multiple concurrent pulses through beats. Recorded at the Lovely Lane Methodist Church during a recital by Benjamin Teague, the space itself contributes to the effectiveness of the piece, with the dome of the ceiling creating a perfect whispering gallery. are these our streets? explores community and gentrification in Washington, D.C. through a field recording of walking through a historically Salvadoran community. The sounds of new buses on recently created routes, majority english speaking, and the pulse of uninterrupted walking are paired with electronically manipulated extended piano technique to communicate the feelings of intense dysphoria and dissonance with the displacement of long-time community members. Flashbacks to a beautiful moment uses a summer rainstorm in Melbourne, Australia as a backdrop to explorations of timbre from a variety of percussion instruments and cor anglais, and the expansion of a harmonic progression played by a disklavier. Inspired by memories of a loved one, the piece uses space and time to paint a building feeling, eventually released into calm. I had been conceiving of Paper Music for more than a year before I put finger to keyboard. The question of integrating the ethics of liberation and equity into composition had been a constant one, especially considering classical music’s history of racism, classism, and homophobia. Even with the post-modern ideals of a valuation system based on polystylistic merit, the new music composers and musicians with the most access to resources and institutional support through social (and cultural) capital continue to be overwhelmingly white and cis-gendered. Acknowledging that the ideas of social and musical progress in the 60’s & 70’s were overwhelmingly abstract and inaccessible because of the background understanding and experience needed to engage, I was still impressed with the principle of breaking down the barrier between performer and audience. The way to bring in new listeners is to offer a unique experience. More popular forms of music have mastered the concert experience, from joy-filled dancing in the crowd to EDM, to moshing to Hardcore, to softly swaying and hanging on each word of great folk punk. Applauding the solos in jazz standards is immeasurably more fun than sitting in silence between movements. Considering each genre facilitates some kind of unique level of engagement, why does new music continue to hold on to the paradigm of a sit-down, contemplative concert? I think folks often classify classical music by a defined power structure, and resulting safety, between composer, performer, and audience when they would ideally be working together towards an fun and intellectually engaging experience. By giving agency to performers and audience members, everyone in a chosen space can contribute and the concert barrier can be shifted towards an empowering and transformative experience. Paper Music facilitates such. Paper Music tackles the concept of creating accessible and interactive music for all levels of musician, while keeping the notated and instructional quality of the classical canon. The piece uses the sounds created from utensil on medium, be it pencil on paper, chalk on board, crayon on cardboard, etc. and different shapes to create a texture of various rhythms, timbres, and pulses. Especially accessible to children and untrained adults, Paper Music illustrates basic concepts of rhythm, organized sound, and participation in music making. By centering the importance of communal growth and interaction in the compositional process of new and experimental musics, all the people in a chosen space benefit. Such pieces and exercises promote growth and expansion of auditory understanding and active listening, a natural stepping stone for the more abstract expressions of new music and an equalizing of education and appreciation. Link to PDF version here I recently attended the New Music Gathering 2017 at BGSU as a panelist on "Diversity and Inclusion in New Music". The opening activity, a performance of Cornelius Cardew's "The Great Learning: Paragraph 7" was excellent as an icebreaker and from the beginning the conference felt well facilitated. My panel was set for the end of the 3-day long activities, as the sole event. However, when your panel, explaining exactly how the status quo of classical and new music upholds white supremacy and structural, historic racism is at the end of the conference, there is no real opportunity for the lessons of the panel to serve as an inoculation against the oppressive behaviors that permeate the conference. Looking around, it looked and felt like the only non-white, non-cis folks in attendance at the gathering were the ones speaking on our panel. The keynote address, by Steven Schick, opened on an inspiring note but was quickly overwhelmed by nostalgic (and fairly appropriatory) references to the collective musicality of humanity and a weirdly implied depoliticizing of music. Overall, it called on the music community to engage in a performative capacity (ex.write music about discrimination, donate money from a concert to refugees) rather than an empowering or liberating manner (ex. use social and cultural capital to change institutions and systems that discriminate against non-white, non-cis, non-neurotypical folks). On a panel talking about failure, there was no analysis or even mention on how structural oppression overwhelmingly affects the institutional and popular success of queer, disabled, neurodivergent, and/or poc musicians. Even one of the best earlier panels at NMG, the New Music(ology) Gathering II, where each of the speakers did an amazing job unpacking and critically analyzing specific case studies, had an attendee, a cishet white man at the head of a powerful organization, who openly took over the conversation, highlighting his own organization and justifying the conservative natures of institutions. Even with the theme of “Support”, the panels did little to apply intersectional lenses to subjects nor to hold in check the voices of the most powerful. During our panel, we were asked to focus on concrete actions the new music community could make to create more accessibility for marginalized folks and accountability for existing organizations and institutions. Below is my post immediately following the conference, highlighting those conclusions as well as aspect of my personal experience at NMG 2017: “It was with an oddly dysphoric feeling that I left NMG after the final panel. We succeeded in our goal of discussing, and at times even debating, the pathways to honest and true inclusion. How to avoid tokenism and why the constant recognition and resistance against white supremacy is necessary to reshape centuries-old spaces, made and held for white cishet men. How competitions and opportunities for "women only" most often erase and exclude those most marginalized by our social and political systems, trans-women. Through the discussion of concrete and anecdotal examples of ableism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and mentalism we traced elements of oppression down to the canon's and community's structures of thinking, molded by historical standards of valuation centered on the society's dominant beliefs (reflective of the dominant population). The panel was effective at providing a platform for these discussions, while having a few glaring shortcomings. We had no asians, particularly east asians (who make up a huge portion of the classical/new music community), on the panel. The panel was extremely white centered, even with a latinx and a black member. While we ended the panel with 'concrete' suggestions for how individuals could move forward: • increase accessibility through lowering costs of score submission • support individual accommodation, specifically for non-able bodied, neurodivergent, and in-transition individuals • when speaking and writing about the culture, expression, and performance by marginalized individuals, actively facilitate dialogue to avoid erasure and misrepresentation • avoid tokenizing composers and performers by suggestions identity-specific topics (ie. school to prison pipeline, ICE, transitioning) • create concrete and transparent systems of accountability for organizers, conductors, and composers to avoid misrepresentation and violence towards the identities being highlighted • actively expand accommodate and embrace musicians and performers with less conventional training and experience • ask as little emotional labour for marginalized folks as you can, especially if the performance centers around experiences that can be actively draining and triggering The truth of the matter is that it takes an extremely high amount of personal effort and labor to reflect and understand the ways in which our modes of thinking have been shaped to be implicitly othering of those who don't fit an image of acceptable social and cultural mobility. There needs to be an overhaul of our ethics to require more diverse voices in new music and that starts with each participant in our gathering truly self-criticizing and understanding their own intersections of privilege and power. I really hope I don't have to come back next year, because these efforts can be implemented now. They require intellectually and morally honest pushes by the established and powerful in the new music community, who have already in name committed us towards a path of progressive and radical inclusion, and to reflect a standard of required diversity so the labor of operating within predominantly white spaces doesn't fall to the few. Actively seek out the voices of those you want to feature. Consciously create safe and inclusive spaces for the most marginalized. Reflect upon the language and phrasing you use: make sure you aren't being violent those you are trying to help. On a personal note, I need to address the way I was treated as more as an activist than a musician at the conference. Before and especially after the panel, members would ask mentally and emotionally exhausting questions that most often turned into me congratulating them on their efforts of inclusivity. I'm a composer and an activist. The bracketing of identity, even in the microcosms of person-to-person interactions is extremely erasing and I left feeling more used than celebrated. These conversations have happened before. The path forward however has always been about the creation of honest communication and transparent dialogue. Individuals, ie. you, can create space in your organizations to listen to your marginalized members, without demanding they educate and/or validate you, and without singling them out from the group. Through listening as attentively as we do to compositions and new experimental, boundary pushing work, we can create tangible progress in our community and thoughtfully, consciously all make better music together.” On a final note, the lack of photo and video documentation for the Diversity & Inclusion panel is pretty noticeable. Considering the declared importance of our testimony and stories, the fact that none of the 500+ tagged photos, videos, and posts highlighted the panel paints it as a clear afterthought. In fact, it highlights the very performative nature of the these kinds of panels as necessary to maintain the illusion of inclusive and non-oppressive institutions while in fact obscuring their roots of supremacy and racism. |
AuthorInti is a composer focusing on the integration of intersectional feminism in musical and compositional practice. Archives
August 2018
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