Featuring Beatriz Ferreyra, Alicia Urreta, Ileana Pérez Velázquez and extra.

Berlin-based writer Contingent Sounds has launched a brand new e book capturing “the feminine protagonists of Latin American digital music”.

Switched On: The Dawn of Electronic Sound by Latin American Women has been edited by impartial curator, researcher and label head of Buh Records, Luis Alvarado, and experimental musician, multimedia artist and researcher Alejandra Cardenas (Ale Hop), and options interviews with the likes of Beatriz Ferreyra, Alicia Urreta, Ileana Pérez Velázquez and extra.

To coincide with the discharge, we check out some archival photographs of Latin America’s feminine Twentieth-century digital pioneers.

Beatriz Ferreyra

In chapter 4 of Switched On, “Beatriz Ferreyra on Listening, Composition, and the Women Who Saved Electroacoustic Music,” music critic Isabelia Herrera interviews composer Beatriz Ferreyra, protecting subjects resembling her youth in Argentina, her time on the GRM [Groupe de Recherches Musicales], the presence of ladies on the GRM, her life within the countryside, the teachings of working with magnetic tape, and the societal acceptance of electroacoustic music.

Beatriz, from the interview:
“I fell into electroacoustic music as a result of I heard a live performance of electroacoustic music with Edgardo Cantón, who’s Argentinian, who took me there in 1963. I had no thought what electroacoustic music was, so he, Edgardo Cantón, made me enter the music studio with Schaeffer as an assistant. He taught me methods to reduce the tape, methods to combine, methods to create a filter, however there was no college—there was nothing”.

---

Graciela Castillo and Fernando Beato on the live performance “Concierto de grabadores antiguos”, Goethe Institut

The Argentinian composer Gabi Yaya writes concerning the work of Argentine composer Graciela Castillo (1935 – 2023), with a meticulous historic account of the 4 a long time wherein she composed electroacoustic music within the metropolis of Córdoba, the epicentre from which excellent Twentieth-century composers, resembling Hilda Dianda (b. 1925), Beatriz Ferreyra (b. 1937) and Patricia Sacavino (1964 – 2008) originated.

Gabi Yaya states about Graciela:
“Graciela Castillo had a prolific instrumental and electroacoustic compositional output. She was additionally a famend pianist and improviser. As a trainer, Castillo left an vital mark on a era of native artists. She taught on the Escuela Superior de Comercio Manuel Belgrano, the Conservatorio Provincial Félix Garzón, and the Music Department of the School of Arts of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. An vital promoter of up to date music in Córdoba, Castillo participated in a number of teams, such because the Agrupación Nueva Música de Córdoba, with the Federación Argentina de Música Electroacústica Córdoba, the group Klaster or the group Alea Rictus Cactus.

---

Ileana Perez Velazquez at EMEC studio (ISA), ca. 1991

Saxophonist and musicologist Adaivis Marrón Pérez presents an integral imaginative and prescient of electroacoustic music in Cuba, interviewing Cuban protagonists Marietta Veulens (Matanzas, 1959), Ileana Pérez Velázquez (Cienfuegos, 1964), Mónica O’Reilly Viamontes (Havana, 1975), Ailem Carvajal (Havana, 1972), and Irina Escalante Chernova (Camagüey, 1977), who talk about their experiences at TIME (later the National Electroacoustic Music Laboratory – LNME), in addition to the EMEC studio based on the Higher Institute of Art of Havana (ISA). In the photograph, Ileana Pérez Velázquez (Cienfuegos, 1964), is at EMEC studio in 1991. She is at present a professor of Musical Composition at Williams College in NY.

Here are two quotes from Ileana extracted from the e book:

“It took about two years to get to the US as a result of every time I [applied for a visa] on the US embassy, they might ask me if I wished to make my scenario a political scenario. They would ask me: Do you need to be a political refugee? And I might reply, “I don’t need to be a political refugee. I don’t have any political issues, I simply need to research.” That occurred to me in Havana, then in Colombia twice. They instructed me, “then you possibly can’t go.” I helped set up a world pageant of up to date music in Bogota, and we invited John Appleton, who was in Italy on the time, and he got here, after which he took me to the embassy as if I had been Colombian. And there he instructed them that I used to be a really proficient individual. And that’s how they gave me the visa to have the ability to come to check digital music at Dartmouth.”

Regarding the topic of gender, Ileana Pérez additionally recognises: 

“Cuba is itself a machista nation. The president is a person, within the congresses, there are males, they’re at all times males. So, sure, I think about that for some girls, it has been an obstacle to turning into composers. Certain composers of instrumental and orchestral educational music had many struggles within the decade [of the 1970s], Magaly Ruiz, for instance, had difficulties. I feel that one optimistic factor concerning the Cuban Revolution -of which I can say many adverse issues as properly, however I’m not going to enter that- was the sense of equality between women and men. And it appears that evidently when my era arrived, we had already grown up in that atmosphere.

---

Jacqueline Nova

The e book additionally options two texts from Colombian composer Jacqueline Nova (1935 – 1975), “The Wonderful World of Machines” (1966) and “An aberrant phenomenon” (1969). Both had been revealed in native newspapers and magazines by the composer herself whereas forging a profession as an electroacoustic composer within the Sixties and at the moment are translated into English for the primary time. 

In these articles, Nova defies criticism of the avant-garde practices of the time in Colombia by those that seen these musical developments with suspicion. This is the primary time these texts have been revealed in English; the chapter additionally contains an introduction by researcher Ana María Romano, who has finished in-depth analysis on Jacqueline Nova and the protagonists of Latin American digital music.

Ana Maria Romano, who introduces these texts says concerning the composer:

“Jacqueline Nova (1935 – 1975), developed her skilled creative life in Colombia between 1964 and 1974—a short and really intense profession that unfolded in a conservative musical atmosphere and whose legacies we’re nonetheless discovering. “

---

Jocy de Oliveira

Brazilian-born, Denmark-based vocalist and efficiency artist Marcela Lucatelli interviews Brazilian composer and multimedia artist Jocy de Oliveira. In this encounter, Lucatelli begins by relating how she got here to know Oliveira’s music and the way it has influenced her all through her creative profession. 

Lucatelli says about Jocy: 

“Jocy de Oliveira is a Brazilian composer and multimedia artist identified for her revolutionary mix of music, theatre, literature, and know-how. Born in 1936, having begun her profession as a celebrated pianist within the so-called American and European avant-garde, her compositions pioneered the incorporation of digital music and multimedia parts into staged works, resulting in the creation of distinctive immersive experiences. Her work Apague meu Spotlight (“Turn off my Spot Light,” 1961) is recognised as the primary efficiency of electroacoustic music in Brazil—a style wherein the sounds of the devices and voices on stage dialogue with different pre-recorded and electronically manipulated sounds.”

---

Leni Alexander

The e book incorporates a chapter, written by Daniela Fugellie, concerning the Chilean-German composer Leni Alexander (1924-2005), centered on her situation as a migrant between the Judeo-German and Chilean cultures and the way this double cultural belonging is mirrored in her experimental radio dramas, with the mixing of various media and sources in her work (recorded artwork and widespread music, documentary and fictional voices, autobiographical reminiscences and historic occasions, amongst different issues). It seems to be at how this represents other ways of exercising reminiscence, from the private to the collective, connecting with themes resembling her youth in Hamburg and the oppression of Jews by Nazism, or the disappeared through the Chilean army dictatorship.

---

Oksana Linde

 

An interview with Venezuelan-Ukrainian artist, Oksana Linde, who launched her debut album after 30 years, after starting its composition within the ’80s. She seems to be to the Venezuelan digital music scene within the Nineteen Eighties, a time wherein synthesizers turned reasonably priced and transportable. Oksana Linde, a scientist and composer born in Venezuela to Ukrainian mother and father in 1948 was interviewed by Venezuelan poet, literary translator, and scholar Natasha Tiniacos. The dialog examines Linde’s debut album, Aquatic and Other Worlds (Buh Records 2022).

---

Jacqueline Nova, Marlene Migliari Fernandes, Graciela Paraskevaídis, Iris Sangüesa Hinostroza, and Joaquin Orellana

Jacqueline Nova, Marlene Migliari Fernandes, Graciela Paraskevaídis, Iris Sangüesa Hinostroza, and Joaquin Orellana as fellows on the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) from the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. This picture paperwork how feminine sound artists and composers from the area had been lively members in CLAEM.

---

Rocío Sanz Quirós

Susan Campos Fonseca and Susana Sánchez Carballo study the contribution of ladies to sound technological experimentation in Central America. During the analysis of their textual content, they obtained a duplicate of Rocío Sanz Quirós piece “Letanía erótica para la paz” (1973) for magnetic tape, created by Sanz in collaboration with the Mexican audio engineer Rodolfo Sánchez Alvarado.

This is reported for the primary time within the publication: “Letanía erótica para la paz” is the oldest electroacoustic work by a feminine Costa Rican composer and a Central American artist ever recognized. The work has a period of 23 minutes 55 seconds and was recognized within the Fonoteca Nacional de México along with an interview on Radio UNAM, wherein Sanz speaks concerning the premiere of the ballet and the artistic course of via which it was developed.

Switched On: The Dawn of Electronic Sound by Latin American Women is out now through Contingent Sounds. Order it now.