Output details

Quartet / Olinka Variations

How might music-based installation works address the murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico? 2. How might celebrated Mexican women from the past be incorporated into such works? 3. What is the role of males in these works? 4. How might such works relate to theories of antagonism (Mouffe) or universality (Badiou)?

The context of Quartet is the murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez (depicted in Roberto Bolanos novel 2666) and the youth orchestra Esperanza Azteca; the celebrated Mexican women Sor Juana and Nahui Olin (Carmen Mondragon); classical musical compositions by male composers, Haydn, Schoenberg and Nancarrow; concepts of the political and universality.

The method for Quartet was to film in a single tracking shot the previously unrecorded Madre, la de los primores by Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) performed by 4 female choristers of Esperanza Azteca and also 'Il Terremoto' from Haydn's The Last Seven Words of Christ (1786). The composition emphasized the differing qualities of these two works, one a devotional work performed by female choristers dressed in pale blue shirts, the other a vibrant and aggressive work performed by a male string quartet in red. The single-take tracking shot however unified the oppositional qualities of these renditions into a single work with a unified horizon – music.

The method for Olinka Variations was to transpose letters corresponding to notes in the name Carmen Mondragon to form a 12-tone row, based upon Schoenberg’s 12-tone system and to develop a composition for solo piano devised using a 12-tone grid. The resulting composition fused atonality and tonality, dissonance and harmony and was performed on pianola as if it were a ghost composition by Carmen Mondragon (Nahui Olin) and a centenary homage to US composer Conlon Nancarrow who was based in Mexico City.