Composer Mark Contreras Waiss, soprano Sofía Kirwan-Baez, and collaborator Professor Rajmil Fischman (Keele), presented a seminar-cum-recital at King’s on 27 November to explore how to incorporate traditional Peruvian music, culture and history into contemporary compositions.
Hosted by the Department of Music as part of The Colloquium Series, and by the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, the event marked 100 years since the birth of Eielson, a Peruvian writer and visual artist who worked with music and performance.
Dr Luis Rebaza-Soraluz. Photo: Iryna Rodina
The celebration of Jorge Eielson's centenary allows cohesive access to his written, visual and musical work. This interdisciplinarity is a key element in explaining the artistic and cultural interaction between Europe and the Americas after 1945. He lived in Paris and Rome when they were being rebuilt and participated in post-war avant-garde discussions seeking to connect contemporary abstraction and the primordial gestures of emotional intelligence of extra-European ancient cultural traditions.– Dr Luis Rebaza-Soraluz, Reader in Latin American Visual Arts
Dr Andrew J Green. Photo: Iryna Rodina
Contreras' music engages with a wider reality of music in Latin America: that it very often condenses the experiences of diverse social groups, and reflects the complex, often fraught encounters between them. His approach to Peru’s musical histories and presents is rich because it draws from the visual and plastic arts as well as the musical, and because he is engaging with important questions about composers drawing inspiration from Indigenous and Black Peruvian musics.– Dr Andrew J. Green, Lecturer in the Music of Central and South America
At the event, Contreras explored the differences in musical production in three of Peru’s varied environments – the desert, the highlands, and the rainforest – and the country’s influences from Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, the pre-Hispanic Quechan civilisation, and the Shipibo Conibo and Yanesha indigenous people. He connected these traditional approaches to modern compositional techniques, and how integration can enrich and preserve cultural heritage.
Composer Mark Contreras Waiss. Photo: Iryna Rodina
Composing a work inspired by Eielson's text has been a deep exploration, where the music seeks to capture the essence of his ideas and emotions. In addition to this, the inclusion of composers from different generations has been an invaluable opportunity to connect diverse voices around his legacy. Each sound element not only translates Eielson’s vision but invites new perspectives to enrich and prolong the dialogue with his work.– Mark Contreras Waiss
Contreras is a teacher of composition at the Universidad Nacional de Música in Peru, which is a partner of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Through this partnership, Dr Rebaza-Soraluz and Contreras have worked together to breathe new life into Eielson’s work.
Rejuvenating Eielson’s literature, art and music
Eielson created an installation and performance for the Munich 1972 Olympics, which included a musical composition that would be performed separately and simultaneously by musicians around the world. However, the performance was cancelled due to the Munich massacre. Dr Rebaza-Soraluz wanted to pay homage to this abandoned performance by creating a new, connected piece of work with the same themes of community, world peace, and anti-war.
Different generations of Peruvian composers created new music in dialogue with Eielson’s 1945 work Antigone, which was inspired by the Sophocles play. Acoustic pieces were played in Lima, while acousmatic ones were composed abroad.
Dr Rebaza-Soraluz and Contreras collated works from ten composers into Urbi et Orbi. This was performed on 4 June 2024 at the oldest theatre in Latin America, the Teatro Manuel Ascencio Segura in Lima, featuring pianists, vocalists and acousmatic music.
Contreras shared one of these musical pieces at the King’s event, before performing the full composition the following day at Festival SONOMUNDO in Paris. Professor Fischman offered his acousmatic initially performed in Peru.
The concert was supported by the Peruvian Embassy in both the UK and France, as well as the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
HE Ignacio Higueras, Ambassador of Peru to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Photo: Iryna Rodina
Composer Mark Contreras Waiss & soprano Sofía Kirwan-Baez. Photo: Iryna Rodina
Photo of Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Peruvian artist and writer, projected onto a screen. Photo: Iryna Rodina
Soprano Sofía Kirwan-Baez. Photo: Iryna Rodina
An enduring legacy
Dr Rebaza-Soraluz has also contributed to three international exhibitions for Eielson’s centenary:
- Jorge Eielson: Room in Rome at the Timothy Taylor art gallery in London, featuring his essay ‘A Room, a Knot: Jorge Eielson and the Mysteries of Humanity’s Bare Necessities’.
- the Jorge Eduardo Eielson: el nudo vertical travelling exhibition that has been displayed in Mallorca and Tenerife, both in Spain, featuring his essay ‘Saying, Writing Showing, Making: A Poiesis of the Gesture in the Poetics of Jorge Eielson’.
- Maria Lai e Jorge Eielson: 100thousand stars at the MAN Museum – Art Museum of the Province of Nuoro in Sardinia, Italy.