
We interviewed composer, conductor, and pianist Oscar Edelstein, who shared his reflections on “new opera.” We discussed his work Journey to the Cathedral of Santa Mónica de los Venados, which will be presented at the fifth edition of the Festival Nueva Ópera, and explored the relationship between imagination, memory, and sonic spaces. The Festival will take place at cheLA (Iguazú 451, CABA) from September 26 to October 13.
By Virginia Chacon Dorr / Ph. Irene Roberts
What can I listen to while reading this interview? MusicaClasicaBA recommends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pACEIrTcVwU
How would you define the concept of “new opera”?
In the case of our Sala Cristal Sónico and the work Journey to the Cathedral of Santa Mónica de los Venados, we present another idea of musical art and acoustic science, reinventing and/or redefining both terms, giving them new directions with a common purpose. Sala Cristal Sónico is a new concept of theater that operates with unique and unprecedented acoustic principles. These principles are derived from sonic crystal, a device formed by a grid of columns that focuses, directs, and amplifies sound solely based on its geometric configuration. These sonic crystals allow us to construct acoustic mirrors, lenses, and prisms that alter the perception of sound space, creating illusions of displacement, acceleration, and perspective using conventional sound sources. The Sala is integrated into the work Journey to the Cathedral of Santa Mónica de los Venados, forming a homogeneous whole. The work incorporates the Sala as a new type of musical instrument, altering the acoustic space’s properties during the performance through changes in its architecture.
The Sala Cristal functions like a kaleidoscope in relation to what is heard, and in some way, it also serves as the three-dimensional score of the work.
What role does new opera and the ideas that stem from it play in your creative process?
From 2000 to 2015, I founded and directed a research program in complex arts that I called “Teatro Acústico”; this program, in its evolution through the logical variants of the knowledge acquired, continues under the direction of my friend and colleague, Dr. Manuel Eguía, a physicist and artist, under the name “Perspectiva Acústica”. From the beginning, we believed that the only way to delve into solid new artistic forms—considering their historical memory, methodology, techniques, and tools—was to work in a multidisciplinary manner. We know that art and science—briefly put—share that initial experimental choice, but after those first steps, their paths may or should remain connected, yet more distant in their objectives. Perhaps there lies an important key to our work: the creations we propose must function with sufficient autonomy and spontaneously expose a poetics capable of bringing renewed problems to the scene that, in any case, the analytical or scientific process will attempt to explain later.
A musical art that can anticipate by generating instrumental inventions around it, but also, above all, new poetics. With this in mind, timbre, textures, rhythms, structures, the acoustic space as an updater of notions and parameters, notation at all levels, forms and modes in the development of acting types, the different processes of speech, work with the body, etc., etc., all come into question. The works function as testing grounds and emitters of new hypotheses and proto-theories.
Could you tell us about the history and the ideas behind Journey to the Cathedral of Santa Mónica de los Venados?
Just as in Alejo Carpentier’s work The Lost Steps, where the Cathedral of Santa Mónica de los Venados evokes in the protagonist the feeling of having found the origin of music, our Journey… proposes this Cathedral of Crystals as the discovery of a new acoustic memory; a musical universe that recovers deep listening with new (other) poetic meanings. The work begins its journey in the blind chamber, a stage space without light so that the audience can fully regain their auditory sense. Then, the rhapsodes guide the audience through different magical (supernatural) scenes associated with the various configurations of the crystals, with a staging described by the visions of a child.
What role do imagination and memory play in Journey to the Cathedral of Santa Mónica de los Venados?
For me, imagination is on the same level as thought, perhaps even more so. I always try to ensure that my hand, or what my hand writes, can reach it. Regarding Journey…, I would say that the Sala Cristal Sónico and the work are conceived as a journey through different types of memory associated with the various spatial configurations of the sonic crystals. Just as human memory evokes and recreates without repetition, the echoes generated by the sonic crystals allow for altering the usual relationships of distance, height, timbre, and harmonic structure of sound. These memories generate a dialogue between the moments of performance—when the audience is inside the hall—and the moments outside the performance, when the audience can walk through the hall, associating positions in the space with various configurations of the crystals and different passages of the work. Imagination, unable to reconstruct what happened exactly as it occurred, takes the place of memory, creating unusual acoustic images.
In Journey to the Cathedral of Santa Mónica de los Venados, how are the sound spaces structured in relation to the narrative of the work? What role do these spaces play in constructing dramatic meaning?
The work has a general structure linked to the different configurations of the sonic crystals; while these are metaphorical scenes of a magical, fictional, unreal, or “supernatural” nature, I sought to give each scene its own logic and autonomy, even within the kind of continuity that comes from moving toward a place determined from the beginning. The crystals, in turn, function like kaleidoscopes, so everything that sounds is transfigured when passing through them, increasing the ghostly character of each scene. Just as light in a scene, sounds, and music can significantly alter the meaning of theatrical actions when not used as simple redundant supports of what has occurred, these transformations produce a multiplication of meanings akin to the sense of surprise generated by novelty. The audience will go through each scene of the journey alongside the protagonists with the same astonishment, the same strangeness. The entire work unfolds around the ideas that arise from the specific use of acoustic-musical space and the suggestive promise of discovering a “new musical wheel” that could (!) change the history of music. I remember writing something long ago in one of the art books that accompany two of my albums, which I believe defines how I understand the creative process: “To remember is to remake oneself. To know is to become rigid. To create is to be able to remember, without knowledge, something that has not happened.”