We spoke with composer and performer Guillermina Etkin about exploring sound in “new opera” and her upcoming premiere, “VOX HUMANA, Opera for Pipes and Larynges,” which will be presented at the Festival Nueva Ópera, taking place at cheLA (Iguazú 451, CABA) from September 26 to October 13.

By Virginia Chacon Dorr

What can I listen to while reading the interview? MusicaClasicaBA recommends:

⁠How would you define the concept of “new opera”?

The concept of “new opera” is, above all, a question about the idea of the work itself.

In the simple act of naming itself “new opera,” it creates a possible space to connect elements in unforeseen ways, push certain boundaries, disrupt narrative logic, and propose new forms of dramaturgy with a focus on sound, on the voice understood as body, matter, or idea, as an entity.

“New opera” serves as a way to escape tradition while still being framed within the operatic tradition, allowing for play with these elements by presenting antagonisms or similarities, and new associations with a clear intention of de-hierarchization. It revisits the idea of intersectionality that allows linking things and languages in a network, rather than subordinating them to each other. Talking about “new opera” is somewhat like talking about atonality, which, in its quest to break away from tonality, makes a clear reference to the unavoidable monument from which it departs. It’s a kind of affiliation from which certain keys for creation in the search for something new can be found. The experimental in its deepest sense. Moving beyond the strict operatic realm, as a genre and tradition, also acknowledging the contributions of cinema, visual arts, sound art, technology, the internet, and especially experimental theater, which resembles new opera more than opera itself.

What place does new opera occupy in your history as an artist?

As a composer and performer, I have been working for almost twenty years in performing arts, theater, dance, performance, and recently also in film. My academic background is linked to music, but my artistic formation has been shaped by my work in group performance projects where I learned a great deal about connections. Connections between things, people, languages, ideas, sounds, time, space. Theater as a house that encompasses all that is possible, a constant state of creativity. These experiences have pushed me towards the desire to compose stage music, works in which sound and musical thought can reveal some key aspects of scene construction. Focusing on listening, breaking with the atavistic idea of images that sound. I believe that “new opera” enables an opportunity to explore sound space, subvert orders, reveal ambiguities, and activate certain performative procedures that enhance perception towards listening.

⁠What is Vox Humana and what is the underlying idea in “Opera for Pipes and Larynges”?

Vox Humana is the name given to the organ stop that tries to emulate the sound of the human voice. In the work VOX HUMANA, Opera for Pipes and Larynges, the notion of VOX, as a performative entity, places the voice at the center of the stage as an instrument, artifact, artifice, machinery, prosthesis, invention, experiment.

How was your experience working with the Opus Klais 1912 organ?

In 2020, I was invited to create, as part of the “Situaciones” series from the Performing Arts Department at Centro Cultural Kirchner, an audiovisual piece focusing on sound in a space of my choice. I decided to work within the Opus Klais 1912 organ at the National Auditorium, recording the instrument’s tuning. The music for the piece was composed entirely with the sounds captured during the tuning, and I collaborated with Natalia Labaké, who handled the image recording and editing.

In conversation with the tuners from the “Organería argentina” group, one of them, Ing. Juan Weinhold, told me the story about the Vox Humana stop, which inspired the motivation and research for this work. This experience opened up a series of key questions in my work regarding the voice, the body, the organ as an organism, and the physicality of sound.

⁠The work you will present at FNOBA addresses the concepts of mimesis in creation. What role do you think the concept of error plays in the creative process? And how does the concept of invention relate to mimesis?

The generating image of the work arises from the story Juan Weinhold told me about the Vox Humana stop of the pipe organ. The Spanish Basque organ builder, Aquilino Amezua, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, built a Vox Humana stop, studying larynges from cadavers. He thought of the voice as an instrument, as material reality. To imitate the sound of the human voice, he turned to the organ of the human body, the larynx, which he believed held the key to achieving that sound and making it resonate in the pipes like throats. In his attempt to emulate the human voice, he created an artifact not identical to the human voice, something new. Together with Manuel Eguía and the LAPSO (Laboratory of Acoustics and Sound Perception at UNQ) team, we devised GlaDys (Glottal Acoustic Dynamical System), a hybrid instrument between the human voice and the pipe organ. The work, in its effort to create an instrument that emulates the human voice, introduces GlaDys, a new electroacoustic instrument consisting of pipes excited by speakers that replicate the acoustic dynamics of the human glottis based on a mathematical model of the glottis. Furthermore, the combination of the resonances of different pipes emulates the filtering done by the vocal tract on the sound of the glottis.

On the other hand, the work also features a digital organ that uses virtual sounds of organs sampled from captures of organs from various auditoriums and churches around the world. Due to the impossibility of having a pipe organ, the digital organ also became part of this mimetic chain.

How did you approach the dramaturgy of the work in relation to sound?

I am interested in thinking about dramaturgy from the perspective of sound, stage music as a compositional unit rather than scenes with music or music with scenes. A will to escape the dominance of text and narrative. A dramaturgy of perception, not textual-argumentative. Sound understood as body and space. An idea of expanded harmony. Conceiving stage music composition as a way of making things work together: sounds, people, ideas, machines, texts, light, spaces, images. These elements, when related, reveal their own intrinsic narrative associated with sound.