(Image: Alexander Perrelli)

(Image: Alexander Perrelli)

LatAm in Focus: The Story behind Joaquín Orellana’s Musical Sculptures

By Luisa Leme

Co-curators Sebastian Zubieta and Diana Flatto share sounds from The Spine of Music.

Joaquín Orellana: The Spine of Music

Open to the public from January 20 to April 24, Americas Society presents the first U.S. exhibition of the Guatemalan composer's innovative instruments alongside contemporary art. 

After Orellana returned to his home country, the composer sought to reflect the political violence and social challenges taking place during Guatemala’s civil war, explains Zubieta. Orellana included sounds of impoverished people outside church atriums, songs in indigenous languages, and sounds of brutality in prisons in his pieces Humanofonía I and II.

“All this social situation, this injustice, all the violence is all in there in a way or another in most of his pieces,” explains Zubieta. “He would not conceive music that is not representative in a way or another.”

Visitors to the New York exhibition can play the instruments and listen to Efluvios y Puntos, a piece commissioned by Americas Society. The idea was to share the composition with New York-based musicians to have a performance with four people playing the instruments—a plan curbed by the pandemic. Instead, Zubieta learned and played all instruments in the piece for a video. “There are moments in which there are long sounds that are created in metal instruments like the tubar...and then short sounds that come from the wooden instruments,” he explains.

Orellana, who is now 90, became a household name in Guatemala over the course of his career. He continues to build instruments, challenge sounds, and work with visual artists. The exhibition also features pieces by four contemporary visual artists with connections with the composer: Carlos Amorales, María Adela Díaz, Akira Ikezoe, and Alberto Rodríguez Collía.

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Luisa Leme produced this episode. The music in this podcast was performed at Americas Society in New York. Learn more about upcoming concerts at musicoftheamericas.org.

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