Work “The noises of memory” – 2024-08-14 11:24:08

Work “The noises of memory”

• FAE Auditorium, University of Santiago, Alameda 3363, Central Station Metro.
• Saturday 24th August – 7:30pm
• Entry allowed.

This work is a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer Leni Alexander, a fundamental figure in contemporary Chilean music. It is a musical theatre piece with 14 musicians and three actresses on stage. It is presented within the framework of the National Meeting of the Network of Memory Sites that will take place at USACH.

Leni Alexander is the most important Chilean composer of the 20th century. Her creative activity and her status as a Jewish emigrant who escaped the Holocaust enabled her to act as a bridge between the avant-garde trends of European music and the Chilean musical movement. Along with her symphonic and chamber works, many of which were composed in direct allusion to the social and subjective realities she experienced, she created various “Hörspiele” or “Theater to Listen”, a musical genre that allowed her to delve deeper into and reflect on issues related to human rights.

This is how she constantly explored the memory of two dictatorships, the Hitlerite one and the civil-military one in Chile, what she experienced as a child and what she experienced as an adult. The importance of memory would become the theme of many of her works. We must keep the memory awake; the traces must remain, we hear in one of her works.

As a committed woman, she also had to fight against the obstacles imposed on her by the patriarchal artistic environment in which she worked, and combine – not without difficulties – her professional and family life.

Over the last few years, many young composers, musicologists and performers have devoted themselves to studying, recovering and disseminating the work of Leni Alexander. The Leni Alexander Festival has been held in Valparaíso for several years.

Collage

This tribute is conceived as a contemporary musical theatre that, using fragmentary music and texts by the composer, transmits and weaves her sound world, her reflections and her experiences. From a formal point of view, it is a collage in which various works, music, texts and images are intertwined in short episodes that shape the world of Leni Alexander.

The idea is not to reproduce some creations from Leni Alexander’s vast oeuvre in order to pay tribute to her, but rather to incorporate her into this journey through moments of her life, her thoughts, her sounds and words. On stage there are three “speakers” (two actresses and one actor) who interpret the texts; a string quartet with female performers; a six-voice female choir and a pianist.

There is also a screen with images and videos controlled from the stage and a computer that plays pieces of orchestral and chamber music by Leni Alexander. The texts presented in a dramatized reading by the speakers are excerpts from three radio plays and letters and stories by the composer, accompanied by her music in recorded and/or live form. Alternating with the texts, the singers and instrumentalists perform in concert, excerpts from various works by the composer, such as her String Quartet, Mandala for piano and Psalm 22, for female choir.

The projections correspond to excerpts from documentaries, photos and documents of the composer.