I decided not to care as much about those things that come with the baggage of new music or classical music and institutions, and just think, very simply, about writing music that I was excited about, and that I wanted to go back and listen to.

—Angélica Negrón, from an interview with The Creative Independent

Me he perdido (2015)

commissioned by American Composers Orchestra for SONiC Festival 2015

Duration: 6:30

Notes from the premiere

Listening to Angélica Negrón's music has me thinking about genre classifications and the paths that people who create music walk as they discover their unique voice. 

There are so many different ways a creator can express themselves these days. They could form an indie electronic band and perform live at music festivals and sell recordings of their music. Such a path is usually labeled as Popular and not Classical. They could spend their time focused on notation rather than on live performance and have others perform the sounds by reading the math. Such a path is usually labeled as Classical, with performances generally occurring in concert halls and seated auditoriums. Often these audiences are very different from each other, each having their own individual set of expectations. But why? Yet another path that they could choose is one that focuses on the environment where the music is to be reproduced and incorporates that environment as part of the performance. This path asks the audience as inhabitants of the environment to participate in the process and is often classified as performance art with the music generally classified as ambient. (Think Brian Eno and his Music for Airports.) There's a whole generation of creators out there who grew up on these performance art experiences and are now bridging their classical training and journeys down the traditional path with ambient performance art. Music for Airports is currently being performed and recorded as classical concert music. Location-specific creations are being repurposed as meditation tools for use in whatever location a listener may wish to use them in. Eno's Music for Airports no longer requires a terminal or baggage claim.

If work is composed of a specific location serving as an element of the composition, how do you classify it, catalog it, or even compare it to other works? Isn't Music for Airports unique, and does such uniqueness make such a piece worthy of consideration? Are reproducibility and active participation things that should even be a part of the discussion when it comes to concert music? Or is this performance art and part of a different canon? If the piece involves live musicians following written instructions and is lead by a conductor/performer, with the audience participating by sitting in cushy velvet chairs, watching visual elements projected in an acoustically tuned auditorium, then does the sound part deserve to be considered concert music, worthy of being excised, published and reproduced by organizations around the world? What if that same organization decides to perform the work in an establishment that serves the best local microbrews and passes nibbles around to a standing room only audience hanging out in an industrial warehouse? Does this event now become part of that organization's POP series, relegating the audio element to being cast out from the Beethoven and Mozart company that it could have mingled with if the performance had taken place elsewhere? Why does John Cage's 4'33" have a print publisher? Page turns? Movement designations? A performer, usually dressed in their most elegant concert attire, sitting at a piano? So that it exists in space and time? In Brian Eno's deck of Oblique Strategies cards, one card asks the reader, "Which frame would make this look right?" Another way of framing this question could be, "What kind of a composer do you want the world to consider you to be?"

I've said it before. After Cage, composers could do anything they wanted to. The world has yet to catch up to this idea. Often composers are forced into training models based on desired vocational expectations rather than trained to explore their innate creativity. When the definition of voice becomes infinite, finding yours can take a lifetime. When it's located, it can change or be lost if the world doesn't like what it hears. Perhaps finding your voice involves deciding to speak with multiple voices. At some point, worrying about the frame has to take a back seat to what you need to express and let the chips fall. Your idea might be worthy of being filed away at the sheet music store on the shelf next to Mozart. It may live attached to other artist’s visual stories. It may only live on in people's memories as an unrepeatable happening worthy of having a reproduction of the event's flyer live on in some future version of an internet archive. I am sure that many of us spend way too much time worrying about such things and not enough time singing. Angélica Negrón sings whatever she feels like singing and, in the process, helps to shape the world around us all.