Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection

Julio Estrada, Doloritas, 1992
[Pedro Páramo]
(Mexico)



Recording time: 55 min 30 s.
Instruments: Quasi a radio opera

Other resources available:
- About Julio Estrada
- Compositions by Julio Estrada

About this composition:

The scenic project of the opera Pedro Páramo is integrated by an ensemble of different modules which can be considered as autonomous elements:

Radio version for broadcast or tape and live performers concert:
a) "Doloritas", first part (1992)
b) "Susana San Juan", second part (1997-)

Chamber music versions:
a) miqi’nahual, base (1994)
b) miqi’cihuatl, female voice (1994)
c) mictlan’se, trio for female voice, base and noise maker (1992)
d) mictlan’ome, sextet for female and male voices, flute, trombon, base and noise maker (1997)
e) Murmullos, quintet for two female and two male voices (1998-)

Scenic version: Pedro Páramo, chamber opera in two acts for six voices, six instruments, noise maker, tape and choreography (1992-2000)

Pedro Páramo, Quasi a Radio Opera.
The project of the Pedro Páramo opera started in 1988, just before concluding El sonido en Rulfo---The Sound in Rulfo---(ESTRADA, México, UNAM, 1990, 125 pp.), a long essay in which I propose the hypothesis of the sound and musical elaboration of Rulfo’s literary work through three main characteristics:

a) literary sonorities (manner of speaking of the people of el Llano de Jalisco)
b) environmental sonorities (sounding description of places and situations)
c) imaginary sonorities (evocation of the infra-world voices).

Both in radio or scenic versions of the opera y propose each of those three sonorities as a layer, in an attempt to create in the listener the impression of listening the novel :

a) actors adopt the "llanero" style of talking, something which Rulfo himself has used while recording some of his own works (RULFO, " ¡Díles que no me maten!" and "Luvina", México, Voz Viva, UNAM/CGDC, 4a. Edition, 1985);
b) the sound environments mentioned in the novel are listened through a series of recordings made in situ in an attempt to recreate and to preserve Rulfo’s sound allusions;
c) the whispers, understood as essential archetypes of live, become music through the voice of and instruments.
"Doloritas", first of two parts, comprehends from the begin of the novel, when Dolores dead voice talks to his son Juan Preciado, until the dead of this last one. The second part, "Susana San Juan" (1997-), is based on another female character and starts at the moment of apparition of this character until the dead of Pedro Páramo, the end of the novel.

In its first contact with the novel, the reader enters to a world in which he ignores if the characters are alive or dead. When the narration starts we know that Juan Preciado’s mother, Doloritas, wife of Pedro Páramo, dies. The opera looks for the reproduction of Rulfo’s idea of Comala, a town whose name is a metaphor of the pre-hispanic hades. In Comala, Doloritas is a whisper sounding in Preciado’s mind while entering in the town, while the rest of the characters maintain a duality between being alive or dead. When they are supposedly alive, their voices are the normal voices of actors. When they are supposedly dead they become music and whispers, the authentic voice they were or the voice of their rattles.

In the scenic opera’s conception, the novel is an evocation of the Mictlan, Aztec mythological place inhabited by the dead, in which the listener will be surrounded by resonant fossils of other times where dead is an extension of life. Different moments allow to observe "how the earth creaks" and how the world continues "up there", listened through the lugubrious swing of the bells or the sounding of Jalisco’s Llano, whose wind, rain, river, insects, birds or bulls appear as a permanent presence of a destroyed Nature. Without any border between sounds, music emerges from the environments within Rulfo’s conception of fusion of realism and magic. (Julio Estrada)

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