Event Detail

"Como si todo fuera canción began in collaboration with Mariana Flores, shaped by a shared resonance with the voice of Mexican singer Chavela Vargas (1919–2012). It was never just about how she sounded, but about what her voice did—how it moved us, how it insisted on presence, on vulnerability, on a raw, embodied intensity that refused containment. 

Her voice evoked a deeply affective and bodily experience, a direct channel to grief, longing, defiance, and ultimately, healing. Chavela’s voice became a site of sonic memory, carrying in its texture the weight of exile, heartbreak, and displacement. But it was also an act of experimentation: she stretched the limits of phrasing, resisted ornamental excess, and expanded what a voice, especially a ranchera female voice, could hold and do. Through this experimental trace, Chavela created transgenerational networks of belonging and opened space for imagining other futures. 

This concert grows out ofthatecho ofexperimentation. Itemerges through memory and the affective force of timbre. In it, I search for alternative sites to reshape the expectations surrounding the oboe, not by resisting its limits but by stepping into the embodied act of sound-making. 

The four songs I composed for Como si todo fuera canción—austera pero no gris (austere but not gray), como si todo fuera canción (as if everything were song), lullaby para no dormir (lullaby to stay awake), and let the rests groove—become unfolding spaces for listening, mourning, healing, and reimagining. Like Chavela’s voice, they carry heartbreak and displacement while also reaching toward new affectiveintensities, toward sounding otherwise. 

Throughout, the four of us (Mariana, Kathryn, Juan, and I) embrace the possibility of intentionally intensifying sound, emotion, and vulnerability as a way of being in sound."

~ Juliana Gaona