The silences of Natalia Valencia

In its last years, the Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra has made an extraordinary effort to remove cellos and clarinets from the tuxedo ghetto of classical music. That includes musical and audiovisual experiences of all kinds. In one of them, the film director Laura Mora, the composer Natalia Valencia and the Reconciliation Choir came together to pay tribute to the victims of the war, a work that seeks to give a name to so many silenced people.

By Simón Murillo Melo

Photographs: cortesía Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra

A few years ago, someone started making music. There was no writing and not much was lived, but some songs probably survived several generations and thus a first history of the world was formed, through stories that were songs or songs that were stories. Someone else realized that with a little direction, two or three or four or twenty can do something that no one can do alone.

Over time the world transformed to suit us. Writing allowed the advancement of empires and the legacy of music. There were kings, administrators, soldiers, patrons, universities, professional musicians. Haydn's and Beethoven's orchestras proved successful to hundreds of ears and became an export product. In Manaus they built an opera house after cutting down a lot of jungle and killing many. In the film, Fitzcarraldo climbs a boat up a mountain because he wants to hear Caruso's voice in Iquitos; In Auschwitz there was a women's orchestra to liven up the work in the camp.

In Medellín there are many orchestras and the largest of them is the Medellín Philharmonic, Filarmed. It started 37 years ago in the garage of Alberto Correa, a doctor who went through the seminary and discovered that he loved Gregorian chants. Today there are 65 musicians, plus the orchestra directors and a large administrative team. Such scaffolding requires, of course, a lot of money. But as someone realized a long time ago, music only exists if there is someone who can listen to it. Furthermore, philharmonics are built on a ritual that is as social as it is artistic. The Philharmonic's touch brings together fans, politicians, businessmen who pay to be together and listen to something. Or at least, that was before the pandemic hid them.

Last year, the Philharmonic hoped to continue its multi-year effort to break out of big theaters and expand across the city. And even though getting money was extremely difficult, they did many things, some of them pleasantly improbable. In El Sinaí, the neighborhood that gave the mayor's office the excuse to use the mounted police and the army, they held concerts for forcibly cloistered listeners and then set up a series of workshops; They also did chamber concerts outside the hospitals and even courses via WhatsApp with students in Urabá; They broadcast concerts for the global market, a strategy copied all over the planet. Musicians accustomed to their local audiences found themselves competing with the all-powerful German, American, and English establishment. The already poor income generated by the ticket office was replaced by nothing in the streaming. Helpless, the Philharmonic continued.

Its musicians held virtual talks with the public in the privacy of their homes. Concertmaster Gonzalo Ospina interviewed an expert in music therapy, prepared a feijoada while talking about Brazilian music and made a mysterious mold of phosphoric chicken. He talked about music with Brigitte Baptiste and Andrea Echeverri and taught a music course around the Latin American boom.

They went viral for playing outside hospitals and for an unfortunate trumpet solo inside a passenger plane. They performed virtually in natural parks, in a succession of disturbing videos that superimpose virtual musicians on static landscapes. In them it seems as if the terror of the pandemic and its imposed distances have taken over the remaining ecosystems.

They also explored the immediate: a series of concerts at the Articulated Life Units (UVA) sought to drag the Milky Way to Manrique, Itagüí, Castilla; a background screen displaying planets, comets, solar flames, and the inexorable expansion of the universe accompanied the performance of a live chamber orchestra. In a year when leaving the house became an adventure, listening to Handel alongside an audience of masked neighbors is a type of communion that already seems very far away. They played virtually with Pala and Pedro Guerra, they did ironing music sessions – Amanda Miguel, José José and Roberto Carlos on Beethoven's instruments –, they animated children's stories and they set live music to a documentary by Juan Fernando Ospina about the pandemic in Medellín.

Voices of memory

Despite the above, perhaps Filarmed's most interesting project is the Reconciliation Choir, a joint effort between the orchestra, a singing teacher and fifteen choristers, which includes the participation of some signatories of the Peace Agreement and victims of the war. . Although last year was difficult – several of its members left the city in search of work picking coffee and others in a mine in Chocó – they continue to meet virtually every week to sing. We do not talk about the past, but about the possibilities of the future. Marcela Correa, the director, told me that singing is not a faculty of the voice; It is one of the whole body. A group that has faced the war singing together through a screen, not thinking about the vocal cords, but about the primary essence of wanting and being able to say something. The pandemic has separated orchestras, but in a choir that sings alone, the strangeness of being heard still survives.

Precisely, this experience brought together the film director Laura Mora, the composer Natalia Valencia and the Reconciliation Choir for a powerful video timidly titled Tribute to the victims, in black and white, barely seventeen minutes long, full of chilling strings, a succession of silent faces and a single voice at the end.

He Tribute to the victims Choir members are seen holding blackboards. The shots change slightly but the image is almost identical: a face with a sign, over and over again. The camera zooms out, zooms in, the doors, hallways and windows in the background become other doors, hallways and windows; Sometimes the camera chases a woman with a gray braid, sometimes each showgirl looks like a ghost standing at the very long reception of another life. The viewer becomes accustomed to the faces—a woman with long black hair, another with elongated lips and painted eyebrows, two men with a cane, a child—and, at the same time, because the white writing on each blackboard is always changing, never We know who is who.

The boards only contain a name and a date: “Jorge Ortiz 06-16-2020 Barranco de Loba”; This is how Pedro Yunda from Belén de los Andaquíes and Emilio Dauqui from Buenos Aires also appear, one with 12-02 and another with 15-02, Eliécer and Felipe Gañán, both from Supía, both in 04-02, Deiro Alexánder Pérez from Barbacoas in 06-05, Gildardo Achicué from Toribío in 04-19, Amparo Guejia in 01-10 in Caloto. And so on until 236 names pass through the camera, some separated by a few days, others on the same day and with the same last name, in Toribío, in Barbacoas, in Bogotá and in Santa Marta. Towns, cities, names and surnames, over and over again.

The strings tremble like impossible screams, and the moments of repose, the occasional tinkling of a bell, only serve to announce another attack. Several notes are played at the same time at the same pitch and the resulting effect is a kind of musical brutalism: sounds compressed like concrete; The small spaces to breathe only excuse the increase in tension that seems like it will never be released. After twelve minutes, silence suspends everything and a white voice comes, the voice of a child. Then silence returns, which is broken by a piano. The concrete transforms into a funeral march until the hallways are left alone, and instead of letters there is only an empty chair.

Cinema is about ghosts, Mora told me. The 236 breaths of silence are sustained by many who are not them, nor do they look like them. The video prefigures another in which the 260 thousand names left by the war in Colombia accumulate one on top of the other, letters that replace names, names that replace bodies.

Whether Mozart composing for the nobles at the height of the Habsburg dynasty, or Beethoven composing for Napoleon and the promised liberation of dynasties like the Habsburgs, or Penderecki and Pärt trying to musicalize the terror of the 20th century, “classical music” carries with it a rich, explicitly political tradition. A work by Natalia Valencia, 1987, part of a previous composition also his, Requiem, with which she graduated from Eafit —Valencia was the first woman in Antioquia to graduate in composition— and that the Philharmonic played for the first time in 2007 —Valencia was the first composer in Antioquia performed by a large orchestra—, within the framework of the commemoration of the twenty years of the dark 1987. Filarmed proposed that she adapt the piece and she accepted.

Compose to live

Natalia Valencia is a careful, pale woman, with strange and beautiful eyes and a clear voice. Although his work is painfully political, for a long time he shied away from literalism. “Contemplation lives in me; Sometimes I get lost in observing things that evoke amazement and beauty in me: that a bird flies, that an ant can carry its own weight. For me it is more important to listen than to speak: that is why we have two ears and one mouth!” This respect for the world is combined with a reluctance to speak in the first person. “Putting a title gave me a lot of difficulty, because there I was being literal. After many years I have realized that I have had or have a serious difficulty in showing myself, in being the center of attention, in expressing myself. I think I have carried a lot of fear in my life. And the way I have had to say without saying has been music.” And if Requiem refers to an anonymous duel, the four digits of 1987 They focus the horror on the intimacy of Valencia.

That year, a squad, apparently led by Carlos Castaño himself, attacked the garage of Valencia's house in a camper at approximately six in the morning. They shot nearly forty shots at his father, Patriotic Union senator Pedro Luis Valencia. Natalia was ten years old, her brother eight. She saw her father endure the shots before falling dead on the floor of the house.

Pedro Luis was a doctor and taught at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Antioquia. He had been a member of the Communist Party for many years until he joined the Patriotic Union list as a substitute. Like the majority on the left of his generation, he was accustomed to harassment from the authorities, to threats. In 1980, the military imprisoned him thanks to the Security Statute and when he was free —Jesús María Valle was his lawyer— the head of the Fourth Brigade and subsequent commander of the armed forces, Harold Bedoya, told him: “You are leaving at this moment. , but you die.” Valle, who publicly denounced Álvaro Uribe for links to paramilitarism, would be assassinated years later. Justice would involve Bedoya in the murder of Jaime Garzón, among other crimes, and he would die free.

The murder of Pedro Luis Valencia was preceded by months of harassment and threats that were not stopped after his death. An unknown man went to the house where Natalia, along with her mother and brother, were hiding, to ask about the family, then he got into a police car around the block. Like Pedro Luis Valencia, it is estimated that another 4,152 militants of the Patriotic Union were murdered, disappeared or kidnapped by paramilitaries and state agents in the bloodiest political genocide in the Western Hemisphere. The extent of the catastrophe of the Valencia family, like that of the other more than four thousand UP militants who were victims of crimes, is not easy to understand, nor is that of the hundreds today. It broke Natalia's life in two: “Even today it makes it very difficult for me to talk about my father's murder. But above all, it makes it very difficult for me to talk about my father's murder in the singular. Think about it like what happened just to me or what happened to my family. That happened to many, many of us.”

Valencia had begun studying clarinet some years before his father's death. “They always told me that when I was very little, I told my dad: 'When I grow up I want to be a doctor like you'... and he immediately started me studying music.” After her murder, the family sought asylum in Cuba, where she and her brother entered the island's rigorous musical training system. The government gave them a house two blocks from the beach and at night you could almost hear the sound of the waves. In Cuba, Valencia obsessively studied the clarinet and piano; she discovered that she could be happy and that the shadow of murder left her at times; He discovered that he was not afraid of the dark.

He tried to give up the clarinet for many years, although he only succeeded when he was in his thirties. But he went on and on: “Studying music was as normal as going to sleep.” When he turned eighteen he left the island to study composition in Brazil. He returned to Medellín three years later for his younger brother, who was becoming more and more depressed every day. “I couldn't live without my dad.” And at a time when he was left alone, he stopped doing it.

"My best friend tells me: 'You never talk about what happened.' And I have realized that it is true. Now I do; I don't know if frequently." When she returned to Colombia she was a stranger who had grown up in two different countries and her language moved at the intersection of both. It existed in the middle of Sao Paulo, Havana, Medellín. The shadow that devoured his family spread across the country, in Urabá, in the Montes de María, in Medellín. Castaño appeared giving explanations on the news, published a book, his successors controlled Congress and who knows how much more. “I am increasingly aware of how atrocious my father's death was. But for many years I didn't talk about him. "It bothered me that my story provoked astonishment that prevented us from speaking."

She wrote music for orchestras and although she doubted her talent, many recognized something in her. He published a study on a sound: the flapping of wings of birds when flying. Flight of birds, and made an orchestral work with his research. Teresita Gómez played one of her pieces in Paris and Andrés Orozco conducted one of her compositions: Fanfare to life and silence. In 2014 she became the keyboardist for Altered States and was a professor at her dad's university. For a time she worked with a piece of paper next to the computer: “Put all the love in the world in every note,” and tried to hide the anger that stalked her. He tried to allow himself joy, even though the news reminded him, almost daily, of his father's death.

Valencia does not write his compositions thinking about horror. But when she listens to them later, she discovers that her father is there, her brother is there, she is there.

Laura Mora, who is the daughter of a lawyer murdered by hitmen apparently linked to paramilitarism, told me that in Colombia they have not yet thought about what was gone, much less what is. In 2020 alone, 83 massacres were committed and the first department on the list is Antioquia. What does music mean in a country that has destroyed so much? Is it an opportunity for healing, the passage to a better life? Or is it the possibility of invoking a flare of dignity amidst catastrophe? In it Tribute to the victims of Valencia and Mora, there is no clear attempt to answer any question; simply to state, with the patience of life, everything that has been lost. When the explosion of the strings stops and silence surrounds everything, when the child comes in to sing, a kind of obviousness becomes a prayer. Not an answer, not a lament, but something more:

I am son,

I am all the children that we all are.

I am you, I am everyone,

I am son,

We are all children.

Look I'm alive,

Look I'm alive,

Look I'm alive.

I am son,

I am all the children,

I am all the children that we all are.