E18 - Jacqueline Nova, “Creación de la tierra”

Jacqueline Nova (Belgium/Colombia)
“Creación de la tierra” (1972)

"Creación de la tierra" is a piece that can be classified as “tape music” or “electroacoustic music for fixed media”; however, the composer consistently emphasized describing it as a work “for electronically transformed voice”. It was composed using archival material, featuring a fragment of one of the chants of the creation of the earth, in the voice of an Indigenous person from the U’wa ethnic group (Boyacá, Colombia).

It is a ritual in which, through listening, words undergo constant metamorphoses; they overflow from the voice to transmute into bodies, memories, territories. In every step of the 19-minute ceremony, the voice takes us to encounters with other forms of existence—visible, invisible, tangible, unknown, familiar, ancestral. This voice guides us initiatically through worlds, both human and non-human, through earthly, spectral, or transitional interstices. This creator chant invites us to embody forest, wind, insects, percussion, choir, river, night. The voice of a community to which Nova does not belong and the words of a language that is not her own are interwoven without exoticism and gain profound symbolic value by being amplified in a context that has historically marginalized them. Nova strongly reaffirms the right to coexist as equals and the necessity to exist without exclusions.

(Text by Ana María Romano.)
(Creación de la tierra" -  courtesy of the Centro de Documentación Musical de la Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

Jacqueline Nova (Ghent, Belgium, 1935 - Bogota, Colombia, 1975)
Jacqueline Nova arrived in Bogotá in 1958 after living in Bucaramanga, her father’s hometown. She settled in the capital to study to become a pianist at the National Conservatory of Music. However, in 1963, she focused on composition. She was the first female composer to earn a diploma from the Conservatory. In 1967, she won a scholarship to study at the CLAEM (Latin American Center for Advanced Musical Studies) of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Argentina. Throughout Nova’s artistic creation, it is evident her great fascination with the human voice, electronic media, and mixed instrumental combinations—those in which acoustic instruments are intertwined with electronic media. For her, electroacoustic resources had to be integrated into the sonic universe of contemporary creation without mystery, as another musical material that could dialogue organically with acoustic instruments. "Creación de la tierra" emerged at the Phonology Studio of the Faculty of Architecture, University of Buenos Aires in 1972. She died in Bogota of bone cancer. Her tragic and early death not only cut short a career at the height of her creative potential, but also directly affected the development of electroacoustic music in Colombia.