By SUSANNA SHARPE
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN RECENT HISTORY, an artist-in-residence will spend a semester at LLILAS. Chilean composer, musical producer, and writer Juan Pablo Abalo will take advantage of access to LLILAS and the Benson Latin American Collection to conduct interdisciplinary research, write, and allow some of his latest ideas on a range of topics—nostalgia, democracy, cinema, and more—to percolate.
The LLILAS community first met Abalo in fall of 2023, when he was the guest of LLILAS Director Adela Pineda Franco for a conversation about the film El Conde (2023, dir. Pablo Larraín), for which Abalo was musical director. The film is a satire that imagines the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire who, despite wishing to end his days on Earth, cannot die. Shot stunningly in black and white, the film won an Academy Award for cinematography.
Abalo holds a PhD in Philosophy from La Universidad de Chile, where he concentrated on aesthetics and theory. He is assistant professor Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, where he is editor of Revista de Artes Liberales (RAL) and teaches about history and aesthetics. These days, he is working remotely on a variety of projects as his wife pursues a doctorate at the School of Journalism and Media in the Moody College of Communication.
In a wide-ranging conversation about his work and his interests, Abalo makes it clear that he is interdisciplinary in almost all that he does: “It’s hard to define myself because I am very much a product of interdisciplinarity. I studied composition in the conservatory, have a master’s in arts and humanities, and a doctorate in philosophy with concentrations in aesthetics and artistic theory.”
Much of this ultimately gets oriented toward music: “What I most enjoy is the creation of ideas that eventually become things,” he says. This can be writing music, writing about music, or even making a podcast.
Prior to working with Chilean director Pablo Larraín on El Conde, Abalo had worked on smaller independent films and video-dance productions. El Conde was a “a big leap,” he said. “Larraín has criteria, and vast musical knowledge. It is enriching and very entertaining to talk to him about music. He knows a lot. It made the work very fluid.”
The soundtrack of El Conde includes recognizable music by well-known composers, such as Vivaldi and Shostakovich. However, the pieces have been altered, or reinvented. This is a process whereby the composer or arranger—Abalo in this case—writes reductions of classical pieces, subtracting some instruments and adding others, elongating some parts and reducing others. Ultimately, this serves to fit a scene in the movie, and also to create a mood.
The director had a list of pieces he wanted remixed. Abalo describes working in an old-fashioned way, the way Hitchcock worked with composer Alfred Newman, or George Lucas with John Williams on the Star Wars movies. Abalo would begin to rewriting or reshape the works on Larraín’s list, creating temporary recordings of them using a musical software program. The recordings were then paired with scenes that Larraín shot, and modified accordingly. Finally, in order that the music accompany film scenes in the way that Larraín and Abalo envisioned, a live orchestra and conductor performed the final score in a studio with the film running on a giant screen. Abalo was present for these recordings as producer.
In talking about creating new, “refreshed” versions of pieces in the classical canon, Abalo describes a process of “refreshing” a piece of music as an art that requires knowledge of certain criteria but also daring.
“It is an exercise that can have a lot of freedom, but it is difficult to preserve the spirit of a piece and at the same time change its clothing, its costume.”
After the success of El Conde, what’s next? Abalo just finished a project that involved another project of reinvention. This time it was the reworking of music by György Ligeti (1923–2006), a Romanian-born composer of Hungarian-Jewish background who is considered one of the most avant-garde in contemporary classical music. Abalo was commissioned by the curator of the Beta 2024 Biennial in Timisoara, Romania, for an exhibition titled “Cover Me Softly,” whose theme was an exploration of “covers.”
Music and Emotions
Abalo’s brain works in interdisciplinary ways. While writing an article about nostalgia in music, for example, he feels motivated to explore musical ideas that provoke nostalgia in a composition.
“When I’m working on an essay about nostalgia in music—for example, ‘la pena’ [pain] of Latin American music—without realizing it, I’m writing a musical piece that is full of that feeling.”
He has written shorter essays on this topic. A piece about Violeta Parra explores how her music, Latin American music, and in particular Chilean music, “leans more toward sadness than happiness when you hear it. And that’s in the best sense, because it’s not that this is a problem. On the contrary, I think that the depth that such music can have is infinite.”
He admits that the majority of the music that he creates is full of nostalgia and melancholy.
A conversation about music with Juan Pablo is definitely an open-ended exercise leaving one wanting more. Don’t we all occasionally wonder about why a certain song or melody or piece of instrumental music makes us feel a certain way? Abalo does, too.
Taking advantage of his semester of proximity to a world-renowned Latin American collection, Abalo also hopes to focus on the question of democracy.
“I think we’re in a very important moment with respect to the protection of democracies in the world. In Latin America—Brazil, Argentina, Chile—we lost those democracies for many years.” After decades of transition, during which some countries have recovered their democracies, Abalo is interested in exploring the ways in which these countries have begun, cinematographically and musically, to “reopen a panorama that had been censured.”
“I think about all that has happened so that the film El Conde can be a satire. A lot of water has gone under the bridge so that we can get to this place of maturity in a country, to be able to have distance, and to satirize a painful moment. And that process is necessary.” ✹
Susanna Sharpe is a writer, editor, and musician, and the Communications Coordinator at LLILAS Benson.
