Angélica Negrón’s Music

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Introduction
This essay assesses Angélica Negrón, a musical composer born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, but now based in New York, where she composes music for orchestras, live audiences, film scores, and ensembles. What makes Angélica Negrón’s music rare and astounding is her commitment to making honest music that unapologetically occupies spaces and whose access has been historically limited for the minority (Composers Now). Angélica Negrón uses plants, voices, vegetables, found objects or chamber ensembles to create music. Specifically, Angélica Negrón uses a living soundscape, where she digitally manipulates with a pixel sorting algorithm that translates plant’s biorhythms into music (Composers Now). Angélica Negrón looks to activate and make audible the secret life of plants to evoke distant landscapes, triggering memories of places that are far away and familiar (Composers Now). Therefore, this essay will take a look into Angélica Negrón’s music and the process that makes her music engaging.
Historical and Musical Background
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Angélica Negrón started playing piano when she was seven, then played the violin as a concert violinist (Fancher). She is a classically trained performer who has branched out into modern music. She incorporates a range of traditional instruments as well as a diverse range of non-traditional acoustics, such as robots and toys (Fancher). Angélica Negrón’s rich, multilayered, symphonic approach has evolved idiosyncratically throughout time, making great use of subtle, accurate, uncommon elements as well as strong rhythms and movements, and just about everything else (Fancher). Angélica Negrón was not trained in the formal approach but in an unorthodox manner. Angélica Negrón states that even during her music school period, she did not explore sounds but was more intent on practicing and honing her skills. As she grew into music, she never thought of the possibility of becoming a composer.
Among the organizations that have commissioned Angélica Negrón are the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Girls Chorus, and the NY Philharmonic Project 19 project (Fancher). She has composed music for television, independent films, stage, and contemporary dance. Negrón earned a master’s degree in composing music from New York University and a doctorate from the Graduate Center (CUNY) (Foster). Foster states that she is also an instructional artist for the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program and co-founder of Acopladitos, a Spanish education symphonic band for small children, with Noraliz Ruiz.
Non-Traditional Composing Style of Angélica Negrón
Aside from the possible nostalgic aspect for individuals who grew up with toys or robots, both the tiny and the sentient robots have intrigued humans since the eighteenth century. As a youngster, Angelica Negron was fascinated by the invisible magic of a music box, especially where the source of the music originates from (Fancher). Friend posits that Angélica Negrón is a composer who is equally likely to utilize electronic technology, toys, plants, crumpled paper, or any other acoustic tool that falls into her inquisitive fingers, as she is to compose for viola, violins, trumpet, saxophone, quintet, or ensemble (7).
Between her own experience and the music Angelica was playing, there was a significant disconnect. Fancher claims that she was never given a chance to experiment with noises. It required constant technique learning. When one is a child in an art class, one experiment with paint and colors, but this is less common when one is experimenting with sound (Herron 8). She tries to access and fill the void left by her lack of such a childhood through her music. Negrón claims that she has always had a strong curiosity about the sounds in her environment (Olivares). Prior to writing her compositions down on paper, she recorded sounds with a cassette player and played them on the computer.
Angélica Negrón speaks candidly and joyfully about small sounds, where she states that she is attracted to extremely little, minor sounds such as music boxes and toy gadgets (Olivares). Funnily enough, the composer states that toys have a quirky side and are never in tune, explaining her love for making music between pitches. Furthermore, Angélica Negrón states that toy instruments try to sound melodious but are never quite in a melody (Olivares). She uses emotion and nostalgia to guide her musical prowess and technique, drawing from the toys and musical boxes’ connection to her childhood to try and understand moments that were elusive and mysterious.
We are drawn to little objects, presumably because size is an important aspect of our perception and existence. Items made for us as toddlers help us to build our unique reality, one of familiarity and solitude, during a moment in our growth while we have minimal influence over the wider universe and bigger persons around us (Hernández-Candelas 12). Angélica Negrón finds that serendipity is a sign of appreciation for creators, and most artists seldom outgrow their childish curiosity and capacity to discover joy in random interactions that can become fruitful over the course of a career of creativity.
Negrón values live performance since she realized earlier on that she intended to involve the listeners while making music while performing. When Angélica Negrón began writing acoustic instruments atop electronic gadgets, she recognized that if it were what she was dedicated to, she simply needed to find out how to make it aesthetically beautiful and intriguing and find innovative ways of approaching electronic music (Olivares). Negrón discusses how she approaches her job cognitively, along with her fascination for the mechanics of music composition. She describes it as a journey and a dedication to issuing a resolution.
Her compositions have addressed important topics, including living during the pandemic for a piece presented last year by the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center and global warming for one that the New York Botanical Garden authorized (Olivares). Negrón said she uses her music to “convey it to a point in which I have a clear and intimate personal connection” when confronted with such heavy situations (Olivares). And to her, that appea...