“What we want to fight for is a world where that fits, that there is space for everybody to find their own ways of learning, living and becoming. If that means making tiny weird sounds, then we should defend the shit out of it as well.”
Luis Fernando Amaya
Luis Fernando Amaya is a Mexican-born composer currently based in Oslo, Norway. Luis’ album nacen en silencio was featured as Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp and described as having a “surprisingly aqueous effect, a milky ether of resonances spiked with metallic scrapes and pings” (Peter Margasak, Bandcamp). His work has been performed in Europe and the Americas by ensembles including London Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Yarn/Wire, and Oslo Domkor, among others. His work explores topics including collective memory and the relationships between human and non-human agents (plants, animals, or environments). He has completed a PhD in composition and music technology from Northwestern University, Illinois, and has since started working more directly with people, creating unique sound worlds with an attention to detail that facilitates a completely different relation between music and the spoken word.
Luis Fernando Amaya was recently featured at hcmf// (Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival) 2025, where his commission ‘Mi libro es la Tierra: Rosa Ixchel’ was performed by London Sinfonietta. Following his premiere at hcmf//, Marisse Cato sat down with Luis to discuss activism, accessible experimentation, and why we make music…
Header photo: Patricia Carolina
.
Marisse/PRXLUDES: You have started doing a series of pieces where you are collaborating with activists. In your work series Mi Libro es la Tierra (“My Book is the Earth”), you work with environmental and indigenous activists like Rosa Ixchel Tuyuc, from Guatemala. She is speaking with your music. Can you share some more about how you are thinking about the relationship between voice and music in these pieces?
Luis Fernando Amaya: The voice and the music are connected throughout, but at the beginning it’s a bit more subtle. My goal with the musical part of this piece was to create music that listens to what Rosa is saying. It’s like music that creates a space for her words — one that doesn’t comment “this is good, bad, sad” and so on, but instead opens up room for listening in the broadest sense of the word.
It’s the first time I worked with words in this way. For me it came from the need to express specific ideas which cannot be done with music alone. Words and music live in different areas of the psyche. Even with words you can be ambiguous but with music it is impossible to have this level of specificity. Composing has always been a way to transform and explore the way I relate with the world.
One of the things I care about most in the world is indigenous struggles — struggles for food sovereignty, for their relationship with the territory and everything that lives there. To me, this is one of the things that can save us from the madness we are in. Many Western societies, though not exclusively, are completely suicidal and murderous. I really wanted to use the little platform I have to share these voices. That’s one thing I believe is good for the world. But there’s another benefit for the activists themselves: visibility may help prevent them from being attacked or murdered. Indigenous activists are the population of environmental activists murdered the most. And Latin America is the epicentre of this: especially in Mexico, Colombia, and Central America, but it’s across the whole continent.
This piece was premiered at hcmf// [Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival], and the number of people I knew there were more than the amount of people Rosa would normally reach outside of Guatemala in a year. So my relationship with the text comes from a deep desire to do things that have a tangible impact in the world that is beyond the piece or its making.
The lack of visibility that the media gives indigenous activists is staggering. I always ask people “how many indigenous activists have been killed in the past year that you know of?”. In Mexico maybe they can tell you the most famous ones — which is like two — but it is actually dozens and dozens. It breaks my heart every time I think about how invisible these amazing and brave people are to the world. It is not the piece itself but people who know about them that can help protect them.
You create incredible collaborations with musicians that are often long term, like in your solo bassoon piece ‘Pregunta no.4: Quimera’ (2021). It was a three year long process. Can you talk about how you manage these long-term projects as a freelancer?
I did this piece during my PhD when I had a stipend — which I miss every month! But I am still doing these kinds of projects. Now that I live in Norway, I have access to more funding than I ever did before. But having access does not mean that I will get it. I am competing with other people who have been in Norway a long time or all their lives. Even though they say that doesn’t make a difference, all of the immigrant population here know that it is a difficult competition for us.
What happens a lot of the time is we want to write a piece and we don’t know when funding will come. So, I start having meetings with collaborators where I record everything. We meet every month and have these intense sessions. Then once I feel like I have that and we apply to funding, I can focus on writing the piece. There’s a whole archive that I draw from — bringing all that accumulated time into the writing period.
Can you share your experience working with feedback in ‘un leve trueno’ (“a slight thunder”)?. This is an interesting difference from collaborating with a player or fixed media electronics.
That piece came from an exception I made to my usual need to secure funding before composing. I had just moved to Norway and it was rough to jump directly into freelancing because making connections takes a very long time. You need people to become interested in your music by encountering it naturally. When I arrived, I started working at one restaurant, then another, then a café. Then I met this wonderful percussionist from Portugal, Madalena Rato, who was doing her Masters at the Norwegian Academy of Music. She had listened to some of my music, and she knew I was a percussionist so she wanted me to write a piece for her final recital. She couldn’t pay me, but we were already friends and I said, “Yes, I will do it!”
It was a two-year long process. We ended up finding what I wanted in the last 3 months of that process. It was a year and 9 months of failures — constant failures! That eventually brought us to a closed loop of feedback between transducers and microphones: one transducer on a timpani and one on a bass drum, pretty far away from each other. Each has a microphone connected to the opposite instrument that is connected to an external performer who controls the levels. That proved to be magical. You can anticipate what sounds you have played, but what I love is that feedback has this living agency! You have to adapt to it. Even though you are controlling the volume, you cannot control what will emerge.
I wanted to talk about your relationship with the piano in ‘la memoria incendiada’ for piano and transducers (“the burning memory”). You wrote it as a way to refigure your relationship with the piano and reconcile with the instrument in some ways. How did you decide to make this work and what is your perspective now 2 years after the piece?
It is as much about my relationship with piano as my relationship with OCD. It kind of erupted when I was around 14. I went to therapy to get tools to understand it and work through it. I had to recognise that I will always have a somewhat cyclical, repetitive relationship with certain things from my life — especially from my early life, childhood or adolescence.
I don’t think about the piano that often, but for many years I have had these pieces in my fingers and mind every day. There is a connection with anxiety and fidgeting with these fragments. It is something that can drive me crazy. The way my mind works is, for example, that I have this Allemande by Handel in D minor, but it varies… It bends and gets pulled and I’m barely in control of it. It was very interesting to take this thing — which is sometimes torture to me — and consider how it could become source material. But I found the material also kept running away. It is like when you have little floaters in your vision; if you ever try to look directly at them, they move. It was kind of like that.
Something that made it really difficult was that these fragments did not make sense together. I had to find what could bind them. I had all these elements that responded to how my brain works, and I kept asking myself, how do I collaborate with this? A lot of my work is to do with relationships with things that go beyond me — not just animals and plants, but also memory. They are porous. You’re always collaborating with something you cannot fully understand. Like, if you see a mouse, the way they act, just doesn’t make sense to me. All their movements seem incomprehensible. So it was like trying to collaborate with a mouse! When I finally finished the piece — and it’s a piece I’m quite fond of — I had this peace for about three months. Those fragments in my mind and fingers went away! I thought “wow this is amazing”. And then gradually, they came back; but I feel like they are a bit more like friends now.
You have one piece that is mixed in binaural. How did you come to working in this way and how did you find it?
The binaural mix was an invitation to a project. You send Sounding Future your stems and the spatialisation of the piece and they mix it. The original setting for ‘Dialecto de árbol no. 6’ is for eight singers, each with a speaker next to them, surrounding the audience. I gave them the charts and they made the binaural version. I know a bit of how to mix binaural with ambisonics but I didn’t do it myself.
To be honest, I find the whole ambisonics thing — although it’s changing — to be very exclusive, due to the correlation between the amount of resources it requires and the amount of people who can listen to it. You need a lot of equipment, specific people, specific gear… At the beginning of my PhD I was hoping to have more ties to the Mexican scene. But this is hard once you leave. At the time, both in Mexico and other parts of Latin America, ambisonics was just not an option, so this became a me problem. I could have chosen to make work like my professors and composers at big universities in the US. Instead, I try to make my music as simple as possible in terms of what it requires — or if not simple, at least as accessible as possible. For ambisonics you need so many speakers and all this software. So, unless I get a commission, I will not work in this way.
For example, with ‘un leve trueno’, I worked with a percussionist and it’s a very experimental piece. But one of the conditions is that they only require a few objects or something you can make. I had in mind making the kind of music my percussion professors in Aguascalientes can use to introduce their students to experimental music.
Yes, I saw this in ‘guerrilla de dientes entre los árboles’ (“guerrilla of teeth amongst the trees”). How do you think about notation as a percussionist?
I write for percussion very differently to other instruments. I started writing for percussion very late. I wrote my first percussion piece when I was 29. By that time I had written 3 or 4 string quartets. I guess I was kind of waiting for a seed to grow. This was the first piece I wrote for percussion, and it’s about insects. I really wanted to make a very performable piece with any means, but that is very precise. For this piece you have a group of objects with certain qualities that I specify in the score: you can have 8-12 or 12-15. Everything else is very precise. But this kind of openness allows the piece to transform in every performance. Not in terms of form or rhythm but certainly in terms of timbre and to some extent duration.
This quality recalls why I love percussion. It’s where timbre matters the most, in my opinion. I remember my professors discussing with different percussionists the exact mallet and cymbal they should use for a particular piece, and it was like a twenty-five minute conversation. This was such a high-level conversation about timbre that not everyone thinks about.
This piece gives a lot of trust to the performers and adjustability to their resources. Growing up I didn’t have a lot of access to percussion instruments. When I was studying orchestral music, it meant I couldn’t practice unless I went to my teacher’s house. I always keep in mind that I don’t want the people who perform my music to have that experience. The notation tries to point at the things that I think matter in the music, and erase the things that can change.
That piece is one that has been performed the most. And they are all different kind of pieces which makes them crazy to listen to. It’s like a having a skeleton, but some skeletons have human skin on top, others look like a blue bear, another looks like an alien. They move the same — they do the same things — but are just completely different characters.
.
How do you listen as a percussionist, and how do you deal with notation that doesn’t get into the details of timbre?
At least as a percussionist — maybe this is the case for other instrumentalists too — I have a very strong connection between gesture and timbre; which usually you wouldn’t pair together, because you can have a gesture but it depends what you are hitting and what you are using to hit it that changes the timbre. Nevertheless, there is this overall quality you can have that will keep many things in timbral quality, even if you open up the materials. I know that the faster this piece is performed, the louder, the denser, the more crisp it will sound. Many aspects will shift. This is what I am interested in; not timbral specificity but timbral transformation.
There are also other things that I’ve written that don’t have that openness. For example, ‘nacen en silencio’ (“born in silence”) requires two aluminium strips. I only included them as they are quite cheap to make. But my relationship with those strips is very interesting because it took over a year, trying a million things with them. Eventually, I just chose to rub them very softly, and that was all I wanted from them. There was this tactile feeling that they were giving me when I struck them, but I was after the kind of “listening with your skin” quality — which I think answers a bit of what you are saying about listening as a percussionist. I think what I am saying is I find it very bodily. It is very tactile and very movement and gesture oriented. I hadn’t even thought about it before you asked, actually!
Is there something shared between the reason you play traditional Mexican music and the reason you compose? Is the motivation for why you play this music linked to the motivation of why you compose?
My immediate answer is yes — but then I delve into a lot of cracks. Maybe the reason comes from the same place but then completely separate and then end up in the same place again. In the end they meet in this thing that I am looking for. I think it is my way — as it is yours and all musicians and artists — of getting to know the world we live in and ourselves. It is an epistemological reason, in a way. We are creating knowledge that is ours, knowledge that serves us, and maybe others, of how we are to live in this world hopefully. But they manifest in such different ways.
The connection is starting to emerge in my activist pieces, particularly through words. I really value the lyrics in the music I perform. It’s an Afro-Mexican genre called Son Jarocho, from Veracruz — which was the first part of the mainland Americas to be colonised (after the Caribbean). It is music that is very old, that has gone through many hands and minds and mouths. And so, it has a lot of insides and collective memory and shared experience and knowledge. That can manifest as pain, as words, as love, as wisdom from just living in the world. To me, this is an amazing gift to anyone who can perceive this music and understand those lyrics. This quality of music as a means to connect with collective memory and create a worldview is related to why I make weird sounds! It is just so different and the results are so different. But they do meet in this thing that I learned, and I became something else at the same time — which for me is so important. It is the reason that I made music in the first place.
When I started making music everything made sense but during my PhD, nothing made sense… The world is shit and I am just making little sounds and I completely lost the point. It took me getting to the point of “I think I am going to stop doing this”. A part of me that knew the answer was “you need to just shut up and understand how incredibly important this is to you, and this is how you live [in] the world. Yes, you are not saving the world, but that is not the only reason to do something.” You don’t make a friend to save the world, yet it is one of the most beautiful things you can do. So going back to making music was like coming back home and finding the beauty and joy and deep importance of making tiny little weird sounds again. What we want to fight for is a world where that fits, that there is space for everybody to find their own ways of learning, living and becoming. If that means making tiny weird sounds, then we should defend the shit out of it as well.
What else are you working on right now? What are your key concerns?
Elena (Elena Perales Andreu) says that I am in my “synth-girly-pop phase”. I feel like for maybe 10 years I was really focused on internal processes. I was very interested in psychological exercises in my music. For example, I would think “how can I see the world without eyes or with different kinds of eyes, bodies…”; how to go beyond myself — even if it is only within imagination — to generate this knowledge and becoming that we were talking about.
Now I’m a little more interested in how that balances with interactions between people. In Dialectos de Árbol (“Tree Dialects”) I was not thinking about the human reception of my pieces at all. Now I want my music to be a platform for these activists to share something. I want to make music that listens and accompanies without taking up too much space for these activists. Or I want to make pieces where young percussionists get to interact with each other and their relationships with their instruments. I am not saying I am making music to be liked, but liking it is not as important as what people receive. That is what the “synth-girly-pop phase” is. I am making something softer to be received. If there is someone telling you about a genocide that happened in Guatemala forty years ago, which is not long ago, it needs to come with sounds that make you open to it, or relates to music you already know.
Can you talk about this in the context of a particular piece?
I want to talk more about these activist pieces. They are sort of my current obsession. I just finished the second piece which is twenty-six minutes long. It was with an activist from the Comcaac nation in Northwestern Mexico. They weren’t colonised by the Spanish or the Mexicans either really, but more so by evangelical missionaries. And in less than a century, their culture has changed dramatically.
Zara Monrroy is the activist. I wrote part of my dissertation about her because the Comcaac people have a really beautiful relationship with singing. They have songs that are time, place and even person specific. For example, there are songs for grandmas to sing to grandchildren. They have songs particular to specific plants and animals. And they stand in as a device of connection between you and other beings.
Zara is active in many types of work; indigenous rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights… She is approximately our age and has been through a lot. For this project, I ask activists, “if you had the chance to speak to an unknown number of people in front of you, what would you say if they were already listening to you?” — then they share all these beautiful things. And then I have this huge responsibility. This piece will probably be listened to by a few hundred people but for Zara, it’s a lot. So what music can I make that feels like it listens to what they are saying and that respects it. The music doesn’t say “this is wrong, this is bad”, but it is not oblivious to what the person is saying. It is the first time I have tried to make music that does this.
I often feel overwhelmed when listening to activists. But in my work, I also try to listen to everything about them — the sound of their voices and the way they ring in the room where they are recorded. It is like a way of taking us with them, of being with them. I am trying to respectfully enter into this person’s world for a little bit. And you realise that it is full of wonder, magic, pain too, but it’s not only that… I feel constantly reminded of this, even with Mexican activists. The level of respect and care that is necessary in this process also generates a lot of knowledge and the possibility of becoming something else — which is what composing gives me. The composition is not only in writing the pieces but also in approaching people and having a lot of people not answering. But whenever they do answer, I try to make it as welcoming and respectful a place as possible.
I haven’t thought about this enough to share it very coherently. But it feels very important to me particularly. I know it can be for them too, and I hope it can help them in many ways. But if I only made these pieces because of that, then I would be very disappointed. It has become very important for me and how I live with myself every day. It is linked to this thing I was talking about earlier in how things bounce off of people. I am putting my whole self into it in the hope that it will be something I can look back on and think “maybe I was young, naïve, or whatever, but I really went all the way.” So maybe that’s why it was so important.
–
Learn more about Luis Fernando Amaya and his practice:
- https://www.luisfernandoamaya.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/@LuisFernandoAmayaComposer
- https://www.instagram.com/luisongolilongo/
References/Links:
- ‘Entrevista a Rosa Ixchel Pu, campesina de Guatemala’ (2022), Mundubat
- Ali Rogin and Satvi Sunkara, ‘Report highlights disproportionate killings of Indigenous environmental activists’ (2024), PBS News
- Simmone Shah, ‘Latin America Is the Deadliest Region For Environmental Activists, Report Finds’ (2024), Time
- Sophia Widholm, ‘Addressing Environmental Land Defender Violence in Latin America’ (2025), International Relations Review
- ‘Missing voices: The violent erasure of land and environmental defenders’ (2024), Global Witness
- Noor Mahtani, ‘Four out of five activists assassinated in 2024 were Latin American’ (2025), El País
- Handel – Allemande in D Minor, HWV 437 (1703-1706)
- Luis Fernando Amaya, ‘Cortahojas: a different way of listening to Earth’ (2023), PRXLUDES
- Kary Stewart, ‘Son Jarocho: A Beginner’s Guide’ (2022), Songlines
- Leonel Hoeffer, ‘Comcaac Youth, Committed to the Conservation of Their Territory’ (2020), ICCA Consortium
