Carla Lucero - Part 2

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 115: Carla Lucero - Part 2

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In this week’s episode, we talk to Carla Lucero about her compositional process, dive into how she composed two examples of her operas Las Tres Mujeres de Jerusalén and touch, and what it's like having synesthesia. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Carla Lucero, check her out here: https://carlalucero.com/. This episode was originally recorded in February 2024.

This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors, like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!

Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano),  as part of “Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers,” January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Alchemy,” October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/15412860

Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes
Interns: Renata Volchinskaya, Sam Mason, Hannah Chen

Curious to hear music by Luna Composition Lab alums? Check out E4TT's annual concert of music by women and non-binary composers, "Midnight Serenades," on January 25.

Chapters

• 0:34 In this week's episode, we continue our conversation with Carla Lucero who we spoke to in February 2024.
• 0:42 You write big ambitious works, which is really cool. Can you talk about your compositional process? How do you go from the blank white page to such amazing pieces?
• 9:49 The way you were describing color and senses, are you synesthetic?

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00
[INTRO MUSIC BEGINS] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists sponsored by a grant from the California Arts Council. I'm Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times. In this week's episode, we continue our conversation with Carla Lucero who we spoke to in February 2024. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] You write big ambitious works, which is really cool. Can you talk about your compositional process? How do you go from the blank white page to such amazing pieces?

Carla Lucero  00:42
Well, thank you for that. I have my process is it depends on what what I'm doing. If I'm creating, co-creating the libretto, it's, it's a completely different process or reading the libretto myself, initially, it is. So I'm just going to talk about after the libretto is written, no matter if I've done it, or somebody else. So what I do as I usually have a big picture of what I want, I already kind of know what the direction I'm going to go in with the music kind of know exactly how it's going to start, and how it's going to end. It's, it's kind of like a photograph in a way. And right, as I'm picturing this, I'm also jotting down musical information, whether it be you know, melodies, or maybe harmonic progression, or a lot of times rhythm, you know, just these ideas of what I'm going to do. And then I create a graph. I have one here.

Nanette McGuinness  01:56
And we can describe it for the people listening.

Carla Lucero  01:59
Okay, so depending on the piece that I'm commissioned to write, or that I'm I'm embarking on myself, for a later commission, the graph starts out, I'll show you, this is the one for Las Tres Mujeres de Jerusalén. So what this is, is, I first start off with what you see in pencil, right, so, so these ideas of of what the flow is, right, the scenes, what I what I'm envisioning, you know, that's happening with the scenes, then after that, the information is about the orchestration. And then up here, it's about density. And you know, how orchestral density.

Nanette McGuinness  02:51
I can describe to people who aren't going to be able to see this, it is a big piece of score paper, on its side, and at the bottom are notes, and then there's a line above it. And then there's more notes. And this is all in pencil. And then there are increasing wave like, not quite a sine wave because it's growing more like a mountain above it. And there are three and then there's a big cliff rising to the climax at the top. And where Carla was talking about density, there's red hatching, and then there's some crescendos and a few other descriptions.

Carla Lucero  03:28
So that's, that was for Tres Mujeres. This one is for touch (An opera about the radical life of Hellen Keller). So you can see this one I did differently. And you could go ahead and describe it and then I'll explain. 

Nanette McGuinness  03:46
Okay, so instead of score paper, this is now looks like poster board. And there are three chunks, one marked Exposition, one marked Development and one marked Recap, and I can't read the rest of somebody's love theme. And in the Exposition is the biggest chunk, and then Development and then the last part, and each one of those has in it looks like colored pencil, different colors and vertical blocks of different colors. This is fascinating too: that particular one has scenes written above each color and pattern. It's very pretty!

Carla Lucero  04:26
Thank you. So you know, depending on the piece because these are so different the the last one that I showed you is all color was from touch and I felt that it sounds almost counterintuitive, but understanding this on a different level touch is about Helen Keller.

Nanette McGuinness  04:46
Right.

Carla Lucero  04:47
And so there there were there were ideas, orchestration ideas that I had toyed with that that feel like shapes that feel like colors, you know, trying to really express what's happening in her mind in in a very abstract way, but so that there is some consistency with that how she's interpreting information and how she's relating to others, in terms of, you know, the world around her. They were more it was more of the music is more familiar. So really kind of to be able to juxtapose these two ideas, these two worlds musical worlds, I had to be really precise, you know, how it was going to move, how it was going to flow, whether or not I don't be maybe I don't want it to flow, you know, in some parts of it. So it really helps me with my process, compositionally and orchestrally, you know, to try to realize these ideas. And I did this, even with my first opera on actual graph paper, you know, I've, this has always been my process. So after I do this, then I told you, I had already like, jotted down some ideas, right? On actual manuscript paper. [laughs] Real deal, right side up. And after that, after the graph, I go back to those notes. And I start to flesh out, at the piano, flesh out some of these ideas, because actually, the first thing I need to do with opera is create a piano vocal score. So it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes I'm already orchestrating in my head, right? It's like, oh, this scene, I already knew what I was going to do orchestrally, so I have to make, create a reduction, you know, for this particular scene. But usually, it's, I will just say mostly, it's the other way around where I'm creating the piano vocal score. So a lot of that works at the piano. And then I do what I call my refinement process. And I input some of that information into Sebelius and and make notes on my regular score. And I have an assistant, a dear assistant Spencer Keene, and he is a copyist, engraver, videographer, editor, you know, he's a composer himself. We've been working together long enough so that he understands, okay, I'm gonna take this information on Sebelius and Carla's notes and, and, like, say, there's some kind of pattern that's, you know, continue this pattern and keep these dynamics consistent here, you know, so that I am not bogged down timewise, so I can write keep, keep going.

Nanette McGuinness  08:03
Could you repeat his name for a second?

Carla Lucero  08:05
Spencer Keene, he's wonderful. So yeah, so So that happens, and then I'm able to, to have something that I can deliver, it's formatted and everything, but there's a lot of back and forth that goes, you know, on, a lot of times, I will, I will, you know, have this raw. Not really that raw, but, you know, he puts in some of the dynamics and everything and I have it listed out and then I get it back. And then of course I change things and develop things more. And that's usually then I'm ready for him to format and, and create a first draft of the piano vocal score. After that, and then then I go into after workshop, I go into orchestration, the commissioners, always the companies commissioning me always think like, Oh, she's gonna start orchestrating now. It's like, you know, I started before even, you know, started the piano vocal score. So it's just kind of a continuation of, of developing the project, but orchestrally.

Nanette McGuinness  09:17
Right, because you're hearing the timbres as you're composing. And so you already know how you want it to sound. The orchestration is part of the inspiration for the sound in the first place.

Carla Lucero  09:28
Exactly. More and more so with with each project, it seems like that's kind of happening very early on for me.

Nanette McGuinness  09:37
The way you were describing color and senses, are you synesthetic?

Carla Lucero  09:45
Yes, I am. And, and I notice it was a very interesting way that I perceived this before knowing what it what it meant. When I was young, I realized that certain colors and and frequent. Well, I don't know how to explain this. Like you know like when you're watching a TV those old the old TVs and then you start to get that horizontal roll. You know the like the old?

Nanette McGuinness  10:19
Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. You mean when it's not really working quite right and it starts to flip.

Carla Lucero  10:24
Yeah, I started to hear. And there was no sound.

Nanette McGuinness  10:29
Hmm. Interesting. You heard frequencies and sounds.

Carla Lucero  10:35
Oh yeah, it was wild. And and I remember I was pretty young I remember asking my parents

Nanette McGuinness  10:43
What's going on? [laughs]

Carla Lucero  10:44
Yeah. What are those sounds what's happening? And and they're like looking at me oh and on top this I was dyslexic so my parents are like, Okay, we want to rebate. [laughs] Yes. Oh, it was it was crazy. So I knew that was happening. And and then same thing with colors and you know, and I just thought it was like normal that everybody, you know, processed visual information.

Nanette McGuinness  11:17
I do not. I don't see colors with music, but I've worked with a number of composers who do.

Carla Lucero  11:24
Really?

Nanette McGuinness  11:25
I think it must make their compositions and process greatly enriched as a result.

Carla Lucero  11:33
I don't know. I mean, it's hard, you know, because that's the way I am. It explains the graphs too.

Nanette McGuinness  11:42
Yes, that's what made me think of it when you showed me your graphs with the color blocks. I was like, "I got a hunch here."

Carla Lucero  11:47
Uh huh. And I feel it, I can feel it, taste it, hear it, you know, everything. It's very kind of...it evokes it evokes something in me where I'm, you know...

Nanette McGuinness  12:03
That's intensely cool. Very cool.

Carla Lucero  12:05
Thank you.

Nanette McGuinness  12:05
You're welcome!

Nanette McGuinness  12:06
[OUTRO MUSIC BEGINS] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure. And a special thank you to our guest, Carla Lucero, for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax- deductible donation, please visit us at e4tt.org. This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times, and design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to co-producer and audio engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure." [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]