Carla Lucero - Part 7

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 120: Carla Lucero - Part 7

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In this week’s episode, we talk to Carla Lucero about the sources of inspiration for her operas, the different characteristics of her protagonists and what makes them appealing, and what makes her choose these subjects. 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/1903729/15412956

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.
• 1:12 ...all your operas are in such disparate subjects, where otherwise, are you finding inspiration? What makes you choose these subjects? They're all fascinating.
• 7:27 Right. Is that, that's what you mean by writing opera for change?

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00
[INTRO MUSIC] 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're talking about your operas - let's just flat out say, congrats on your Opera America Discovery grant for Juana and two commissioning grants for touch and The Tower of Babel, you have... touch is the opera in progress about Hellen Keller and you've got a creative work fund grant for Wuornos, so, you know, this is very cool. You've had some wonderful success there.

Carla Lucero  00:54
Thank you.

Nanette McGuinness  00:55
You're welcome. And you told us about how you found the inspiration for Wuornos. But all your operas are in such disparate subjects, where otherwise, are you finding inspiration? What makes you choose these subjects? They're all fascinating.

Carla Lucero  01:11
Well, I think that for me to really give my all to, to writing an opera, because it's, you know, we're talking about years. It's not always, like, years and years and years, but I'm getting faster at what I do, I'm able to find it more. But you have to really either fall in love with your subject, or, or or see in your subject to kind of a reflection of yourself in some way or another.

Nanette McGuinness  01:51
Because you're going to live with it for so long.

Carla Lucero  01:53
Yeah, yeah. So, so there's that element of not having maybe a direct parallel, but really, really seeing a reflection. Someone it could be distorted, but you understand, there's, there's a connection between yourself and myself and the subject, but just gonna say that I'm really, really driven to stories about strong women that break the mold, basically, where we, they change the perception of how you think about women. Yeah, so the kind of challenge the the, you challenge the audience to, to, to, to think in a different way, you know, it's not didactic, like, I don't want people to be like, "Oh, you know, I hated her. But now I love her!" You know? [laughs]

Nanette McGuinness  03:00
You don't want them to go out saying "I learned so much!"

Carla Lucero  03:04
Yeah, I'm not an evangelist, you know? Yeah. I, but I do love hearing people talk about my work after they've seen it. Like, "Oh, wow, you know, I don't know what I think about that. That's weird." Or "That's, that's, that's beautiful, or that's, I never thought about it that way." That type of thing, something that's thought provoking, but also it has to be there has to be a connect some connection to social justice, that it has to be that way, for me. So sometimes my my characters are, are unlikable. You know, unlovable, like with Aileen Wuornos that's what you think. But at the core, she was a person, she was a person with a story of that story. And I do feel that how, however harsh that story was, you know, I had people coming that were sex workers to see that, and, and women who had spent time in prison and then they embraced me and thanked me.

Nanette McGuinness  04:21
Yeah.

Carla Lucero  04:22
You don't think that made me cry?

Nanette McGuinness  04:24
Oh, yeah. Sure. [laughs]

Carla Lucero  04:27
And people who are against the death penalty, then it just it galvanized all of these, all of these people who I really was not expecting, you know, to hear from, or to meet, or to listen to their, their stories. That I mean, they came out of the woodwork because they thought from, you know, there's a story that I can relate to, right? That they're thinking this and, and it's actually been being produced, so that, so that people can can see it. So it was that's very gratifying. Same thing like, so Juana, you know, she's the thing about her. It's like the worst kept secret, you know that she's she was queer, right? Like everyone's like, "Oh, she's a feminist." And yes, a great poet, first great poet of the Americas. Absolutely true. And [laughs] so, so the same type of reaction came from, from women, lesbians, queer, queer women who, who saw the opera, especially women who come from Latin America, or or knew about someone who grew up knowing about her. They're like, Thank you, you know, yes, she was she's, she's a queer icon. And, but nobody really wants to say that, you know, so, so in that way, yeah. Again, you know, kind of a, a point at which I can connect, not only with myself, but with the audience.

Nanette McGuinness  06:17
Right.

Carla Lucero  06:18
In terms of Wuornos, there was a rage that I understood, you know, that that I understood, you know, that, that type of treatment of any type of person...

Nanette McGuinness  06:31
That unfairness.

Carla Lucero  06:32
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, like social, she's like, social justice, poster child, you know. So it had nothing to do with my culture, or, or anything, but it mainly had to do with my feelings as a woman, she was also queer. So, so making sure that that part of the story is there, you know, that it's not like, oh, and [whispers] you know? [laughs]

Nanette McGuinness  06:59
Right, it goes front and center and part of seeing and hearing that person so that the people seeing and hearing the music can see and hear themselves and felt and be felt.

Carla Lucero  07:11
Right, and they understand them as, as full people.

Nanette McGuinness  07:15
Right. Is that that's what you mean by writing opera for change?

Carla Lucero  07:20
Yes. So that you see, you see these women as as fully fleshed out people. And, and that, you know, everybody's flawed, you know, and everybody has their own brilliance. Everybody is, is, you know, we're all human. Right? And we're not these icons, like Helen Keller is another one. She, shoot, of course, she wasn't queer, but she was a brilliant, brilliant woman, you know, was a feminist. She was a suffragist.

Nanette McGuinness  07:59
Right.

Carla Lucero  08:00
You know, there's, she was an amazing person. So I really wanted to instead of like, "Oh, here's Helen Keller, smelling a rose in a chair." [laughs]

Nanette McGuinness  08:11
A sweet icon on the pedestal, but I gather, she was not an easy person, but how could she to have the perseverance to do what she did?

Carla Lucero  08:22
Absolutely. She was totally badass. You know, she, she didn't care what anybody thought, her main thing was, was social justice. You know, whether it was for people with disabilities, or you know, people of color? Yeah, she was, she, do you know that she was the one of the cofounders of the ACLU?

Nanette McGuinness  08:46
I might have known it sounds vaguely familiar, but I've certainly forgotten about it. I'll say that.

Carla Lucero  08:51
Yeah, I mean, that just tells you, you know, who, who she was, so I really, I fell in love with her story as a child. I always knew, at the back of my head that I was going to do something about her. I didn't think it was going to be an opera until much later. Yeah. But But yeah, she's one of them. The Las Tres Mujeres de Jerusalén, It's the passion of Christ seen through the eyes of three women who Jesus meets at the eighth station of the cross. And there's no explanation about who these women are. They don't have names, until my opera.

Nanette McGuinness  09:36
Right, there's no explanation because they're women.

Carla Lucero  09:39
Yeah, yeah. So, so I completely turned that, the whole thing around so that it's a feminist piece, you know, and it's and it goes through the Stations of the Cross, but it's it's completely a feminist piece and as women, it's about their journey as much as as Jesus's journey where they're understanding what that underlying message is of love and sacrifice and living a life with purpose, so they're, so that's what that whole thing becomes the Tower of Babel that I'm working on now, currently - it's my second commission with La opera it's, it's a political satire...I won't tell you too much about it

Nanette McGuinness  10:29
Okay...

Carla Lucero  10:31
it's a comedy and it's it's told with hundreds of people because of, you know, what they do over there and I love I love being able to write these huge orchestral

Nanette McGuinness  10:48
Grand opera scenes

Carla Lucero  10:49
Oh gosh, yeah I mean it's it's so nice because I'm you know got used to writing a lot of chamber work but you know now and then I get these these symphonic works that I that I get to these grand operas and I get to write, but I'm, it's the, the person who saves the day is a woman.

Nanette McGuinness  11:08
Of course.

Carla Lucero  11:08
So, yeah. Semiramis, and, and I'm not going this far. But, you know, in the in the end of the story of Nimrod, who is the...I'm not gonna tell you what the parallel is.

Nanette McGuinness  11:25
[laughs]

Carla Lucero  11:25
You can think about it, or you can put it together.

Nanette McGuinness  11:27
Okay. [laughs]

Carla Lucero  11:27
So Semiramis his wife in biblical. I don't know if it's in the Bible, or if it's just a story like lore. He finally, he grants her, she begs for a day to have power in his kingdom. And he grants her one day, and she has him beheaded. [laughs] So, and that's not in the opera, but, it's, there's there's a parallel there. So she, she is she becomes the logical...the one who is, who saves the day and it's a multi, multicultural story at the end. It's English, Spanish, Mandarin and Hebrew.

Nanette McGuinness  12:17
Oh my gosh.

Carla Lucero  12:18
Yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  12:19
I would love to see this, I want to say. when this is...let me know when it's done. I would love to see it.

Carla Lucero  12:25
I will. It premieres in 25.

Nanette McGuinness  12:27
Ah! No so far away.

Carla Lucero  12:31
No, no, don't remind me. It's, it will be in the spring of 25.

Nanette McGuinness  12:37
Wow, that'll be very cool. One of the things that this, in addition to the fact that sounds totally fascinating, this reminds me of where you say that the women in your operas are their own knights in shining armor. That's, that's just such a, it's a very cool concept that they need rescuing, but they do it themselves.

Carla Lucero  12:58
Thank you, I feel that that's what I've had to do myself. So I think these these women, that's part of that reflection. Also where I see this perseverance, and, and knowing in your heart that you, you have only yourself to rely on and that you're going to, to no matter what it takes, you know, you're going to, you're going to either fix something or you're going to make it make something happen.

Nanette McGuinness  13:32
[OUTRO MUSIC] 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]