The Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, led by former music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya, will premiere a new work by Colombian composer Victor Agudelo on Friday at Bass Performance Hall.
Inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “Algo muy grave va a suceder en este pueblo,” the piece, Algo Va a Suceder (Something Is Going to Happen), addresses climate change.
In Márquez’s story, a person wakes up with a premonition. A mother tells her son: “Something really bad is going to happen here.”
The rumor starts spreading. At one point, residents become so scared, they end up burning down the village, convinced something bad was about to happen.
“We’re doing the same with our planet,” says Agudelo, in his interpretation of García Márquez’s work, during an interview over Zoom from Colombia.
Commissioned by Harth-Bedoya, the piece was originally intended to be premiered at his final performance as music director in 2020, but was pushed back because of the pandemic. Harth-Bedoya and Agudelo have worked together in the past, but never with a new composition.
Agudelo says he wanted to create a work about climate change because, when he met Harth-Bedoya in person in 2017, he was surprised by how deeply committed Harth-Bedoya is to preserving nature — the conductor makes compost, gathered the leftovers after lunch and recycles garbage.
“That had a big impact on me,” Agudelo says. “Because it was a piece for him, from the beginning I thought about something related to the planet.”
Agudelo composed it to be a message for everyone. “We’re citizens of a global village, because our planet is a village,” he says.
To build his work, Agudelo chose eight different accents from his country, using them as musical characters interacting with each other. He studied the accents in detail, musically, as each has its own cadence and tone: costeño, chocoano, pastuso, bogotano, paisa, cundiboyacense, valluno, santandereano.
“I documented myself especially on the accent part, because, basically, all the piece’s music derives from those eight Colombian accents,” he said. “Paisa, for instance — I’m paisa. I’m from Medellín.”
Agudelo currently lives in Bogotá. But he will be at the premiere of his work at Bass Performance Hall.
“My job was listening to those eight accents closely, transcribing them and getting into them, trying to live them, experience them, to get that reflected on the music.
“Obviously, the audience won’t pick that up. There has to be someone from Colombia to know which accent is which. But it is a good reason to find something that has a lot of sense for the story, which is Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism,” he said.
During the performance, the musicians will occasionally whisper or yell the word “fuego” (fire). At other times, they will pop plastic bags as a symbolic act, because plastic pollution is a major environmental issue.
Agudelo said the bag’s noise is very similar to that of crackling flames.
Before the pandemic, when the piece was ready, Agudelo thought about having the audience members make the bag noises themselves, with all of them bringing a bag and leaving it in the hall afterward so it could be recycled for clothing, handbags or other items.
The work begins with a swift and ardent tempo. It then evolves into a slow-paced sequence. A slow-speaking musical character enters — the Tolima accent from Colombia — followed by a character who speaks more rapidly. Eventually, all of them converge.
For Agudelo, a father of two daughters, it’s important to make a difference with his piece.
“What I want to achieve with this music is create awareness about this,” he said.
“I want to leave that window open, for people to pinch themselves and say, ‘Gosh, we’re alive, we are beings on a planet, in a community, and anything we do will have an impact on others.’”
This story originally appeared in Spanish on Al Dia’s website.
Details
7:30 p.m. Oct. 8 and 9, 2 p.m. Oct. 10 at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce, Fort Worth. $25 to $99. 817-665-6000, fwsymphony.org.