Human Nature: Sonic Botany

Guillermo Galindo (b. 1960, Mexico City) uses composed and performed music, printed scores, and assembled instruments to investigate the politics of the human. Curator Josh Kun commissioned this new work as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA in conjunction with the exhibition Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin, on view in the Boone Gallery. Galindo combines graphic scores and ambient sounds to comment on the indigenous codices included in Visual Voyages.

Galindo’s scores extend the graphic score tradition of composers like Sylvano Bussotti, Earl Brown, Cornelius Cardew, and John Cage, who blurred the lines between music and visual art. For Galindo, a musical score is “a set of symbols written on a piece of paper or any other readable surface, to be translated into sound events reproduced in real time.”

Galindo’s “genome scores” incorporate the texture of plants, viruses, and bacteria, investigating how symbolic language and visual data have historically expressed and sustained systems of power. Specifically, they respond to the European conquest of the Americas as a violent event that destroyed and invented worlds, one that produced new hybrid, even mutant, species of natural life. Galindo’s scores and sounds link this history to contemporary debates around immigration, racism, and settler colonialism.

Related Event

Guillermo Galindo Performance
Human Nature: Sonic Botany
Nov. 4 (Saturday), noon - 1 p.m.
Rose Hills Garden Court

Experimental composer, sonic architect, and performance artist Guillermo Galindo presents a work inspired by “Visual Voyages.” The program is part of USC Annenberg’s Musical Interventions, a series of public events organized for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA by Josh Kun, historian of popular music and recently named a MacArthur Fellow. Free; no reservations required. Rose Hills Garden Court