Working closely with Rodolfo Acosta’s music has led me to deep reflection and even a reconciliation with my own past artistic practice. Acosta’s work not only as a composer but also as a pedagogue and thinker has profoundly influenced several generations of Colombian musicians, especially in Bogotá. Analyzing True Negatives through the decolonial lens I adopted for this project allowed me to also read my own biography differently, not as an isolated story of circumstance or privilege, but as one entangled with the ordinary conditions of Latin American life. In that sense, my encounter with Acosta’s work reaffirmed to me that we, as Latin Americans, are surrounded by practices that exist outside modernity, practices that may not align with Eurocentric standards of artistic value but are rich in sensitivity, craftsmanship, creativity, and curiosity.
As a composer, I cannot separate this reflection from my own origins. I come from a medium-sized industrial city in Colombia shaped by oil and manufacturing economies, a place where, under the gaze of modernity, “nothing happens” artistically. I was raised in a family with no artistic inheritance; one that understood art through the clichés of mass media and, for a long time, did not consider artistic labor as work. Yet this ordinariness, far from being an obstacle, became a source of meaning. It grounded my artistic sense in everyday forms of improvisation and adaptation, the same sensibilities that Acosta’s decolonial thought invites us to revalue.
In the following, I’ll be sharing some of my compositions that started to resonate again, and that I began revisiting as I worked on this project about temporalities and Acosta.
The works I present here are part of a cycle of solo pieces for saxophone, flute, and clarinet with live electronics, sharing two core axes: collaboration with performers and speculation about each instrument as a sonic body. In every piece, I approach the instrument not as a performer would but as an explorer rediscovering sound through curiosity and trial.
My encounter with Acosta’s compositional ethics and with decolonial theorists like Vázquez and Ochoa Gautier made me realize that this kind of experimentation is not simply a limitation, making do with what one has, but an epistemic stance. It reflects the inventive, resourceful logic of Latin American life, where artistic creation often begins in negotiation with material scarcity, with others, and with one’s own position of not knowing.
Reflecting on these experiences, I realize that my own music has always negotiated the paradoxes of belonging and exteriority. My practice is marked by the tension of not being European enough in Europe nor Colombian enough in Colombia, an ambivalence that mirrors Acosta’s rejection of imposed labels and his refusal to inhabit the categories of modernity uncritically. As I see it now, my work does not seek to escape modernity but to listen from its edges to compose from the borderlands of the audible. In that sense, my recent pieces resonate with Acosta’s act of indeterminacy; they enact their own modest form of epistemic disobedience, crafting spaces where performers, instruments, and sounds negotiate meaning collectively rather than submit to predetermined hierarchies of correctness or identity.
In Memorias de lo efímero (memories of the ephemeral) (2019-2020) for alto saxophone, composed during the pandemic using a borrowed instrument left in my home, the work emerged from the sounds I could produce as a non-saxophonist. The piece became a meditation and repetition where the transformation was achieved through ephemeral gestures like the sound of keys, breath sound, and growling. Only later, when a professional saxophonist encountered the score, did the piece reveal its true form as a dialogue among three agents: composer, instrument, and performer.
Está mal decir, for baritone saxophone, grew over five years and found its final shape only through collaboration with the performer David Cortez. In its last section, breath becomes a structural parameter integrating the performer’s physical limits as part of the musical discourse. Here, my own authorship dissolves almost entirely. What remains is a process of shared regulation echoing Acosta’s concept of autorregulación, a space where doing it well is not about correctness but about ethical engagement with the act of making sound together.
In Bitácora de un viaje al vacío- Travels to the void, a logbook for bass clarinet and live electronics (2023), created for clarinetist Emily Cook, I extended this dialogue by incorporating a fourth participant: the electronic medium. The piece explores performer-machine interdependence through live granular synthesis that reprocesses the clarinetist’s sound in real time. Emily as the performer, must self-regulate her timing and breath to interact with her own transformed instrumental voice. The score, segmented into three parts, includes two interludes of guided improvisation where Emily responds to the sonic traces of her own playing. Now I think these moments of interaction embody what Vazquez calls relational time. The sound of the past is returning as presence transformed but still resonant, still creating relationships and affect as a trace.
Ruptura (2024) for solo flute, written for Pittsburgh-based flutist Sarah Steranka, pushes this relational logic further. Each unconventional gesture in the score is idiomatically linked to the previous fingering or breath position, ensuring continuity between extended techniques (non-traditional ways of playing the instrument) and traditional notation. The final cadenza, while I suggest certain gestures, is an invitation to Sarah to improvise freely, shaping the ending according to her preference, which can change in every performance. I thought of this as a small act of self-care and freedom that resists the common modern anxiety in new music of playing correctly. Lately, it is important to say that Sarah was the one who titled the piece, an act that completes the cycle of coauthorship and shared agency.
