Jacqueline Nova

Jacqueline Nova (1935, Ghent, Belgium – 1975, Bogota, Colombia) was a pioneer of electroacoustic music in Colombia and one of the most important Latin American experimental composers of the 20th Century. The daughter of a Belgian mother and a Colombian father, she moved to Bucaramanga (Colombia) in early childhood and grew up in a very violent period in the country's history, known as La Violencia ("The Violence"), marked by popular guerilla warfare, fights over land access and conflict for power between the two main political parties. Nova started her musical education with private piano classes at the age of seven and moved to Bogotá aged twenty, where she enrolled in the Conservatório de la Universidad Nacional in 1958 – first to study piano and in 1964 she decided to formally study composition.

Nova contributed to breaking the tradition that confined women to roles of interpreter or muse, becoming the first female trained in musical composition in Colombia and starting a profound research into the use of new technologies in music. In 1966, she composed the piece Doce móviles [Twelve mobiles], in which she introduced her concerns about the spatial dimensions of sound and about free serialism, following her interest in electroacoustic music. Between 1967 and 1969, Nova studied at the leading Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), in the Torcuato di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires (Argentina), where she had contact with major vanguard composers including Gilbert Amy, John Cage, Luigi Nono, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Gerardo Gandini, Alberto Ginastera and Francisco Kröpf. Taking advantage of the infrastructure and the equipment available at CLAEM, Nova delved into the universe of electronic music, in search of new sounds and compositional and interdisciplinary methods, becoming increasingly interested in the limits between noise and the human voice and in the political implications behind the intelligibility of speech.

Returning to Colombia in 1969, Nova fought for vanguard music in her country and played an important role as a cultural actor in a repressive context, becoming a reference for composers interested in contemporary musical composition. In some of her productions of that era, Nova merged electronic noise, orchestral instruments and indigenous voices, creating a hybrid music that radically revised musical norms. In Creación de la tierra [Creation of the earth] (1972), probably her best-known work, she interwove her interest in electronic transformations of the voice with the search for an almost mythical idea of ancestry. In this piece, Nova incorporated chants about the creation of the earth by the Colombian indigenous U'wa people, and distorted and modified them electronically, alluding in a sense to the impossibility of a translation or linear appropriation of one culture by another.

The version of Creación de la tierra presented at Vento and at the 34th Bienal was conceived by Ana María Romano G.