A Song for Justice: Collaborative Composition in Response to Brutality

Introductions

On 4th of May 2021 the Afro-Colombian leader Francia Márquez visited the working-class neighbourhood of Siloé in Cali, Southwest Colombia. She spoke publicly in response to the violence in which the young men named above had lost their lives (her speech is now available on YouTube¹). According to some news sources the youths were killed in a coordinated operation led by State forces in response to largely peaceful protests in Siloé that formed part of a national strike.² The questions interwoven with their names above guide the reflections that make up this essay, which focuses on a musical response, namely a collaborative composition released on YouTube.³ I recommend listening to it closely to understand better how the argument presented here relates to different parts of the song.

I argue that, in times of restricted physical proximity, mediated collaborative composition can be a way of responding to injustice. Working together on a creative project helps increase understanding among participants by bringing into sharp focus different approaches to music (and the underlying social tendencies they illuminate), while forcing us to negotiate those differences for the sake of realising a shared goal. In this case, a praxis of collaboration leads to increased empathy and trust between participants, but also to solidarity with people participating directly in the protest and with the victims of its repression.⁴ Importantly, this occurs through the use of found and created sonic material, which can be understood as direct evidence of the collaborative process, combined in a way that borrows heavily from plunderphonics and participatory⁵ musical practices. The eight sections of this essay roughly follow both the process of creation and the structure of the song, elucidating along the way participants’ intentions, difficulties, differences, and strategies for sounding solidarity.

Parar para empezar (Stopping/Striking to Start⁶)

This section introduces the initial collaborators and describes the conditions in which we began creating, as well as presenting a central theoretical framework to understand the process. First, let us try to clarify some potential confusion. Colombia’s most recent national strike began in April 2021 and is still ongoing, though through more sporadic manifestations, at the time of writing (August 2021). Strikers are voicing many demands, and chief among them is an end to violent State repression of popular opposition. Human rights defenders believe this practice has long been outsourced to neo-paramilitaries who systematically assassinate community leaders. However, more recently, police, riot police (the Mobile Antidisturbances Squadron, known by its Spanish acronym ESMAD), and the State army have taken a more public role in the violence against citizens. The city of Cali has become a centre of State brutality, resistance, and counter-resistance by armed civilians. Despite the questionable morality of their racist and classist vigilante shootings and displays of force, the latter call themselves “gente de bien” (“honourable people”). They do so to distinguish themselves from protesters, who are commonly branded “vandals” and “delinquents” in the right-wing mainstream media.

In my analytic writing I typically try to define terms clearly and avoid the kind of confusion that I feel arises from “postmodern” styling. At present, however, given my proximity to the situation, there are too many euphemisms, too little certainty, too much vagueness to be able to achieve a clear picture.⁷ This is one reason why a musical response might be more apt in some cases than straightforward academic writing. Music can be bad for making unequivocal arguments, but far better at evoking feelings.⁸ As one of the collaborators in this song and essay puts it: “Music has an emotional power.”⁹ It was primarily this power that we aimed to harness to connect with residents of Siloé.

Siloé is a comuna (collection of neighbourhoods) on the literal and metaphorical margins of Cali. The hillside maze of streets has a local reputation for danger. Largely controlled by rival gangs who dispute “fronteras invisibles” (invisible borders that gang members, or those associated with them, should not cross), it is a no-go-area for most residents of the city. Outside Cali I doubt most Colombians had heard of it before the killings, but since then it has become a byword for resistance and tragedy—or for the violence of protesters and unfortunate collateral damage, depending on one’s news sources.

I have long collaborated with a musical group there called Tambores de Siloé.¹⁰ Since the end of 2020 I have been co-directing a project with Tambores called “Our Histories in the Music of the Barrio.”¹¹ When the killings occurred, face-to-face sessions became impossible. Some participants and project leaders were too busy participating in protests, while others had their mobility limited by the gangs who had taken complete control of Siloé. Internet service in the area—perhaps in the entire city—was regularly collapsing or being cut off. Whatever my response to the killings might be in the immediate future, it would not involve the young participants in our project: I would have to find other collaborators.¹²

I initially found out about the killings by an unlikely route. Martina Camargo, a friend and cantadora (singer of traditional music) who lives in Cartagena, sent me a video. It showed Afro-Colombian leader, human rights defender, and environmental activist Francia Márquez speaking near the roundabout that marks the intersection between Siloé and the rest of Cali.¹³ She was tearful but defiant, forceful in her condemnation of events, but calling for calm and conciliation between opposing groups. The first words captured on the video stayed with me: “Sé que estas palabras… tal vez no alivian el dolor” (“I know these words might not alleviate the pain”). I confess I could not force myself to watch the whole video at first. A quick online search led to a confused bombardment of information about the killings. I rarely use social media, but during the previous week, with a strong desire to stay up to date with developments of the protest, I had become “saturated”—as people say here—, overloaded by the intensity and amount of information. A day passed before I revisited the video and wrote to Martina to thank her: “I’m thinking of doing something musical in response to this, Marti.” Her rapid response— “Count on me, Iancito”—gave me my first collaborator.

I knew that I wanted to use the recording of Márquez’ speech itself. The intonation of her words, the rhythm, the heartfelt message were all there already, and they were all hers. She had even spoken over a backing track of some uplifting evangelical guitar music. I did not know Márquez, and I did not want to bother my activist friends who might, but I tried to contact her through Facebook and email explaining my vague idea. Assuming she would be too busy with the strike and the victims’ families to respond, I was surprised when a few days later she wrote back, positive about the idea of getting her message to a wider audience through music. This felt like a special step; to have the blessing of the leader herself to use her words and voice.

More collaborators joined the project from among my colleagues and students at the Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes). Some of us had been frustrated by stalled attempts to call a strike in solidarity with the protests in the preceding weeks and wanted to do something to work against the university’s long-term reputation for having “its back turned to the country.” Gabriela Gallo, a member of the Uniandes Caribbean music ensemble, was keen to add her voice to the song. It felt right to have a wealth of female collaborators from the start. The manifesto on which Márquez is currently running her campaign for president declares: “Without women, democracy is incomplete. Without feminism, Colombian history will find it difficult to stop looking in the broken mirror of its failures and absences.”¹⁴ Still, the question remained: What sort of musical action could we take?

My normal response to this question would be “participatory music.” Violence is perhaps most elegantly understood as exclusion in its various forms.¹⁵ The best musical practices to combat exclusion are those in which we seek to increase participation in the practices themselves and, through their iteration, promote social inclusion in general.¹⁶

Ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino divides all music into four or five “fields”:¹⁷

Successful participatory music provides both comfort and challenges to musicians of all levels. Its dense overall texture and open structures mask the contributions of individuals and facilitate on-the-go learning, reducing performance anxiety while maintaining the interest of more practised core players through intense variation. Turino thinks all musical fields are important. However, he urges us to avoid neglecting participatory practices, or excluding them from our consideration of art, because they are often best for creating social synchrony in the moment and helping to forge and maintain strong social groups that resist toxic hierarchies. I knew the pandemic meant our musical project would necessarily sit mostly in the telemusical field, with aspects of hi-fidelity recording and studio-audio art, but I wanted to do everything possible to adopt elements from the participatory field, with the hope that this would augment our feelings of solidarity with each other and with those who were losing their loved ones in Cali.

Verse 1: Inspiration, Intentions, and Initiations

My primary musical influences include the mainly participatory traditions of Latin America that I research and teach, along with English-language guitar-based pop and rock. These informed the initial section of the recording (00:22-01:18), though the contributions of others revealed a variety of approaches, which required negotiation.

Having decided to use the actual sounds of the recording of Francia Marquez’ speech, I had an immediate source of inspiration. As an undergraduate student in Leeds, UK, I fell in love with an album by American-Dutch duo The Books. Lost and Safe is an experimental indie record which my friend Chris Derrick (better known as the musician Teawigs) describes as “the sound of a computer finding its soul.” If ever there was a time for technology to do spiritual work, it was now. Music produced using digital technology can sometimes feel “cold,” and this is especially true of recordings produced with no direct contact between musicians. Listeners can often hear both genuine interaction and its lack. Given that all the collaborators on this project would be working individually from home, I wanted to do everything I could to emulate genuine, “warm” human interaction.

One song from Lost and Safe in particular provided a blueprint for how Gabriela and I approached the conversion of Márquez’ opening lines into verses of the song. “Be Good to Them Always” includes a verse in which Nick Zamutto sings over a series of samples, his voice perfectly matching the rhythm of the original recordings but converting their inflections into more precise melodic lines¹⁹. These are accommodated over a simple ternary rhythmic pattern, including sampled household sounds and a harmonic framework on harpsichord and heavily processed guitar over legato cello lines.

With Márquez’ speech there was little initial work to be done to accommodate her words to a rhythmic pattern. I copied the audio into a simple editing programme and played the first few lines repeatedly. I felt they implied a pulse of 82 beats per minute. Adding a click track at this tempo, I sang along, trying to match Márquez’ speech patterns while accentuating her intonation into diatonic melodic contours. These mostly moved stepwise or by thirds, within about an octave near the bottom of my vocal range. This was in part because I was working at night and did not want to wake my sleeping family, but I think I was also emulating Márquez’ speech and the almost whispered singing style of Zamutto. I accompanied myself on guitar, searching for chords that supported the melodies and the significance of the words. This was especially true on lines like “tan profunda para esas madres” (“[pain] so profound for those mothers”), which I punctuated with the subdominant minor chord, low in the guitar’s range. After four lines, I had to cut some gaps in Marquez’ speech to fit the lines into a regular metre, but her pace remained steady and the phrases fit neatly with the tempo and a simple, tonal chord progression (i, VII, iv, i, III, VI, VII).

Once I had recorded about a minute of material, it felt like a natural place to stop the first verse. The line “por la justicia, por la dignidad” (“for justice, for dignity”) struck me as a strong, central message for the song (1:29). I exported the material and emailed an MP3 to Gabriela.

The following day Gabriela added her vocals to the track. Singing an octave above my voice (she is panned to the right, and I to the left), she followed my melodic lines closely in some parts, but found slight variations at others (e.g., 00:37). Here we were starting to include techniques commonly applied in participatory musical practices. Charles Keil calls these slight deviations from absolute unison or abstract schema “participatory discrepancies.”²⁰ In face-to-face performance they help to promote participation by opening space for contributions, increasing the density of sonic texture and decreasing the anxiety of potential participants who might otherwise feel their sounds would have to match precisely those of others in order to be valid. In participatory traditions like Aymara sikuri ensembles in the Peruvian Andes and Shona bira ceremonies in Zimbabwe these discrepancies can include “wide” tuning–either of individual instruments or between different musicians–, buzzy timbres, and not playing precisely on the beat.²¹ In our recording we stuck to relatively clear timbres, as well as precise timing and tuning, to avoid the risk of passive listeners feeling it was “poorly recorded” or “out of tune.” However, Gabriela unreflexively sought out slight variations of the melody within the harmonic framework, providing moments of heterophony, just like many banjo and fiddle players do in old-time dance music in the USA.²² When I mentioned this to her, she was pleasantly surprised and sought to replicate these discrepancies when we came to recording the second verse (e.g., 4:29).

At this point in the process, the harmony required a modification, which reveals the kinds of accommodations that often need to be made in a collaborative process with an open format. Márquez had made her speech over a backing track in the key of C# minor, a challenging key for some instruments. I had already spoken to my colleague Rondy Torres about adding some bandoneon to the track. He is an accomplished musician on many keyboard instruments, but feels he is just starting to explore the bandoneon, which is taxing enough even in keys with fewer sharps. The instrument was originally developed in Germany as a portable organ for religious services, and some of its buttons are ordered so as to facilitate common hymnal chords, while others were added later in its development without any clear logic. This makes its adoption in the River Plate region as the central sound of tango perhaps even more surprising and impressive. Playing melodies in unusual keys can be bafflingly complex. I wanted to include the nostalgic poignancy that the bandoneon’s wheezy timbre suggests for tango lovers, so a new key had to be found. Shifting the pitch of the track too far from the original tonal centre made Márquez’ voice sound unnatural, so we settled for the slightly easier key of C minor.

With the key decided, other colleagues could build the texture of the first verse by inventing complementary parts. Rondy added intriguing countermelodies, including some chromatic runs reminiscent of bandoneon greats like Aníbal Troilo, which complemented the legato cello notes contributed by another colleague, Gibelly Parra. Gibelly was quick to suggest numerous ideas throughout the song, exploring the timbric range of her instrument so often associated with lament. Gibelly’s playing, with little vibrato, added a visceral sense of drawn-out pain and longing, but also a constancy and solidity. She is a mother of two and she emphasised in our discussions during the creative process how she wanted to drive home the messages of certain lines. I interpreted her performance as enacting empathy with the pain of mothers who had lost their sons (“tan profunda para esas madres…”). However, Gibelly stressed the multiplicity of emotions we all might feel in relation to such events. As she put it: “The timbric range of the cello, with its similarity to the human voice, lends it the capacity to emulate the versatility of humans. So, for me it has strong connections with a range of emotions and facets of identity.”²³ By emphasising multiplicity, Gibelly goes beyond dyadic ways of viewing (protest) music—as solidary or complicit, for example— integrating some of the “messiness” and performativity called for by recent scholars of music, conflict, and protest.²⁴

The creative and recording processes of Rondy and Gibelly revealed an interesting difference in musical praxis. While Gibelly is a fan of contemporary academic music and was most comfortable thinking in terms of tone colour and repetitive phrases in relation to time cues (“I think I’ll repeat this phrase from 01:40 onwards”), Rondy is much more centred in rehearsed presentational performance with a highly fixed and fixing score, and a conductor who determines the tempo, in the style of European or Euro-American art music from the 19th century. He had fundamental questions about how to record his part. Although I tried to write a basic score, it was easier in the end to guide him towards hi-fidelity practices of recording over the backing track, a completely novel experience for him.

The electric piano (audible at 00:58; 01:21) was recorded by a friend from the USA, Jud Wellington. He was a fellow PhD student during my time at the University of Illinois, so his formation is similar to mine. He struck a balance between adding interest and simply supporting the main melodic ideas, and used a deep understanding of marimba music from the Black Pacific to complement later sections. Working with him reminded me of participatory and presentational performances we had realised together. His geographical position, across various borders to the North, mirrored the way in which marimba music crosses the Colombia-Ecuador border to the South.

The key change was the first of many accommodations to other people’s strengths and restrictions during the process, which I did not perceive as compromises of some previously set “artistic vision”—bluntly put: I did not have one. Rather, they were part of the natural process of collaboration, like the pauses and changes in topics one makes in good, flowing conversation. While Jud and I speak the same languages both literally and figuratively, “conversation” with Rondy required more patience. Again, this is a feature of participatory music making, which Turino describes in terms of constraint and responsibility to the enjoyment of others.²⁵ Even highly skilled musicians cannot simply do what they like, or demonstrate the full range of their virtuosity, if this goes against the central aim of maintaining and increasing participation. Everyone present has an obligation to the successful interaction and enjoyment of all present.

Cueing the Chorus like Cosmopolitan Afro-Colombians

Another source of inspiration came when I revisited the material recorded thus far and began to think more about structure. As mentioned above, the line “por la justicia, por la dignidad” felt like a strong central idea. I decided to form a responsorial chorus using this as the refrain sung by multiple voices, and later snippets of the Márquez recording as the changing lead lines. Here we were borrowing from Afro-diasporic musical practices, and specifically from two styles from Colombia’s Black Atlantic and Pacific.

I wanted to include Martina Camargo in the recording, in part because she had been the one who shared the video with me in the first place, but also because I love her voice and enjoy collaborating with her. She is a cantadora (traditional singer) from a region known as La Depresión Momposina in the Colombian Caribbean. She sings tambora music,²⁶ but has also collaborated with a range of artists, generating a sense of connection with the capital, Bogotá, and the Pacific, in particular Cali.²⁷ This kind of connectivity is often underrepresented in folkloric discourses that emphasise regionality.

“Tambora” here does not just refer to the double-headed bass drum played with sticks, but to a collection of styles distinguished mainly by their rhythmic feel, played historically in La Depresión Momposina for celebrations, especially at Christmas. One of the tambora styles, guacherna, has a twelve-beat feel (O-OOO-XX-XOO)²⁸ which leant itself to the chorus. I programmed a digital version of this pattern, which enters in the preceding instrumental section (01:19). This would not only make Martina more comfortable participating and serve as a sonic sign of the presence of her region in this song, but it would also permit the incorporation of a style from the Colombian Pacific, which would in turn help increase the number of collaborators and generate a stronger sense of connection with Cali and Márquez. Realising these steps, however, would require yet another collaborator.

Moisés Zamora has been the main music teacher of Tambores de Siloé for over a decade and is the musical director of the “Our Histories” project. When it became clear that it would be impossible to involve the young members of Tambores in the collaboration, he volunteered to take on the musical roles of marimba, percussion and clarinets himself (entering with the chorus at 1:40). Here he plays in a style known as currulao, or bambuco viejo, its six-beat cycle complementing that of guacherna. The bombo pattern in particular articulates nicely (X-XXO-). Music originating from the Afro-Colombian communities in the Pacific coastal region has become increasingly important in Cali since the foundation of the Petronio Álvarez Festival in the mid 1990s, reflecting the increased migration of Afro-Colombians to Cali during this time—the same Afro-Colombians who were so central to the longevity of the 2021 strike in Cali. For some people marimba music in particular has come to supersede salsa as Cali’s most characteristic style. Seeing as Francia Márquez comes from Yolombo in the department of Cauca, it felt important to include musical sounds that many listeners would identify as “representative” of both her region and Cali, where the killings and her speech took place. However, the sounds most listeners are accustomed to are not those of participatory currulao dances, but rather the more highly scripted staged and recorded versions of these practices by groups such as Herencia de Timbiquí and artists like Nidia Góngora.

The sound we sought for the chorus was close to that of a song that had become famous after a previous massacre. “¿Quién los mató?” (“Who Killed Them?”) unites various artists from Colombia’s Pacific region that navigate “traditional” and “contemporary urban” music.²⁹ Its contrasting sections combine the singer-songwriter sensibilities of Hendrix B with raps from Hendrix, Alexis Play, and Junior Jein (R.I.P.) respectively, and presentational currulao led by the voice of Nídia Góngora. These elements are combined seamlessly by producer and one-time Herencia keyboardist Cristian Salgado into a profoundly moving denouncement of the killing of five adolescents in Cali in August 2020.³⁰ When I realised “Por la justicia’’ was likely to end up resembling “¿Quién los mató?,” I wrote to Cristian and Nidia to explain; I wanted them to understand their influence on what we were trying to achieve and get their blessing. I was pleased to receive a positive comment from Góngora when we eventually published the video. Although I lived in Cali for many years and count many members of its musical community as friends or constructed family members, I am aware that many of my colleagues and I are, in many ways, outsiders to that musical-social world, especially insofar as it constitutes a site of the African Diaspora. It was important to me that its leaders understood our solidary intentions.

A Chorus of Unity and Differences

Repetitive chorus refrains are perfect for increasing participation in live contexts, providing as they do “security in consistency.”³¹ People can learn them on the fly as their repetition simultaneously drives home the message of the lyrics and allows the mind to quiet, permitting our focus to pass to our body, or the collective body of participants, minimising ego. As listeners, when we hear chorus refrains sung by many voices we can often feel that the lead singer’s sentiments are widely shared.³² Our telemusical recording process drew on these facets, but creating unity required further negotiations which revealed fundamental cultural and personal differences regarding music, lifeways, and protest.

Lennin Martínez and Andrés Giraldo, student members of the Uniandes Caribbean ensemble, joined in, sending me their unison sung chorus lines (01:40-04:10). Martina Camargo also added her voice here. The responsorial form we were now using echoed the way in which audience members react to Márquez’ speech at this point: “Tenemos que seguir sosteniendo la mobilización pacífica.” —”¡Así es!” (“We have to maintain peaceful protests.” —”That’s right!”) (01:40-01:47).

Introducing further instrumental elements in the form of clarinets and saxophones revealed contrasting attitudes to participation in the strike and the musical project. Two further members of the ensemble, Miguel Hoyos and Santiago Prada, had had positive experiences participating in demonstrations in Bogotá and joined in the composition and recording immediately. In contrast, a friend and mentor from Cali, Joaquín Salcedo, was reluctant to record at first. He had been too close for comfort to some of the violent oppression of protests by State forces: A fellow protester at one march had been abducted and beaten by police. I avoided applying pressure, encouraging him to participate only if it would help him feel better. He eventually added his parts (e.g., 02:51-03:00), but without his normal creative vigour.

Another timbric layer came in the form of a string section, the development of which revealed interesting differences in musical praxis and epistemology among the participants. Pedro Ramírez is a composer and lecturer at Uniandes who specialises in neo-classical styles, some of which incorporate popular elements. As a caleño he was also keen to participate. In discussions with him about what he could contribute we settled on a string-quartet idea that would repeat incessantly through and beyond the chorus, to be faded in and out as needed. He remembered a song by Alejandro Sanz called “Me iré” (“I Will Go”) as a reference³³, but before he could start to develop his ideas he wanted to be absolutely sure of the metric and harmonic structure.

As a percussionist I tend to think of metre and rhythm slightly differently from many other musicians. I had felt a pulse in the intro and grouped them in fours. This could easily be translated into bars of 4/4 for Pedro and others. Nonetheless, the chorus section definitely had a ternary subdivision of this pulse. It was easy to convey this to Moisés in terms of genre-defining patterns that we were both familiar with: guacherna and currulao. However, talking in terms of Western art music in order to communicate with Pedro was more taxing for me. Had the metre changed to 6/8? Was it still in 4/4 with a triplet subdivision? Furthermore, the bass drum beats of the guacherna pattern can be misleading, perhaps suggesting a duple subdivision and a different start point to those accustomed to hearing a strong bass drum beat as the beginning of a bar: |OOO-|OOO-|XX-X| as opposed to the “real” grouping of: |O-OOO|XX-XOO|. We eventually settled on understanding the metre in terms of 12/8, which allowed for the ternary, or “compound,” feel, but also accommodated the harmonic movement. This latter was much clearer for Pedro, but he confirmed it with me emphatically before writing the string lines (|Cm| |Aьmaj9| Bь6|).

Pedro’s contribution came in the form of a fully developed score for five stringed instruments—two violins, viola and two cellos—complete with dynamic markings, as well as a midi rendering. With his melodies he sought to highlight melodic intervals of ascending minor seconds to build the tension throughout the loop. Gibelly was happy to replace the part she had suggested for the chorus with that which Pedro had written. Lennin Martínez took on one of the violin parts.

Another student, Fé Guarín, added their viola. Fé identifies as non-binary and understands their playing of the viola as an expression of that gender identity, the instrument avoiding archetypal characterization as either male or female. Including their sound chimed with the strong musical presence of LGBTQ+ protesters in the strike,³⁴ even more admirable for the extent to which queerness has been marginalized in the country.

Finally, a graduate from our music programme and ex-ensemble member, Estefanía “Pepa” Lopera, took on the remaining, and most complex, violin part. In English she would not say that she was a violinist, but a fiddler. Colombian Spanish does not accommodate this distinction, and she was slightly embarrassed to tell me of her struggles to read and execute the written part. She is far more accustomed to accompanying others by listening and developing countermelodies on the fly. My solfège is not sufficiently strong to help her much and the mediation and time delays of WhatsApp messages made this process painful, but Pepa used the editing techniques developed in her production degree to piece together her part.

Throughout the process I encouraged collaborators to send me whatever they felt would fit with the emerging song, but Martina was initially unsure: “Lo que no sé es qué puedo añadir yo” (“What I’m unsure about is what I can add”). I suggested she start by singing the chorus, but she found it difficult, which came somewhat as a shock to me. I had maintained the rhythmic pattern of guacherna in the programmed drum beat to help her feel at home. The melody was simple and not dissimilar to songs she knows well. What could the difficulty be?

The problem was with the lead voice. In tambora music, whether participatory, presentational, or hi-fidelity, the cantador(a) sings lines between the chorus refrains that vary in lyrical content but maintain the same melody. Importantly, the melody of this strophe resolves to the tonic centre, or a closely related tone, just before the chorus comes in. In fact, as I was discovering, Martina and other tambora singers may pay closer attention to this as a cue for their entrance than they do to any abstract metric scheme. In “Por la justicia” the chorus enters in a metrically regular fashion, just before every fourth repetition of the guacherna cycle. That is how I felt where to enter. Martina, however, was waiting for a tonal cue from the “cantadora”. We hadn’t created melodies for this part of Márquez’ speech, so Martina struggled to know where to come in. Nonetheless, after me singing through the part on WhatsApp messages and phone calls, she managed to locate her entrances and successfully record the part.

In sum, writing and recording this section required the resolution of a series of fundamental tensions. In stark contrast to Pedro’s desire for a clear, abstracted, diagrammatic description of rhythmic and harmonic structure, Pepa would have liked the opportunity to listen repeatedly and develop her own complementary part, while Martina would have preferred a clear, repeated sonic cue from a fellow participant to guide her input. These musical dispositions reflect broader cultural traits of social interaction. Pedro comes from a cosmopolitan, middle-class family in the city of Cali, and sought out the structured rigour of training in classical music in both France and Canada, where he appreciated the relative order of day-to-day life. The millennial Pepa combines “folk” and punk aesthetics in her music, dress sense, and social circles. Martina is the daughter of a campesino farmer from a small town accessible only by boat. Her formative years were spent combining formal schooling with the soaking up of oral traditions, which she now performs and teaches. Joaquín wondered whether to participate at all because of his proximity to physical violence aimed at protesters. Miguel and Santiago had no such doubts, as their experiences of protests had been peaceful.

In a shared project we were all forced to mediate between these different approaches to music, people, and protest, edging out of our comfort zones to try different approaches and help each other adapt to the differences. We also had to find novel strategies for success within the restricted circumstances of mediated interaction due to geographical distance and the Covid lockdown. The musical compromises and new understandings we developed of one another were at different ends of a single spectrum of social specificity. We used musical composition, performance, recording, and editing to model and manifest peaceful relations based on “non-dominance, deliberation, and cooperation.”³⁵ As such, the sonic elements of the song can be heard as “dicent indices” of collaboration.³⁶ That is to say, they do not merely represent possible collaboration, as a song like The Beatles’ “Come Together” might, but can be taken as evidence of genuine collaborative processes.

Break it Down and Build Up the Female Voice

People listening passively to a recording need contrasts to avoid becoming bored and moments of surprise that connect them with the here and now. We aimed to achieve this with the second verse (04:15-04:30) and bridge (04:32-04:55), especially by punctuating the urgency of the lyrics beginning with “Nosotros no somos terrorristas” (“We are not terrorists”). The Colombian political left has been marginalised so thoroughly throughout the twentieth century that some, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) or the National Liberation Army (ELN), have taken up arms. Many of these groups’ actions seem to belie a greater concern for maintaining armed domination of territory and (illicit) trade than for social change. People who wish to express progressive views without going to those extremes are constantly forced to distance themselves from militant groups, to avoid becoming military or paramilitary targets. In her speech, Márquez aligned herself with the protesters and spoke emphatically against their criminalization by the government, right-wing media, and reactionary public opinion.

We wrote a unison break that matched the force of Márquez’ words (04:33-04:41). To accompany the declaration of her female positionality—”Como mujer, como hermana, como hija, como madre…” (“As a woman, as a sister, as a daughter, as a mother…”)—we added female voices to imply feminine solidarity. Gabriela created layers of harmonised sung vocals “as if [Francia’s words] were the voice of a multitude of people.”³⁷ Martina added her harmony. Gibelly wanted to sing with her daughters “to highlight a voice that calls us to value the other and listen,”³⁸ though time restraints did not permit. Lina Zambrano, my wife, added both sung and spoken lines to increase the density.

The way in which the last two lines of the bridge were fixed involved an intervention from Francia Márquez herself. When we had a rough edit of the whole song, I sent it to her, reiterating our intentions and asking for her comments or suggestions. Although I worried she might reject what we had developed and leave us in a difficult situation, it was an important part of the process to include her in the decision making. She was happy with everything bar one word. In her original improvised speech, she had said “hago un llamado a la tolerancia” (“I call for tolerance”). In her email she said that, on reflection, she would prefer that the word “tolerancia” not be included in the song. She did not develop her reasons, but Lina helped me understand that Márquez likely wanted to avoid being misinterpreted as calling on protesters to tolerate police violence. I cut “a la tolerancia” leaving the “call” more open.

Without “tolerancia” the following line, “Vamos a parar esto” (“Let’s stop this” [the killings]) (04:53-04:44) had a more commanding sound, which I attempted to amplify with editing techniques. It was the voice of a strong Afro-Colombian mother leading her matrifocal household³⁹, painted large. It resonated with picket signs referring to the power of a mother’s word, or the physical and emotional strength of mothers who joined the protests, such as Teresa Montero Rendón.⁴⁰ Underscoring the power of this idea required more than human voices. I used digital echo to repeat “parar esto” and shifted the echoed track down an octave, in a style I first heard in Outkast’s “Morris Brown,”⁴¹ which has since been adopted in much trap and pop music. I also reused part of a digital sound created for the introduction, the understanding of which highlights a further way of thinking about music, reframing, in turn, the whole collaborative project.

How Many Seconds of Noise?

Returning to my initial ideas for this song, I was keen to use digital editing software not simply to compile and “polish” the constituent sounds, but to reshape, mould, and contribute to the finished sonic product. My capacities for doing so are limited by know-how and access to software. For some of the digitally manipulated sounds of the verses and choruses I felt able to take samples of the Márquez recording, edit, reverse, process, and recombine them to create sounds that highlighted certain phrases (02:03-02:06) or outlined an entire section (01:1801:39). However, in discussions with the collaborators we decided to begin the song with a growing mass of dissonant sound that could evoke for listeners the tumult of the protests, police repression, and popular reactions. Sculpting such a sound was beyond me.

Jorge García is a composer in the Uniandes music department with classical formation, a love of heavy metal, and a PhD from the University of Birmingham, where he developed his interest in loud, spatialized electroacoustic music. He likes John Blacking’s oft-quoted description of music as “humanly organised sound,”⁴² and his compositional practice often involves sculpting found recordings.⁴³ He was central in creating the swell of sound that introduces “Por la justicia” (00:12-00:29).

When I spoke to Jorge about the idea, he asked for clear instructions, not in Perdo’s terms of metre and harmony, but in terms of how many seconds of “noise” were needed. Beginning with a search for open-source recordings, he first selected material which would immediately call to mind the national strike for (Colombian and Latin American) listeners: the sounds of cooking pots being bashed in cacophonic displays of inconformity as part of demonstrations known as “cacerolazos”; indistinct chanting; and the hoots of vuvuzelas. He then processed these in such a way as to make any clear meaning questionable, playing with the possibility of understanding and misunderstanding. He also introduced a “boom” sound from a sample library, toying with the ways in which the combination related spatially through panning.

García describes the creative process as a “double appropriation”⁴⁴ in close dialogue with “plunderphonics” a concept introduced in a 1985 conference presentation by John Oswald, which implores us to question notions of sonic ownership.⁴⁵ It resonates with Turino’s category of studio-audio art,⁴⁶ but delves deeper into the social repercussions of the practice. This concept struck me as useful in explaining what we had been doing throughout the project: the heavy sampling of recorded material not initially created as music, and its rearrangement and combination with other sonic material—found, new, inspired by existing music, or developed especially—to create a musical product that resists legalistic or aesthetic description as “original,” “derivative,” or “stolen”. It involves using sound technology (in the broadest sense) in ways that question distinctions between composing, (re)producing, and playing (in the sense of interpreting an instrument). These questions both echo and answer Walter Benjamin’s concerns about creativity in the age of mechanical (and digital) reproduction.⁴⁷

Oswald’s and García’s responses to the philosophical knots of copyright and ownership in the age of sampling are at base optimistic. I believe they also indicate an optimistic response to the broader social question of how we can react musically to horrors the like of which Colombia currently faces, beyond the creative drive of a single composer. For Jorge, playing in the murky waters of sampling and creativity is a means of moving away from discourses about the social “autonomy” of music: old, but still commonplace ideas that (the most valuable) musical sound, and its appreciation, should be “pure” and “transcend” social or political meaning or uses. Oswald advocated for “a state of music without fences, but where, as in scholarship, acknowledgement is insisted upon.”⁴⁸ In “Por la justicia” we attempted to make a sound that would be “drenched in” and “rub up against” the social upheaval and political debate of its moment. We sought to remove some of the “fences” between students and faculty in our department, between the academy and the “real world” of traditional singers and activists, between bogotanos, people from “the regions,” and foreigners, between music and speech, composition and borrowed material. However, we always sought to acknowledge the creative and social debts we owe to others.

One More Time: Iterating Participation to Counter Violence

The re-emergence of the chorus (5:00) allowed me to select lines from the second half of Márquez’ speech to include as spoken interjections between refrains. One of these was long, but it allowed some “word painting” which we hoped would allow listeners to hear more analytically, while simultaneously conveying two messages about the power of music to resist violence: “Instead of the gunshots we have been hearing, we must ensure that tonight everyone hears guitars, drums, cununos, guasá shakers, marimbas, clarinets. Let those be the sounds that are heard” (05:45-06:05).

While editing this section I adapted a technique commonly used by funk and soul bands during the 1960s and ‘70s⁴⁹. This allows listeners to hear each part individually, understanding how each combines with the others to form a gestalt musical pattern. I took advantage of Márquez’ list of instruments to do similar. Though its impact on listeners’ understanding is perhaps limited, as the speech and groove quickly come to an end, it may provide an invitation to relisten to the whole song.

Márquez’ words in this section suggest that musical sounds can be a means of blocking out, silencing, or replacing the sounds of violent conflict. This is an idea developed by academic literature on the peacebuilding power of music. Michael Daughtry writes of the sounds of war, such as the helicopters, gunshots, and sirens that were assaulting the ears of caleños in early May 2021, as the “belliphonic.”⁵⁰ His case studies show various ways in which music can resist them sonically and socially.⁵¹

Márquez’ plea goes further, however, than just blocking out belliphony: She invites us, or at least the residents of neighbourhoods like Siloé, to join together in participatory practices, seeking social synchrony through music making, accommodating our desires to the needs of the group, participating in peaceful protest, and making material the social harmony that harmonious music can both represent and foment.⁵² This invitation went out to people on all sides of the conflict in a way that helped to nuance discourses that would otherwise glorify or vilify particular agents in the tumult. Those of us who participated in the song were unable to take part in the way Márquez’ lines imagine, but the reintroduction of a densely-textured chorus accompaniment aimed to evoke for listeners the kind of musical practice that she was calling for, after separating out clearly each of its multiple layers of repeating patterns, contrasting timbres, and interlocking phrases.

Final Reflections

The song ends as the recording of Francia Márquez’ speech begins (06:10 - 06:20): We remember that words, spoken or sung, might not help alleviate the pain of those who are suffering, but the echo of the sounds developed over the previous minutes (in recorded time), and days (in real time), might contribute to the efforts not just to relieve pain, but to construct societies that inflict less pain in the first place.

In this essay I have argued that the act of making music with Márquez’ speech in the way we did was not simply a means of representing solidarity with her message and the families of victims, but was itself an act, however small, of solidarity, empathy, and collaboration. Regrettably, our collaborators did not include locals from Siloé, far less the families of victims. Such inclusion is just one way in which the process could have been strengthened, in order to augment further the empathy with those people. Working together in person, or with less centralised communication, and iterating our performances live would also help. However, the temporal immediacy of the project, and its technologically mediated nature, required various compromises. Nonetheless, the lessons of the process, and its narration here, include a deeper understanding of how each collaborator approaches musical praxis, and how these differences reflect broader cultural and personal diversity.⁵³

Working together to realise a project on an achievable scale is, I hope, the beginning of processes by which we can form broader social habits of collaboration. Such habits are part of the response necessary to break cycles of violence in places like Colombia. The sonic signs we recorded and manipulated that now form part of the whole recording are dicent indices of our collaboration and increased solidarity with each other, and to some extent with Francia Márquez, José Ambuila, Kevin Agudelo, Hárold Rodríguez, Neison Sánchez, and the countless other victims of the current wave of violence. They borrow from participatory practices, especially Afro-Colombian ones, even as they show plainly their mediated, and largely “outsider,” nature. We enacted a plunder-phonic philosophy to minimise frontiers while acknowledging influences. I hope these sounds and interactions are also understood as an invitation to dialogue among all those involved (victims, perpetrators, observers, activists, musicians) as we struggle to find a way of moving beyond belliphony, via the harmonious relations made manifest in our musical practices, towards a society characterised by more justice and dignity for all.