CARLOS SANDOVAL

DOCUMENTATION - ARCHIVE

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LA PASION SEGUN LA GENTE

Mexico 2001-2002

Banda Filarmonica de Tejalpa, Rodrigo Zerquera (Perc), Fernando dominguez (Cl)

Recording technicians: Miguel Rodriguez, Rene Blancas and Marcos Deli

Scholarsip: H. Aytuntamiento de Jiutepec, PACMYC Morelos

Production: Sireña

2001, premiere Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, curator: Marcos Deli

2002, 500-CD Edition: Quindecim Recordings-Sireña, QD01153, out of print

This work is a sonic portrait of Mexico, rooted in the Christian Passion celebration in the town of Ocotepec, Mexico. During the festival, which spans nearly six square kilometers, three technicians roamed freely with DAT recorders, capturing the ritual’s music, voices, steps, and ambient life without predetermined paths. The resulting recordings reveal a chaotic, immersive soundscape, alive with overlapping layers of tradition, devotion, and communal expression.

These field recordings were later synchronized and mixed with electronic sounds, summing five stereo tracks that were ultimately rendered into a single tape. The composer used this tape as a temporal and expressive guide for writing the score, letting the sonic gestures of the celebration shape the timing, character, and spatial sensibility of the instrumental parts. The tape was not simply accompaniment—it was a living reference, a map of memory, place, and sonic movement.

At the premiere, musicians were on stage while the tape was diffused through speakers behind the audience. The sound enveloped listeners, dissolving orientation and creating a sense of being lost within the festival itself. The chaotic, multi-directional sonic environment mirrored the density of memory and ritual: it is not a space meant for clarity, but for immersion, for inhabiting sound as one inhabits place. Amid this flux, the voice of the actor portraying Jesus provided the only linear thread—a human anchor threading the listener through the mycelial sonic network.

For the composer, these recordings constitute a sonic homeland: a world of sound that predates explicit melody or composition, shaping memory, identity, and perception. This work precedes and gestures toward “The National Mexican Anthem, as I recall it from my childhood,” exploring the intimate interplay of ritual, culture, and self. Philosophically and artistically, the piece embraces sound as living, connective, and experiential, an environment where memory, tradition, and place grow together like subterranean mycelia—complex, entangled, and alive beneath the surface.