We recently connected with J.E. Hernández and have shared our conversation below.
J.E., thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
Last year I premiered a work titled Voces Fantasmas (Eng: Phantom Voices). The work is a multi-disciplinary program that honors immigrants detained inside ICE immigrant detention centers.
The program is inspired by my own experiences inside the Houston detention facility, where I spent 60 days detained in 2013. I wanted to honor those who have since become no more than phantom voices in not only my memory, but the cultural memory of their countries and the United States. The program consists of a 30-35 minute performance featuring music, dance, and film, exploring the way in which each medium can—both together and separately—say something about the phantom voices that are now lost to the eternity of time.
J.E., love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I began making music at the age of 17, after my grandmother gifted me a Roland 404SX sampler. I used it to record and overdub instruments, and to arrange samples from records I would buy. I would eventually get to the point where I would buy and rent instruments I needed, including but not limited to: a sitar, cello, mandolin, banjo, synthesizers, and eventually, piano. I recorded and mixed and mastered my own music, and released it under different aliases.
It was when I bought a piano – by this time age 24 – that I knew I needed to begin to read & write musical notation. So I took theory courses in community college with Professor Aaron Alon – to whom I owe a great debt. Then I auditioned (playing piano) for the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music, and began learning there from Dr. Marcus Maroney, Dr. Rob Smith, and Dr. David Ashley White. It was from there that my “classical” training took place, which greatly enhanced my ability to express my musical intuition. I graduated in 2020 (sadly), and ince then, I’ve continued learning privately with Gregory Spears.
My artistic practice is partly about elevating personal and cultural narrative. It is by no coincidence that, since working on Voces Fantasmas, I have found a pull towards understanding certain cultural positions that I find myself, and people who I consider either a direct or indirect part of my own cultural paradigm. This pull manifests itself staunchly with my work, and I look to give voices to narratives that I feel have otherwise never received them. To this end, I imbue each and every work that falls into this category of elevation with as much information as possible from the topics I research. For Voces Fantasmas, as an example, I dug deeply into topics like language (implementing Nahuatl – which I had heard for the first time ever while detained), history, and even the words themselves – I often use words and turn them into musical material. I want every level of a musical composition to be richly indebted to its source material.
I want to always give a huge thanks to my collaborators for Voces Fantasmas – soprano Shannon Murray, FILMATIC Cinema, Houston Contemporary Dance Company, the Apollo Chamber Players, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Often, musical material will present itself to me in strange ways that I either see, hear, or feel. I pursue that music, as I believe it exists whole and complete in some strange world – a kind of metaphysical realm that lives within the realm of silence, language lacking the capacity to describe it in any meaningful way.
It is this pursuit of an ideal work that drives my work as a composer; I want to be a steward for the miracle that is musical sound. The immemorial inheritance of music is something that must be respected – we are all privy to this world of music, and to be a part of that via creating and arranging sound and silence is a privilege that motivates me every day,
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
Despite my own statements on the mysterious nature of where music originates, I actually think that people who are not artists often find it difficult to understand just how music is put together. It is actually an extremely practical kind of work that is straightforward and relatively easy to understand. Though there are many different kinds of disciplines in music making (classical playing, making music by ear, arranging electronic music, etc.), the process is similar in that there are concrete steps that take place to go from original musical inspiration to end result.
Furthermore, the traditional idea of inspiration (think lightning in a bottle) is a romantic view of something that can be manifested in a myriad of different ways. If we all waited for inspiration, we would never get anything done! Inspiration is actually extremely unreliable, sometimes abundant, sometimes absent, and it should never be the underpinning of someone’s entire artistic practice. Like any other type of work, we must diligently construct and go on a journey towards a finished piece, and along the way inspiration shows itself to us in different quantities.
Art is a fruit – born from a tree grown by a seed of inspiration, nurtured and watered by hard work.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jehernandez.com/
- Instagram: @jehernandezhtx
Image Credits
Portrait photography by Spencer Young (spenceryoung.photography). Film stills provided by ConcertiaHTX (concertiahtx.org), in collaboration with FILMATIC Cinema (filmaticcinema.com).
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