Lotus flowers, above, symbolize memory. They are origami—representing each declaration page folded into something beautiful. "Soul Echoes" is the world premiere of a 30-minute vocal drama, choreographed for dance and scored for string quartet, two voices and fixed media/electronics. This immersive vocal drama elevates the narratives of children who have been detained at the US-Mexico border. Soul Echoes explores the way in which immigration detention affects the bodies of children. The work utilizes sonification technology to turn musical and bodily gestures into visual art. 

"Soul Echoes" was composed by J.E. Hernandez, an award-winning composer who himself was detained as a young person returning from Mexico to be with his family in the U.S. Now a naturalized U.S. citizen, J.E. wrote Soul Echoes for a mezzo-soprano, performed by Venezuelan Luisana Rivas known for her advocacy promoting Latin American music, and Cynthia López, a Mexican American soprano, and string quartet, performed by Lírios Quartet, a graduate string quartet currently in residence at CU Boulder. 

Soul Echoes is choreographed by Jesus Acosta, who also was detained as a teenager arriving to the U.S. Acosta will also perform in Soul Echoes  along with a youth dancer from Houston Contemporary Dance Company’s youth division. 

Artist Statement

"Soul Echoes amplifies the voices of migrant children who were detained at the U.S.-México border from around 2017 to 2019. I first became aware of the issue of migrant detention in 2013 when I was detained by ICE. I spent 60 days incarcerated then in the Houston Processing Center. Needless to say, it was an experience that was a mixture of brutality, confusion and misery. 

"I made a work about this titled Voces Fantasmas, which remains the only work in American Classical music that deals with migrant detention.  Children’s rights scholar and attorney Warren Binford then came to know this work of mine and asked me if I wanted to do a work based on legal declarations from the children detained during that period, collected for a class action lawsuit against the Federal Government, under conditions which Warren witnessed. It’s nearly one thousand pages worth of declarations – 887 to be exact. I read every single one. Though I have been detained myself, nothing really prepares you to read such things. Although I am not surprised at anything that I have read, it is nonetheless heart shattering. 

"Of these 887 pages, I selected about 40 pages worth of fragments. From these, I further dwindled down the selections to about 9 pages worth of usable text, which I used to weave an impressionistic narrative into a piece of music where the voices, thoughts, and feelings of the children – their heart – would be lifted and could echo through my own artistic voice and into the artistic landscape of today. Altogether, Soul Echoes is a testimony to a horrific situation, offering my artistic practice as a conduit in between the stark reality of children migration, and the hearts of listeners, hoping to foster a deepening of the emotional empathy that we all need to create better lives for children all over the world who come here – children who dream, who laugh, who cry, who hope, and who want to live like many of us do." – J.E. Hernandez, composer

Produced by Concertia HTX, in collaboration with Project Amplify. Photo courtesy Houston Chronicle. 

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