"And after I compose my programs, but it is very easy because I look to the music in a very natural way without fuss, and so I look always music, in my home, like books and books and books, choose books and you read the pages, so I do this with music, and I make programs"
About this Quote
De los Angeles makes programming sound almost disarmingly casual, and that casualness is the point. She’s pushing back against the idea that musical authority has to arrive wrapped in theory-speak or curatorial grandstanding. “Very natural… without fuss” is an aesthetic philosophy: let the music lead, don’t perform your seriousness for the room.
The looping syntax - “books and books and books” - feels like someone reaching for the most ordinary metaphor because the experience is ordinary to her. Not easy in the sense of effortless artistry, but easy as in habitual: music is a home library she lives inside. She “looks” to music the way readers browse spines, pull something down, open at a page. That analogy quietly demystifies the labor of repertoire-building. Programs aren’t divine inspiration; they’re selection, sequence, and taste, shaped by long familiarity.
The subtext is also about control. A singer in the mid-20th-century classical world was often treated as an interpreter executing other people’s decisions: conductors, impresarios, institutions. By framing program-making as personal reading, she asserts curatorial agency without sounding combative. It’s a soft power statement: I choose, I combine, I tell the story of the evening.
Context matters: de los Angeles was celebrated for warmth and naturalness, especially in Spanish song and lyric opera. This quote matches that brand, but it’s more than branding - it’s a quiet argument that “natural” artistry can still be rigorous, and that intimacy with material is its own kind of intellect.
The looping syntax - “books and books and books” - feels like someone reaching for the most ordinary metaphor because the experience is ordinary to her. Not easy in the sense of effortless artistry, but easy as in habitual: music is a home library she lives inside. She “looks” to music the way readers browse spines, pull something down, open at a page. That analogy quietly demystifies the labor of repertoire-building. Programs aren’t divine inspiration; they’re selection, sequence, and taste, shaped by long familiarity.
The subtext is also about control. A singer in the mid-20th-century classical world was often treated as an interpreter executing other people’s decisions: conductors, impresarios, institutions. By framing program-making as personal reading, she asserts curatorial agency without sounding combative. It’s a soft power statement: I choose, I combine, I tell the story of the evening.
Context matters: de los Angeles was celebrated for warmth and naturalness, especially in Spanish song and lyric opera. This quote matches that brand, but it’s more than branding - it’s a quiet argument that “natural” artistry can still be rigorous, and that intimacy with material is its own kind of intellect.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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