Carried home by sound: Music of Omar Rojas, Mexico native living in Czechia
When circumstances make travel impossible, an unfulfilled longing for home can become a real source of sadness and pain. Fortunately, these negative feelings can be overcome through art, which can sometimes transport us thousands of kilometers away. The work of composer Omar Rojas is proof of this.
It is said that longing inspires creativity. In the case of composer and university teacher Omar Rojas, this expression definitely holds true.
Rojas, who is a native of Mexico, has lived in Czechia for almost 20 years: he studied here, found a job, and started a family. In 2020, however, the pandemic hit the world, and the global lockdown made it impossible for foreigners to travel to their homelands when feeling homesick. Many of us had to find a way to cope with the harsh reality of not being able to be physically with loved ones or visit places dear to us. Nevertheless, Omar Rojas managed to transform his homesickness into art.
“I didn’t want it to be just inspired by Mexico City. I wanted Mexico City to be there. Of course, I didn’t have any way to record it. But a very good friend of mine, who is a pianist and composer, was working on a different project and had many recordings of Mexico City, for example, the sounds of ambulances, shopping malls, streets, or subways, and he provided me with some of these recordings. In addition to that, I made a call on social media asking my friends who were, at the time, in Mexico City to record the sounds around them. I didn’t really care about the quality; I wanted the sounds to be as natural as possible. And this was the beginning of this journey. Ciudad was the very first piece that I wrote within the concept of urban soundscape.”
The piece Ciudad 1 contains the sounds of an ambulance, streets, cars, birds, and even a local saxophone player recorded in the street. However, this was far from the last piece Omar Rojas created using urban sounds.
“I couldn’t say that I was only from Mexico City because back then I had been living in the Czech Republic for nearly 15 years. So I also wanted to include that part of me. And one day I simply went to the garden, took my handheld recorder, and started to record the sounds of Ludgeřovice.”
The second piece Omar Rojas recorded using urban soundscape is called Dual 1.
“The reason why it is called Dual is that the original idea was to combine the sounds from two places – in this case it is Mexico City and Ludgeřovice. I recorded the electric guitar, then I processed it and added electronic sounds there.”
Nevertheless, Dual 1 was just the first one of the Dual series combining sounds from two cities.
“One of the first places where I travelled, besides Mexico, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, was Germany—Weimar. And I remember that this piece, Dual 2, has a very nice context. I did the recording for this piece mostly from a window in a hotel in Weimar. You can hear crowds, cars, but also the sounds of a forest. There is this beautiful area close to the Bauhaus University.”
The piece, however, also features so-called alternative percussion instruments – meaning whatever a percussionist has in his or her pockets.
“And here comes a very good friend of mine, a Mexican percussionist with whom I have worked on most of the Dual pieces. His name is Enrique Nieto. So when I was writing Dual 2, I asked him if he could record whatever he had in his pockets. And he loved the idea.”
The piece Dual 2 thus includes the sound of a set of keys, a plastic cookie wrapper, a wallet, and some coins.
Omar Rojas is aware that his music is not for everyone, and we would probably not hear it on commercial radio. Nevertheless, some of the most valuable feedback for him has come from people who are not part of the artistic community.
“I think for them it is kind of interesting to listen to these crazy sounds, and suddenly they realize that they can recognize specific places thanks to the sounds in the piece. And this is what I actually like – the feedback from people who are not so much in the art media, and their reaction is therefore quite honest. And the piece really gets to their hearts in the sense that it triggers their memory.”
Music is truly a powerful medium, often even attributed with transcendent qualities. After all, it can be perceived as a language in its own right—and perhaps also as a way of capturing and communicating emotions that our spoken language cannot fully express. For university lecturer and composer Omar Rojas, however, music is also, simply put, a means of transport that can carry him back to his homeland at any time.
“There is this cliché that says that music has the power to take you to very far places. But, well, I don’t want to be taken so far. I just want to be taken back home to Mexico City.”
