Sounding Out Absent Bodies: Ghost Harmonies, Resonances and Remembering in Marisol Jiménez’s XLIII Memoriam Vivere

This paper explores how the performance of absence in twenty-first century music can both contribute to contemporary struggles for social justice and tackle human rights violations, such as enforced disappearances. It examines the orchestral work XLIII Memoriam Vivere (2015) by Marisol Jiménez (b. 1978), which refers to the story of the forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ college in Mexico, who were forcibly abducted and then disappeared in September 2014. Since then, both the right to have a full investigation and to know what happened to the bodies of the students have been central demands of the families of the victims and Mexican society – so far, only a few burned bone fragments have been matched to three students but most of the bodies have never been found. In my presentation, I examine three compositional strategies with which Marisol Jiménez performs the absence of the students’ bodies and engages the audience with the global problem of enforced disappearances: 1) using the number 43 as a key structural element of the work; 2) asking the wind musicians to use their instruments as resonant bodies to amplify the word Vivos! (Alive!); and 3) employing ‘ghost harmonies’, which consist in putting out certain sounds from complex harmonic textures in order to trigger auditors’ aural agency to internally reconstruct the sonic assemblage. This presentation shows how, performing absence and fostering collective remembering, musical and aural performances are acts of resistance to grave violations of human rights.