24 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JULY 9-15, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com Angélica Negrón has purple hair, a dog named Midi, and a gift for finding music in places others don’t think to listen—in the waves off a Puerto Rican beach, in the leaves of a snake plant, in a lullaby a grandmother might have sung. The 42-year-old composer and sound artist, born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, just outside San Juan and now based in Brooklyn, arrives at the 89th Carmel Bach Festival as featured composer with a portfolio that spans orchestral premieres at the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics to film scores and experimental pop. This year, she is both performer and curator, bringing to Carmel a vision of sound that feels less like a genre and more like a sensibility—layered and alive to the world beyond the concert hall. She came to composition late, and by accident. Negrón’s mother was a percussionist who played pandereta and congas; her father was a big music fan who would blast old-school salsa at home. Growing up in Puerto Rico, Negrón played violin in conservatory orchestras—an education, she now says, in which she never encountered a single work by a living composer. “I had no idea that living composers were among us,” she recalls. The discovery that changed things came through film. While studying at the University of Puerto Rico, she fell into the world of film scores—the Herrmann-Hitchcock collaborations, Fellini and Nino Rota, Almodóvar and Alberto Iglesias. Those led her to artists like Bang on a Can, Sō Percussion and Kronos Quartet. “I remember discovering Kronos’ recording of Black Angels,” she says, “and the massive score of that piece in the conservatory library. Those moments really were the spark.” The actual turning point was more concrete. Her band, Sinestia—a string quintet with vocal and electronic components, influenced by Björk and Portishead—was asked to score a silent screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at the university. To organize the music, Negrón had to start writing it down. A composition student looked at what she was doing and asked: Why don’t you study composition? “I didn’t know that was even a possibility,” she says. “Oh, this is a profession. This is something I can actually do.” Her compositional career took off around 2008 when she connected with the Transit ensemble, generating a wave of commissions. By 2011 she was featured at the MATA Festival and Bang on a Can Summer Festival, establishing her place in New York’s contemporary music scene. Inward Pieces, commissioned and performed by Sō Percussion at Carnegie Hall in 2026, put her on the map with major institutions. Negrón sings and plays the accordion with the indie electronic band Balún, which she co-founded with her college friends. For years, she kept her worlds deliberately separate—the conservatory-trained composer on one side, the pop songwriter and electronic experimentalist on the other. The shift came about 12 years ago. “I was doing two things and I had these two separate lives,” she says. “I started to think things are more fluid—all one thing, all part of my creative output.” The liberation of that realization is audible in everything she makes now: a piece for orchestra, a Balún song, a work for electronics and percussion can all emerge from the same impulse. Two of Negrón’s pieces will be played at the Carmel Bach Festival this year. One is Marejada, her string quartet for Kronos, which weaves in field recordings from Seven Seas Beach in Puerto Rico, on the island’s eastern tip. It will be performed at 7:30pm on two Fridays, July 17 and July 24, at Sunset Center. The other piece is Lo Infinito, a fully acoustic string quartet featured in a candlelit series at All Saints Episcopal Church, which transforms the melody of “La Linda Manita,” a traditional Puerto Rican lullaby, written in the aftermath of her grandmother’s death. “I was thinking a lot about women in Puerto Rican culture,” Negrón says, “how they raise generations, how they nourish, how they are the powerhouses that raise us.” The melody is never heard whole—it shimmers through transformations, something you might half-recognize if it was part of your childhood, if someone once rocked you to it. Additionally, Negrón has curated a chamber program called “Field of Sound,” presented at 3:30pm on Friday, July 23. Designed as an immersive experience, it blurs the boundary between acoustic and electronic sound, between individual voice and collective, between memory and environment. The program brings together works by a bunch of young composers, from Colorado-based avant folk vocalist Annika Socolofsky to fellow Puerto Rican composer Christian Quiñones, alongside Negrón’s own Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado. Pauline Oliveros—one of the pioneers of early electronic music and a foundational influence on Negrón—is represented by an open-instrumentation piece drawn from her deep listening practice, designed to draw the audience itself into the performance. Negrón chose every piece deliberately. Strings, voices and electronics are featured, yes, but also a guiding idea: that sound is a flexible material, shaped by space and texture and the act of listening itself. Composing is just part of the craft; another is recording and collecting sounds—from home, from the street, from the environment. In her classical compositions, Negrón integrates electronics not as background texture but as a central element. She’s known for using robotic instruments, music boxes, toy instruments and found sounds. (Her collection started with a Strawberry Shortcake music box and grew from there.) In a festival dedicated to finding new life in old music, Negrón is asking what it means to truly listen: not just to what is played, but to everything the sound carries with it. Sound is a flexible material, shaped by space and texture and the act of listening itself. The Woman With the Purple Hair Angélica Negrón is rethinking the way composers, musicians and listeners relate to sound. By Agata Popęda CATALINA KULCZAR “I became a composer when I realized that I don’t want to compose for one instrument,” says Angélica Negrón. “I want to compose for all of them.” So she does. Carmel Bach Festival 2026
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