To Exile…Landscape, Memory, and Sonic Identity in the Music of Edgar Girtain by Aracely Rojas and Alejandro Ochoa

Introduction

Exile—whether the result of forced displacement or the voluntary decision not to inhabit a given territory—produces uprootedness. This experience has been central to the lives of many artists, and in musical creation it often becomes a powerful means of expressing the complex emotional and existential dimensions associated with displacement.

The impact of exile and uprootedness in music operates on both personal and cultural levels. Music can function not only as a means of preserving cultural identity or fostering solidarity, but also as a way of confronting and transforming the challenges posed by displacement.

In the case of American composer Edgar Girtain, his extended residence in southern Chile until 2024 marked a significant transformation in his aesthetic identity and in his understanding of the relationship between music, territory, and belonging. This essay approaches that experience as a condition of uprootedness.

I propose a reading of three works composed during this period—Three Pieces for Flute and Cello (2022), Otro Viento Cantará (2022), and Puerto Montt (2025), from the piano cycle Tres Lluvias Australes—as sonic manifestations of an ongoing process of identity reconfiguration. Rather than explicitly depicting exile, these works explore ways of inhabiting the condition of migration through sound, oscillating between introspection, community participation, and contemplation of landscape.

Biographical Framework and Creative Context

Now based in Colorado, USA, Girtain’s years in Chile’s Los Lagos Region were marked by sustained engagement with the natural environment, a strong commitment to educational and community-based music-making, and a deep ethical concern for the ecological crisis. From this perspective, his status as a foreigner did not manifest as a rupture with his past, but as an opportunity for dialogue, listening, and transformation between his cultural origins and his lived reality in Chile.

However, Girtain’s return to the United States in 2024 recontextualizes his Chilean body of work through what might be described as an “inverted exile”: separation from a place that had become a vital and sonic home. In this light, his compositions can be understood as musical narratives in which uprootedness itself becomes aesthetic material.

A Phenomenological Approach to Uprootedness

What occurs within the individual who experiences uprootedness? How is the narrative unity of the self reconstituted when the bond to a place of dwelling—one that shapes identity and trajectory—is suspended? How do we think uprootedness in an era of globalization and the virtualization of presence?

Virtuality has increasingly replaced embodied modes of inhabiting the world, weakening the unique and sustained bond with physical space in which life unfolds. Rather than an exception, this shift consolidates uprootedness as a generalized condition of contemporary existence.

Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

“To be uprooted means to have no recognized and guaranteed place in the world; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all. Uprootedness can be the preliminary condition of superfluity, just as isolation can be (though not necessarily) the preliminary condition of loneliness.”

This condition is not the result of individual choice but of broader processes of alienation that suspend the individual’s essential role within political and social life. A diminished sense of belonging gives rise to solitude and a reduced capacity to act upon or transform the space one inhabits.

From this perspective, uprootedness appears as a shared condition of contemporary life—one that often operates invisibly. Girtain’s music offers a lens through which to explore this condition, drawing on his lived experience of building a home in southern Chile and, implicitly, his perception of a lack of belonging within North American society.

What emerges here is not overt political confrontation, but a process of estrangement that challenges the composer aesthetically and creatively. The place of enunciation of the musical work is no longer taken as given, but becomes something to be constructed—a dwelling formed through sound. From the awareness of being external or superfluous, a new space emerges in which the question of the world’s meaning regains urgency and demands renewed response.

This reconfiguration unfolds across three interconnected dimensions: interiority and estrangement, collective life, and the restoration of dwelling. These dimensions provide a framework for understanding Girtain’s work during this period.

I. Interiority and Estrangement: Three Pieces for Flute and Cello (2022)

This three-movement chamber work (Prelude, Scherzo, Finale) was composed with the intention of being performed in diverse spaces, requiring minimal technical adaptation. The piece presents an intimate dialogue between two instruments of contrasting registers and characters. Through harmonic tension, motivic fragmentation, and a tripartite formal design, the work traces an emotional trajectory: from introspective contemplation, through rhythmic conflict, toward a symbolic resolution.

In the Prelude (Andante con calma), flute and cello intertwine without hierarchy—two voices moving together. Wide intervals, soft dynamics, and stepwise motion suggest an inward listening that seeks refuge rather than withdrawal. This marks the beginning of uprootedness as introspection: an exploration of one’s emotional terrain.

The Scherzo (Vivace e misterioso) introduces fragmentation and instability. Alternating pizzicato and arco, shifting meters, and the contrast between a rhythmically anchored cello and a more fluid flute create a soundscape of displacement. The oscillation between consonance and dissonance evokes the experience of inhabiting multiple worlds without a fixed center.

In the Finale, stylized echoes of American folk idioms—pentatonic scales, syncopations, and dance-like gestures—emerge. These elements are not literal quotations but traces of cultural memory, integrated into a sound world shaped by the composer’s Chilean experience. The movement resonates as an audible imprint of origin within a music formed in exile.

II. Collectivity and Belonging: Otro Viento Cantará (2022)

In contrast to the intimacy of the chamber work, Otro Viento Cantará is a large-scale choral cantata for children’s and adult choirs, soprano soloist, Latin American ensemble, and texts by poet Verónica Zondek. Premiered at the Teatro del Lago in 2022, the work poetically explores the relationship between humanity and nature amid ecological crisis.

Musically conceived as a dramatized choral form, collectivity here functions as both an ethical and aesthetic principle. The fusion of classical and popular languages, the use of local timbral resources, and the central role of poetic text position the work as an act of cultural integration.

In this piece, Girtain moves beyond individual expression to engage actively with community, transforming exile into a practice of belonging and sonic mediation.

A clear example appears in Part III, “La oscuridad”, where near-static textures, diminishing dynamics, and subtle timbral exchanges between voices and instruments reveal a community that recognizes itself in fragility, loss, and shared silence. The work does not merely sing in unison; it sustains silence collectively.

III. Territory and Contemplation: Puerto Montt (2025)

Composed and premiered in early 2025, Puerto Montt offers a sonic experience closely tied to life in a growing city of southern Chile. Part of the solo piano cycle Tres Lluvias Australes, the work seeks, in the composer’s words, “to evoke particular memories and emotions linked to three towns that were fundamental in my life over the last decade—capturing their landscapes, their people, and the omnipresent sound of southern rain.”

Puerto Montt is structured as a musical palindrome and a metaphor for daily routine: a “trudging march” whose underlying harmonies move chromatically through major and minor triads, reaching a midpoint before retracing their path back toward the opening.

This palindromic structure functions symbolically as a representation of the migrant’s cycle: departure, settlement, the slow accumulation of daily life, and eventual return—irreversibly transformed. The march evokes work, repetition, and the patient construction of a life in a place that was once unfamiliar.

Through suspended harmonies and barely resolved tensions, the city emerges not as background but as a living sonic presence—one that accompanies and challenges the composer’s subjectivity.

The piece concludes, as Girtain notes, “with the sound of an airplane taking off.” This explicit gesture breaks the palindromic cycle, suggesting that true return is impossible: one cannot inhabit another place without being changed by it.

Conclusion

Edgar Girtain’s music traces a sonic map of southern Chile that extends beyond geography into the realm of affective resonance. From the suspended interiority of Three Pieces for Flute and Cello, through the shared vulnerability of Otro Viento Cantará, to the persistent rain of Puerto Montt, his work articulates a poetics of uprootedness transformed into belonging through sound.

Here, territory is not merely physical space but a shared field of resonance, present in the memory of both those who arrive and those who dwell. The emerging sonic identity arises from an expanded mode of listening—one that hears the environment as an extension of the self and recognizes itself in the listening of others.

In this body of work, exile is not loss but passage; interiority becomes dialogue; and collectivity becomes a way of remaining. These compositions invite us to hear territory not as background, but as interlocutor: a landscape that sings, rains, and remembers.