Antonio Correa (1982, Colombia) studied piano performance with Manfred Gerhard in the conservatory of the Universidad del Cauca and later on with Radostina Petkova at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. His main interest as a performer is the performance of experimental music both as a solo performer and as a founding member of the Ensamble Als Eco. Antonio Correa has premiered in Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, works by composers such as Morton Feldman, Simeon ten Holt, Yuji Takahashi, David Lang, Philip Glass, Jacob ter Veldhuis, Marc Mellits, Francisco Polonio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jesús Pinzón, Louis Andriessen, and Terry Riley, among many others. His own compositions, described as “one of a kind, unassuming beautiful doodles that come from a mind fully aware of his connection to the American experimental music tradition”, have been performed in Bogotá, Argentina, the USA, France, Spain and the Netherlands. Antonio Correa is the director of the Experimental Music Student’s Ensemble and a frequent guest speaker at the Composer’s Forums, at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.

Should I care where are you from? For synthesizers and field recordings (2013)

Written at the request and dedicated to Sonja Lončar and Andrija Pavlović from LP Duo.

Is it really that important to create a Colombian piece of  music, a Colombian sculpture or painting? Again, what does this even mean? How do you do this, by going back to what is most often referred to as “roots”? Is it really the only way possible? In great part thanks to my family background, I was not educated to think in terms of nations but in terms of the human species as a whole. My father used to say that roots are for trees, not for human beings:  “If you want to stay all your life in the same place, then care about your roots”, he said.  All this I had in mind when conceiving this piece of music and the usage of a field recording  of a place, as Colombian as it can get, (the balcony from my apartment, located  at Bogotá, the capital of Colombia), but that at the same time could have been  recorded in any place in the world and still obtain a very similar outcome . There is also an inescapable sense of  longing  for  something  as  personal  as  the sounds I listen to everyday (and the particular thoughts and memories attached to them) when I am at my apartment writing this piece of music, conceived to be performed so very far away from where I inhabit the world; to have an unknown audience in an unknown country listen to my sound environment.  The name of the piece makes reference to the fact that one of the last things I see in another human being is his or her origin. I could not care less about that. My friends Sonja and Andrija are from Serbia and I certainly hope that they in turn, do not care that I am from Colombia. It  is  our  humanity  and  many  aspects  of  our personality that bond us together, nothing more, nothing less.