A couple of months ago, when writing about this year’s World New Music Days in Portugal, i mentioned a talk by Miso Music co-founder Miguel Azguime, given during a colloquium exploring the festival’s theme Thirst for Change. i was deeply struck by the force of Azguime’s words, which i found to be thought-provoking, persuasive and inspiring. Azguime has kindly given me permission to share the complete text of his talk, which you can read below. It’s worth noting that this talk, as well as coming from the perspective of spectral music, also uses Azguime’s opera A Laugh to Cry as a point of focus in its second half. It’s a rich, complex, radical work that i highly recommend spending time with. You can read my thoughts about it here, watch it on YouTube, and when you do, make sure you have the all-important libretto ready too.
Listening to the Earth: Spectral Music, “A Laugh to Cry” and Ecological Activism
(The role of music in Ecological Activism and the place of my New Op-Era “A Laugh to Cry”)
Art and Music alike can be a powerful force in ecological activism because it speaks not only to the intellect, but to the emotions, the senses, and the imagination — all crucial for inspiring awareness and action, in fact the inner terrain from which real change begins.
Music may not change carbon levels. But it can change perception. And sometimes, a shift in perception is the very first step toward transformation.
Among the many musical languages that speak to ecology, I’d like to focus on one in particular: spectral music. Why? Because it’s where my music is rooted and consequently also my New Op-Era “A Laugh to Cry” many of you were able to attend last Monday evening. And this piece will serve me to further express my thoughts about Ecological Activism and the theme underlying this World New Music Days Festival in Portugal, “Thirst for Change”.
Spectral music begins with sound itself — with the spectrum of overtones, the interior life of a single note. It’s music born not from abstraction, but from listening deeply to the physical properties of sound. In that way, spectral music is already ecological: it tunes the ear to the material world, to resonance, vibration, decay — the very laws of nature.
Think about that for a moment. In a time when the Earth is overwhelmed by noise — industrial, digital, political — spectral music somehow invites us to slow down and listen. It says: every sound has depth. Every vibration contains complexity. And so does every living system.
In my own practice, when I compose, I’m not just shaping sound — I’m learning from it. I’m listening to its micro-structure, its internal shifts, its breath. This way of working reminds me that music is not just a metaphor for nature — it is nature. It moves like wind, pulses like a heartbeat, dissolves like mist.
Spectral music doesn’t shout. It doesn’t offer slogans. What it offers is attention. And in the context of ecological crisis, attention is a radical act. To listen closely — to a tone, to a tree, to a body of water — is to say: you matter. You are not background noise. You are alive.
Spectral music, also teaches us to live with uncertainty and imperfection. Sounds drift out of tune. Harmonics clash. Nothing is static. This mirrors the fragility of ecosystems, the interdependence of everything. It’s a kind of sonic humility — a reminder that we’re part of a much larger vibratory web.
And yet, within that fragility, there is beauty. Not the polished beauty of so- called perfection, but the raw, shimmering beauty of things as they are. That, to me, is the core of both music and ecological thinking: a sense of awe — and of responsibility.
And that is what art can offer ecological activism. Not solutions in the technical sense, but a reorientation of perception. A re-sensitization to the complexity and delicacy of the systems we live within.
Spectral music, with its attention to nuance, instability, resonance, is a kind of sonic ecology. It doesn’t give answers, but it cultivates awareness. It makes us notice — not just the loud emergencies, but the quiet losses. Not just destruction, but interdependence.
This is profoundly ecological thinking: the idea that we don’t master the world, we coexist with it — that sound, like the environment, is a living system to be entered, not conquered.
So no, music alone won’t solve the climate crisis! But it can retrain our attention, reawaken our sensitivity, and help us imagine a different kind of relationship — with sound, with nature, with each other.
Music in general, and spectral music, in particular, reminds us that there is meaning in the smallest vibrations — and that change begins when we learn to listen differently, feel deeply, and act collectively. And in this moment of ecological urgency, that might be exactly what we need.
Because before we can save the planet, we have to hear it. And music teaches us how.
“A Laugh to Cry: Listening Ecologically”
Now, turning towards my own music which is deeply rooted in spectral thinking I would like to shed some light into my New Op-Era “A Laugh to Cry” as an example of spectral music and ecological activism.
Microscopic and microtonal variation, timbre transformation, attention to the shaping of silence, concepts of harmonicity, etc… indeed link me with the spectral tradition but in the case of “A Laugh to Cry” I’m inviting you into a different mode of listening — one that is at once musical, poetic, and ecological, that is music rooted in poetry, in the sound of language (or better the spectral formants of spoken language), in the act of listening as resistance and rising awareness to the ecological problems and policies through its own text and dramaturgy.
In a time of ecological crisis, we often look to facts for answers. But I would like to remind you that facts alone do not move us. What moves us is vibration. Breath. Tension. The realization that our own voices are part of a much larger field of resonance.
When we feel, we begin to care. And when we care, we begin to act!
Last Monday evening, for those that were present, you have experienced a work that is not simply music, not only opera, and certainly not just theatre — but a living sound organism, a poetic system, a sonic ecology.
This work (it was commissioned by the Warsaw Autumn Festival and premiered in Warsaw, and then toured in Portugal and Sweden) was born in 2013 of urgency — ecological, emotional, existential, and yet it remains, in 2025, absolutely updated and, very sadly, in tune with current ecological, political and social problems, including the war barbarities again in Europe and elsewhere!
The first level of the dramaturgy is based indeed upon the texts that made the libretto. The libretto was made from a path through several poems I’ve wrote, I should better say that I’ve composed.
This path of “A Laugh to Cry” is conceived as an initiatory journey — a passage through the darkness of night towards the light of dawn, led by the dream of those who dare to dream.
Crossing the night means confronting the destruction we are bringing upon ourselves, a destruction that reflects our own self-annihilation. In the face of despair and apparent dead ends, one must ask: is humanity’s only possible response its own suicide?
Suicide may seem like a release from the deadlock — but art stands in denial of suicide. Because art is a life force. It is generative. It is regenerative.
A “Laugh to Cry” is therefore not a narrative of resignation, but one of resistance. It denounces and reveals, but also imagines and proposes. It is a sonic and poetic act that demands attention — an opera that transcends conventional form to become a philosophical and emotional reflection on the very condition of being human.
This work confronts destruction with the dream of transformation. It affirms that in creation lies the possibility of renewal — and in the power of art, the refusal of silence.
And this brings us to the second level of the dramaturgy, a deeper level, where instead of describing environmental collapse in images or slogans, I’m staging the collapse of language itself. I’m asking: what happens when the words we use to speak of crisis are no longer enough?
When the voice trembles, stutters, dissolves into sound?
When laughter becomes a form of despair, and tears a form of resistance?
The final Coda, for example, with a semi-invented text that combines three languages simultaneously, is in fact the key to understanding not what the narrative tells, but how the composition itself unfolds — and how the intricate relationships between music and text, between musical instruments and the human voice, are developed.
Topique omnisciente la forme / for me ethnic simoon equipotent is to all differences belonging to human humanity humming unity producing multiplicity unanimously keeping inseparably the diversity of harmony within the union of the unison united son of the one sound reason of resonance resuming whom to hum
The voice is not a narrator then — it is an ecosystem. It crackles, bursts, breaks apart, reformulates. It inhabits paradox.
The electronics are not background — they are the weather, the distortion of our times.
The performers are not characters — but a conduit, through which anxiety, absurdity, and lucidity flicker like unstable light.
I wanted this piece to be visceral, intimate, and deeply human.
Inviting us to listen differently — not just to words or sounds, but to what lies beneath them:
The breath.
The break.
The laugh that hides the sob. The sob that hides the scream.
The scream that echoes what we can no longer deny.
In this way, I understand “A Laugh to Cry” as deeply ecological — not because it speaks about the environment, although it does, but because it enacts the very instability, the fragility, the interdependence that defines our planetary moment.
So don’t look for a plot — look for a pulse.
Don’t listen for answers — listen for resonance. Let the opera happen to you.
And perhaps, in the flicker between laugh and cry, you’ll hear something of yourself.
Something of all of us.
Thank you!
© Miguel Azguime
