One thing that struck me when I first read about Chimera is opera’s long history of men singing women’s roles and women singing men’s roles, and the layers of identity that go into that. Was that something you considered in bringing this together?

Not that much. I have been thinking a lot more about the historical tradition of opera being something in which the voice is the main, important thing, and I’m interested in writing an opera in which most of it will be recorded voice. So through the absence of the physical presence of the voice, there’s performances that are being born out of that absence, and there are people that are giving life to those disembodied voices. I am interested in that other historical side of tradition, all that comes with the word opera.

Can you say more about the “absence of the physical presence of the voice,” and what’s born out of that absence?

A lot of this work is about making visible the things that are not necessarily visible. Sometimes that might be in a very literal way, in which we actually see a queen getting out of drag or a queen getting into drag, from a place in which they’re more of their just “normal” self and kind of transforming. But there’s another side of this, too, that’s about making sides of ourselves visible to the audience that relate more to their personal stories and their vulnerabilities. Usually when you see these performers, they’re so fabulous and confident that it’s easy to forget [that they’re also human]. I’m interested in exploring that vulnerable side of them that we don’t often get to see.

So that, for me, connects in a way to this idea of bringing something out that is not necessarily evident at first sight, which also kind of plays into the idea of this being mostly a lip-sync opera. There’s going to be queens that will sing — for the January 5 preview, Alexis Michelle will sing one of the songs — and we’ll also hear their speaking voices, but most of it is recorded voices. So the actual singer is absent from the stage, and we hear their voice through the performance of someone else and through someone else’s, and what does that add to their performance?

It’s interesting that you’re focusing on these ideas of layers of identity and making connections, because you’ve also discussed how your path to your current work came after negotiating different musical identities.

Definitely. I come from a place of, in a way, trying to prove myself — that this was something I could do, and that I was capable of being a part of the composer world. Because it’s something that is mostly associated with academia and institutions, there’s baggage that comes with it. For a long, long time I thought that I had to write music to fit into those contexts to feel validated, in a way. Now, just saying that for me is like, Come on, why? But it took me a while to get to a place of feeling comfortable and accepting all the other music that I was making. That was really fulfilling to me, and I found my joy in it musically, even though I spent less time doing that than writing an orchestra piece, which takes up so much of your time. But I still was connecting to other music. I didn’t even know you could be a composer until I was in my late teens.

I think I see it as a detour, in a way, because I started making music that’s closer to what I’m making now. But it just took me a while to make a connection between the music I was writing outside of the concert hall and the music I was playing at home in San Juan. It took a long detour for me to make sense of this—that this is all just who I am, and it’s not this kind of compartmentalization. There aren’t these separate containers in which my music exists, and there’s this thing for the concert hall and this thing for my band and then this thing for… it’s all one thing.

Just saying it out loud, it feels very strange that at one moment in my life, that’s how it was. But I think it’s sometimes easy to lose perspective when most of the music you’re writing exists in the context of academia, and there are certain expectations around that. Once I stopped caring about all those things, I was way more excited about the music I was writing, and about finding intersections between the music I was writing and all the different factors of my musical life.

Connecting back with drag, it’s liberating in a way to stop worrying over how you’re going to label one aspect of your persona or art and instead consider the full gestalt of the person or the body of work.

There’s something very appealing for me in that case. Since I was young, I didn’t even understand what was going on: I was just hanging out with my mom’s friends and they just happened to put on shows, and were mostly men who dressed as women. Since that was such an important part of my childhood, that marked me deeply. I’ve always been really drawn to this irreverence and kind of empowerment that doesn’t care about what other people say. Even though that was true for when I was younger, I feel like I lost track of that as soon as I started writing music on paper. In a way, over the past couple of years, I’ve been finding my way back to that path, which seems like the right fit for me.