A multimedia ‘Mass’ on horrors of ICE detention
How a haunting exhibit on immigration inspired a Roosevelt University student to create a work that bristles with tension
Carlos Jaquez Gonzalez remembers the gallery show that changed his life.
That’s not hyperbole or over-romanticization. Two autumns ago, Gonzalez, a composition master’s student at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA), headed to his usual rehearsal with the Conservatory Chorus, moved that day to an unusual location: the Gage Gallery on Wabash Avenue. He wasn’t prepared for what he’d find inside: Stark panoramas of immigrant detention centers hung on the walls, with harrowing narratives from those within — prerecorded and read aloud by students in the Conservatory Chorus opera program — echoing in the space.
The American photojournalist behind the images, Greg Constantine, has been documenting detention centers around the world since 2016 as part of his Seven Doors series. The photos Gonzalez saw that day were from “American Gulag,” the project’s threepart centerpiece. (The third part will launch online and in a print edition later this summer.) Constantine combines haunting blackand-white images and hours of interviews with formerly detained immigrants. His work exhorts viewers to pay attention to individual stories — to a Honduran trans woman’s humiliation after being incarcerated at the Florence Correctional Center, a men’s jail in Arizona which lets roughly 550 of its beds to ICE; to an asylum-seeker’s denigration by ICE attorneys; to an El Salvadoran woman discharged from her hospital bed in shackles, sobbing
— and, in turn, to the plight of all people held in immigration detention each day in the United States. In 2019, at the height of the Trump administration’s draconian policies, ICE reported more than 50,000 people were being held each day.
The full force of the exhibit landed square in Gonzalez’s gut. Born outside Monterey, California, to Mexican immigrant parents in 1985, he was all too familiar with the specter of the American immigration system.
“When I saw this and I heard the interviews, I was blown away. I just knew, that was it,” Gonzalez says.
Over the next year and a half, Gonzalez would reach out to Constantine to collaborate with him, the Chicago Composers Orchestra, or CCO, and Roosevelt University’s Conservatory Chorus on “Immigrant Mass,” a 40-minute multimedia composition braiding the Mass ordinary with Constantine’s unflinching interviews. The Conservatory Chorus, CCPA choir alumni, and CCO musicians recorded the work from late February to mid-April; the final product launches online May 22.
“Immigrant Mass” would have been premiered live, had it been an ordinary yearand-a-half. Instead, the state and city’s first lockdown orders came down weeks after Gonzalez first pitched the project to Conservatory Chorus director Cheryl Frazes Hill. CCO musicians met for an optional in-person recording session. After the orchestra finished recording, choir members, who have rehearsed remotely since the onset of the pandemic, submitted individual recordings of themselves singing, synced by a flexible click track Gonzalez created to CCO director Allen Tinkham’s beat. The finished video combines Constantine’s photography, some of the narration audio from the 2019 Gage Gallery exhibit, and footage of the orchestra and choir performing the work.
Or, to be precise, Gonzalez will combine all these elements into a cohesive whole. In addition to composing the music, Gonzalez is single-handedly editing and mixing the video himself. Constantine — who is in Vancouver, where he’s spent much of the pandemic sheltering in place — says the cuts Gonzalez have sent him of the piece so far have been “stunning.”
“Carlos is really the driving creative force behind this project. He’s created multilayered points of entry for people — there can be an entry point through the visuals, through the words, or through the music itself,” Constantine says.
In addition to editing the video, Gonzalez attended every rehearsal of “Immigrant Mass,” fine-tuning the score after input from musicians and even creating a small dossier of backing tracks and resources for the choir.
“Carlos created tremendous materials for the students. I work with composers who have been in the field for a long time that don’t necessarily have some of the knowledge and skill he’s demonstrated,” Frazes Hill says.
“I know from now on, if Carlos has an idea, I’m listening.”
Gonzalez’s path to composition in a conservatory setting was more circuitous than most. After high school, he bounced around community colleges in Monterey County before pivoting to the culinary arts. He started as a baker, then landed in lines at fine-dining establishments in ritzy nearby Carmel and, eventually, San Francisco.
But music remained a constant. Gonzalez grew up on doo-wop and oldies, then, later, R&B and soul. While in high school in the late ’90s, he fell in love with rap and punk rock, which in turn led him to other hard-driving genres like metal and hardcore. All those influences remain close at hand when he composes.
“I loved beautiful voices — I think that’s carried me to a lot of what I do now,” Gonzalez says. “Then, even if the subject material is really depressing or very real, I still want (my music) to be exciting. I’ve had teachers on my case about my thing for driving rhythms. It’s the punk rock in me.”
With piano already under his belt as a teen, Gonzalez taught himself bass, guitar, drums and ukulele, recording his own music on a fourtrack tape recorder. Despite playing trumpet in his school band, Gonzalez says years of playing dispiriting band arrangements kept classical music off his radar until adulthood.
“We were playing covers of, like, Celine Dion and Aerosmith — no classical music or anything,” Gonzalez recalls. “After that, I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ ”
While working lines, he fronted a spate of Bay Area-based groups, spanning experimental rock to ’60s-inspired garage bands. From before he enrolled at San Francisco State University in 2015 — this time to study music — to when he moved out to Chicago in 2019, Gonzalez was the lead singer for garage-surf project Silhouette Era. (He’s still technically part of the band, despite the 2,000-mile separation from his bandmates.)
A number of associations flow into the tributary that is “Immigrant Mass.” Gonzalez resonates with the deliberation required in notated music, but he also relates to the punkish aesthetics of 20th-century modernists like Ives and Schoenberg, whose creative voices radically departed from the norm. But, of course, the work is a Mass — and, as a lapsed Catholic, Gonzalez is well aware of the weight that musical form carries. Rather than let the liturgy carry on as usual, however, Gonzalez countered the Latin text with searing excerpts from Constantine’s interviewees with detained immigrants. The painful contrast upends the Mass ordinary’s meaning; what is thought of as a source of succor and solace conceals a much uglier underbelly. (Sound familiar?)
“There is a lot of anger and frustration in this Mass, and not just about what’s happening — it’s about a lack of understanding from people,” Gonzalez says. “I inserted the interviews in moments where I thought that that juxtaposition was going to be the most jarring.”
The harmonic language of “Immigrant Mass” bristles with its own tensions. On the one hand, Gonzalez knew the work needed to be appropriate for a preprofessional choir like Conservatory Chorus, especially since its members would need to rehearse and record themselves separately. On the other, he wanted the technical demands of the work to carry another layer of meaning — and, like its subject matter, nothing about “Immigrant Mass” is easy.
“When students would struggle with tritones or with asymmetric rhythms, (I asked them,) ‘Why is this section so difficult for you to be able to perform successfully? Why would Carlos put that there?’ ” Frazes Hill recalls.
Choral graduate assistant Gabriella Klotz, who helped lead sectionals during rehearsals, echoed Frazes Hill’s observations.
“This piece forces you to listen, and the force of the message is emphasized in the compositional style. It’s meant to make you uncomfortable for a reason,” she says.
Technical challenges aside, Gonzalez’s Mass is well suited for the Conservatory Chorus choir singers. After all, as a bass in the chorus, he intimately knew the voices he was writing for. Frazes Hill notes that he even tinkered with the vocal writing so it better fit Conservatory Chorus’ ranks — for example, dividing inner voices so the Conservatory Chorus tenors, the choir’s smallest section, could avoid singing one to a line.
“He really understood just how far he could push things,” Frazes Hill says. “It created one of those moments where students could connect their studies in harmonic analysis, in music history, in translation. They (knew), as performers, that they needed to use all that information to convey something personal.”
Of course, “Immigrant Mass” also unearthed more personal points of connection. Every time the Conservatory Chorus choir prepares a social justice-oriented work (like Craig Hella Johnson’s “Considering Matthew Shepard” in 2019, or Ethan Wickman’s “A Destiny of Liberty” last season), Frazes Hill splits the choir into small breakout sessions, where they can discuss the work’s ethical tenets among peers. Many first-generation students spoke candidly of their experience with the American immigration system. Often, the cruelty depicted in “American Gulag” cast new shadows on their memories.
“I was able to come to the U.S. with my family as a refugee from Ukraine, and (“Immigrant Mass”) brought up some of the feelings that I had about the immigration process,” says Roosevelt sophomore Naz Mykhailenko. After rehearsing the piece, “I started researching the difficulties Latin American immigrants face coming to the U.S. and how to help.”
Mykhailenko’s reaction is precisely the kind Gonzalez hopes for when the project goes live on May 22. The video premiere is free, but attendees will be encouraged to donate to the Chicago-based Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants in lieu of a cover, with the National Immigrant Justice Center as a secondary partner.
“I don’t want people to feel guilty or like they’re not doing enough, but I also don’t want this to be a self-indulgent piece of art that just lives in the artist community. I want it to have practical applications,” Gonzalez says.
He also recognizes that “Immigrant Mass” may mark the first time some audiences have meaningfully engaged with immigrant detention — particularly classical music audiences, given the socioeconomic and racial privileges they often carry. It’s a challenge that motivates Gonzalez rather than dissuades him.
“During a punk rock gig, if I say something to the audience, it’s mostly people who I know already share my opinion. But with classical music, it’s not necessarily that way,” Gonzalez says. “I still often feel like an outsider in this field, but I also feel like I have a duty. I got an education to speak to people who listen to this music and who have the potential to make a huge difference. I’m saying this in a way they understand.”