A little over a year after she released Miss Colombia, Lido Pimienta became the first woman of color to compose a piece for the New York City Ballet: 2021’s sky to hold, which presented folk genres like dembow and vallenato on the City Ballet’s esteemed stage. But she had already been composing another orchestral work, one that took notes from a deep well of historical sources: 16th century Italian castrati singers; Czech composer Luboš Fišer; the Gregorian liturgical chant Lux Aeterna. Pimienta uses these inspirations to create La Belleza: an acoustic, liberatory record of personal homecoming and ancestral communion where rumbling timpani, portentous strings, and rising and falling woodwinds meet in conversation with claves, drums, and celestial dembow.

Miss Colombia was Pimienta’s Polaris Prize-winning exploration of how beauty is used as a tool of colonial and anti-Black oppression. In it, she examined themes of homeland and Afro-indigenous identity with production that combined synths with traditional genres like cumbia, bullerengue, and porro. She anchored the album in hyper-specific references: the 2015 Miss Colombia incident; the importance of Sexteto Tabalá of San Basilio de Palenque. But La Belleza is a more abstract treatise on beauty and personal returns larger in scope. The album’s nine movements, arranged with the help of Canadian composer Owen Pallett, do tell a specific story across a transitory 28 minutes, one that loosely follows the separation and reconciliation of Pimienta with her partner. It is grounded by place—“representando a la Guajira,” she sings of the Guajira peninsula, to whom the Wayuu people are indigenous—but overall, no time anchors it except musical time.

After an arresting overture, Pimienta is joined by the choir she convened, the Coro La Belleza de Barranquilla, who sing on “Ahora”: “Eso mismo buscan ancestros/Es la ceremonia de los restos/Un honor que se le hace los restos/La ceremonia Wayuu.” (“That is what the ancestors look for/It is the ceremony for the remains/An honor that we make to the remains/The Wayuu ceremony.”) Across the album, she repeats “ahora” (“now”) as the music circles around repeated phrases and patterns; she returns to themes of ceremony and her Wayuu ancestors—calling back to a time before colonization created the nations of Colombia, where she was born, or Canada, her current home. In doing so, she corrects a historical pattern in orchestral composition and opera, in which indigenous peoples were largely represented as scene-setting characters rather than as stewards and composers of their own histories.