Media

Resonancia Natural, a collaboration with visual artist Heather Bird Harris, is inspired by the history and the sounds of the Santa Cruz River watershed, and by its endangerment after the loss of perennial desert flows that followed colonial settlement. Its three parts trace past, present, and future.

The video art follows locally gathered earth pigments as they move through water. The past is made with grassland soil, clay from Madera Canyon, and plants that bloom on very little water — prickly pear, creosote, desert willow. The present is water retreating from the arroyo at Las Cienegas and the dry bed of the Sutherland Wash. The future is decomposing soil from the base of a cottonwood at Empire Ranch, burned in the 2017 Sawmill Fire — soil where life regenerates from death. The electronic track draws on field recordings by ecologist and biogeographer Luc Barbaro, along with rhythm and texture extracted from those recordings and mapped onto software instruments.

Ius in Bello, Latin for "law in war," is the body of international humanitarian law — chiefly the Geneva Conventions — that limits the destructiveness of war: barring certain weapons, protecting civilians, restricting the scope of fighting. I wrote this piece in 2014 as a commentary on the situation then unfolding in Venezuela, where an increasingly authoritarian government met dissent with violence, and more broadly on a recurring pattern across Latin America, where the search for freedom from imperialist oppression has repeatedly devolved into internal conflict, foreclosing any real possibility of stability or peace. This piece holds two things at once: the horror inflicted by those who seek power over human lives, and the beauty of a culture whose depth is not always visible from a U.S. vantage point — one that finds real meaning in a slower life, in needing fewer material things, in strong networks of connection with other people and with the land, in trusting intuition and improvisation. The beauty of the imperfect, the unproduced, the raw, the natural. A call to find languages of solidarity toward fellow humans, and respect for human life.

I found the impetus for this work in the last writings of three South American poets: Violeta Parra (Chile), Alfonsina Storni (Argentina), and Ana Cristina Cesar (Brazil). I was moved by their final works and compelled to explore the weight of the roles they played, as women artists, as protectors of Indigenous Peoples' culture, and as figures in the 20th-century feminist current. Parra's "Gracias a la vida" [Thanks to Life] (1966) simultaneously held gratefulness, appreciation, and mourning in a song that became an icon of 20th-century Latin American folk culture; Storni's "Voy a dormir" [I'm going to sleep] (1938) describes her transition to death in a magical-realist poem, where she will be welcomed and comforted by fantastic sea creatures; and Cesar's "Samba-Canção" (Slow Samba), a poem with an ambiguous tone (between crude and funny) describing the multiple identities she had performed in her search for approval. The fixed media and video, gathered on research trips through Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, include Parra's own Cuatro Venezolano, the coastal site where Storni died, and an archival recording of Cesar—in an attempt to materialize their memory.

This work was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation.

pruning evokes the process of self-directed neuroplasticity — something ancient Eastern traditions have understood for thousands of years, and that Western science has only recently been able to describe by its own methods. The brain's automated processes are necessary to handle the amount of information daily life delivers, but they are deeply shaped by our earliest experiences. The pruning of neural connections in adult life allows those processes to be redirected toward a more conscious and intentional path.

This work is my meditation practice expressed poetically, in sound and musical gesture. Its three sections move through acknowledging and accepting, forgiving and letting go, and rebuilding — imagining a brighter future in as much detail as possible. The more vivid that image, the clearer my present, my real options, and my very next steps become.

In Spanish, two verbs carry what English collapses into a single "to be": ser and estar. Estar names a transitory state; ser, something more enduring. This distinction resurfaces often in my mind as I experience life as an immigrant. The need for adaptation and the distance from the people, land, and culture that shape one's ser imply losing something of oneself along the way. Forgetting and remembering both become necessary in that process. This piece is an exercise in remembering — the simple things and the small acts that carry a beauty sometimes only understood in one language, the shared moments and love that shape one's essence. Aren't we all just memories?

Virginia is based on Virginia Woolf's final letter to her husband, Leonard, dated March 28, 1941, a poignant document that reveals her immense capacity for compassion and love. An expression of a woman's deep state of sadness — yet full of gratitude and self-blame — the letter shows a vulnerable and virtuous Virginia Woolf, a woman who carried the weight only some can see, that of living and writing as a feminist.

The title Déjate Caer may be loosely translated as "let yourself fall." The piece takes its inspiration from poem 35 from Árbol de Diana by the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik. The free verse one-stanza poem invites surrender to the raw experience of living, embracing both pain and existence itself as part of a deeper, nocturnal truth. Pizarnik uses repetition with slight displacement: images or phrases reappear as echoes of themselves, slightly shifted, creating a suspended state of self-reflection, circling in on itself before the poem suddenly breaks into a bare statement. The opening gesture of this work mirrors this structural motion: a slow ascending and descending scale shared by the live violin and its recorded counterpart, beginning in unison and gradually slipping out of phase. Then, the collapse—the fall as a movement toward a revelation.

Añoranzas is part of a set tracing the emotional landscape of exile: grief giving way to nostalgia, to love, to memories worn faint and soft. Written for solo cello, the piece follows that arc as one continuous gesture.