​Working as a composition lecturer for Javeriana University's Music Department has given me countless moments of fulfillment and bliss. One of them was tutoring the master's thesis by Kike Mendoza and Abel Loterstein. Alongside my teacher colleagues Holman Álvarez and Juan Carlos Britto, we decided to come up with a way of materializing our interest in the choral sound in works that would also highlight our individual composition voices. The pieces we ended up writing during the 2020-2021 pandemic reflect our fears, hopes, beliefs on life and death, as well as the need for forgiveness. My piece Ama is included in this recording. It is about the act of loving -no matter what you do, do it lovingly.

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In 2018, Colombia's Banco de la República commissioned a new string quartet from me, which was premiered and then recorded by Quatuor Diotima. I was honored to have Noche de reyes sin corona included in Diotima’s three-concert series dedicated to the six Bartók quartets, which they had recently recorded for Naïve. The quartet also presented the new piece in Cali (my hometown!) and Armenia. The three-concert series in Bogotá was quite special because at Banco de la República’s request, the quartet performed the other two quartets I had written by that time as part of the series. I guess it was really a Bartók-Noguera cycle, huh?

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I joined my friends, composers Ricardo Gallo and Damián Ponce, on the production of this recording. Ricardo had written Chirimías imaginarias for Linos Trio a few years before, so we decided that Damián would write a piece for them as well. I included Elegía errante for viola and Chirimías metálicas for flute, to the project, works that I had written during my PhD. I wrote Latidos de lo oscuro for harp so that we could have three solo pieces for the three members of the ensemble, to go along with the two chamber pieces written by Ricardo and Damián and… voilà!

While I was studying in the United Kingdom, my alma mater, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota started to work on the fourth volume of its recording series dedicated to works written for specific formats by its composition alumni. This volume was going to feature pieces written for string quartet. As soon as I heard about the project, I contacted the university and I proposed the inclusion of Quattuor verba, one of my string quartets. For this recording I got to work with Marcela Zorro, one of Latin America’s most renowned recording engineers dedicated to the recording of classical music and with whom -to this day- I continue to work whenever it is possible.

Sometimes an award-winning piece can come out of unexpected situations. A friend of mine who played the tuba asked me to write a piece for him. I decided to write En luz y sombra, a piece richer in texture that complemented the tuba with a bass clarinet, a double bass and percussion. However, my friend became uninterested in the piece and… he never performed it! I sent the piece to a composition competition organized by the culture bureau of Bogota and… I won! The piece was then included in this recording, which features the pieces that won the competition between 2003 and 2006.

The Kondraschewa/Chica piano duo commissioned different pieces from Colombian composers. My piece Otros pedazos de chonta is an expansion of Pedazos de chonta, a much shorter piece I wrote for the Schubert Ensemble a few years ago. While the first piece deconstructs the sound of the marimba de chonta from the Pacific Coast of Colombia, the new one expands it, destroys it, blurs it, forgets it and then remembers it again. In my opinion, the result of this exploration is not as luminous as the rest of the pieces on the recording. My feeling is that Otros pedazos de chonta is imbued with noise, fugal counterpoint, dissonance, and collapsing mechanisms, but also melancholic melodies that fade away into the distance.

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I was honored to be in charge of selecting the music for this recording, the seventh volume of a series dedicated to works written by graduates of the composition program of the Javeriana University in Bogota. Each recording of the series has focused on specific formats and this one focused on brass ensembles. Aside from the acoustic prowess of this format, it also has a strong relationship with some of the popular music of certain Colombian regions. The recording includes El brujo, a piece that makes a direct reference to one of my band suites and uses distorted quotes from the popular band repertoire of Colombia.

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This recording was born out of a research project in which I approached musical composition from the idea that memory and oblivion can provide a strong creative source. Many of the works in the project were inspired by Colombian rural music’s oral traditions and by the music I remember from my childhood. The recording features five of my works, some of which use distortion as a metaphor for the blurriness of long-term memory. I presented the recording at Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and I was later invited to present the works in Banco de la República's concert series, also in Bogotá.

During my PhD studies at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, the University of Leeds’ music department organized a match between composers and poets living in the UK. I was paired with Oz Hardwick, who wrote Masks, a poem based on the concept of ‘carnival’, which was the main subject of my doctoral thesis. I composed the music for a selection of verses of the poem and Masks was premiered by Helena Raeburn (mezzo) and Benjamin Graves (Bb cl.) during the 2009 edition of LEEDS Lieder, a biennial festival dedicated to promoting the enjoyment, understanding, appreciation, composition and performance of art songs.