Martí Dialogues - for soprano and mixed ensemble. Excerpt of movement 5 premiered in April 2025 with Yiran Zhao conducting. Solo soprano, saxophone, amplified classical guitar, 2 percussionists, 4 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos, double bass (with C extension).

Martí Dialogues is a piece that I have been wanting to write for a long time. For the last few years, I have been researching and thinking extensively about the embargo that the United States has put on Cuba since 1962, a few years after the socialist revolution led by Castro. The embargo has had a devastating effect on the Cuban people, causing the flourishing of several black market networks in the country and severely limiting the supply and range of food, technology, and other essentials. Even though I have never visited and have little family left in Cuba, I have always felt strong ties with my Cuban roots, owing to my close relationships throughout my life with my grandmother and several aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Martí Dialogues will be a song cycle consisting of five movements and four interludes. Each movement is set to a poem from the legendary collection Versos Sencillos, penned in exile from Cuba by the late 19th-century poet José Martí.

The beginning of this movement excerpted in the recording below is one of desolation, ghostliness, and apocalypse. The text is a prophetic vision succinctly describing a struggle leading to the end of the world. Because of the gravity of the words, I use repetition as a crucial musical device, with the singer dwelling on each word for an almost painstaking amount of time. As this vision of the end of the world keeps repeating, the music becomes more and more restless, with the emanations of the bass drum and the resonances emerging from the bowed cymbal becoming increasingly chaotic as the piece continues. At the end of this excerpt, the music, true to the text, yields to its own weight, collapsing in a moan of indeterminate pitch.