Sueño-Vibrant
4-Part - Digital Sheet Music

I composed this work partially to serve as my master’s thesis, but also to explore the

blurring and eradication of boundaries – whether the boundaries are musical, social, cultural, linguistical, or political. I wanted to create a work that would explore the boundaries of my own dual identities, such as Mexican or American, or masculine or feminine, and that of my varied interests, such as popular, jazz, and European art music. After half a year of work, Sueño-Vibrant is the dazzling, whirlwind of a result ("vibrant" is pronounced just as it is in English).

I worked with poet Marco Piña because we share many similar artistic philosophies owing to our mutual identities as bilingual Chicanxs. "Bastardized Spanglish Translations" portrays an individual going through a painful break-up, whereas "Night Song" is about self-discovery of

one’s identity. By pairing these two poems, I create a polarity between the texts themselves, to highlight that the shaping of identity is both an internal and external process.

In the cantata, we travel from the mourning and mysterious "Do My Eyes Lie" to the Mexican folk-styled "Ya me voy;" the arduous and painful "Ban Me From Balancing;" the indie- and jazz-inspired "Soon I’ll Be Home;" the introspective choral work "Night Song;" and the dissonant and disoriented "This Song Keeps Skipping." We finish with "Adiós, Amor," where these seemingly disparate feelings, genres, ideas, and identities are tied together and explored to fruition through a variety of styles and genres, from the salsa, to the opera chorus. This, I hope, will provide audiences with an invitation to consider their own identities and those of others, and to embrace the social dissonances that happen both within us and around us.