Sometimes, when composers receive an invitation to go on a music-creative journey, they also received some indications about how the composition should go, or the length of it, or simply just words and phrases to have direction. It’s a journey we are invited on, so it’s important to have a map. These indications can take us a little bit longer to connect and create, and sometimes they “dan en el clavo" (‘hit the nail on the head’).

With “Andanza del Ánima”, from the very first email I got from Dr. Diana V. Suárez, founder, artistic director and conductor of Coral Cantigas, I started imagining the universe I wanted to go, and the indications I was reading from Dr. Suárez where leading me there faster than light.

When the composition was finished, I realized the universe I traveled to was located in my very first memories enjoying and listening to music with my parents. These first memories during late-night rehearsals watching and listening them playing and singing songs from Violeta Parra, Victor Jara, Amparo Ochoa and many others, were my first attempts to make music. And not too far from that moment I started playing with Tepeu, a Latin-American and Andean music group founded by my father in 1974 in Mexico City.

That was the universe I traveled into to create this work. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t by writing these notes and there will be no choral composition.

In terms of the composition, I knew from the very beginning I wanted to use and maintain the myxolydian mode in the whole work, typically used by Parra and Jara in their songs, to create a fair or sentimental bridge between music and lyrics. That lead me to the melody, just the notes, and the melody took me to the rhythm, a hybrid between argentinians styles of malambo and chacarera. When the moment came to write the lyrics, I remembered something Dr. Suárez wrote me in one of the first emails to have a sense of direction: “Un viaje musical por Latinoamérica, pero también un viaje colectivo del alma”. (A musical journey through Latin America, as well as a collective journey to the soul).

And that was it. I knew in that moment what to write to honor what this choir have been doing for twenty years and what my parents have been doing since I was aware of my existence, or even before that.

Sometimes, when composers receive the invitation to go on a music-creative journey, they found themselves.