ZARABANDA VARIATIONS

Keir GoGwilt is a violinist, composer, and musicologist who was born in Edinburgh and grew up in New York City, where he currently lives. His work combines research and collaborative experimentation across a range of music and media. Known as a “formidable performer” (New York Times) with an “evocative sound” (London Jazz News) and “finger-busting virtuosity” (San Diego Tribune), he has soloed with the Basel Sinfonieorchester, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Chinese National Symphony, Orquesta Filarmonica de Santiago, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Recent composition projects include his album, hope lies fallow, with violinist Johnny Chang on Another Timbre, and Zarabanda Variations, which re-imagines music from New Spain/colonial Mexico. He is a founding member of AMOC and a resident composer with JACK Quartet for the 2023-2025 seasons. His research has been published in the Bach Journal, Current Musicology, and Naxos Musicology.

Mariana Flores Bucio is a singer and actress who specializes in Contemporary Music and Mexican traditional Musics. Mariana has studied and collaborated with artists such as Susan Narucki, Steven Schick Wilfrido Terrazas, Carmina Escobar and artistic groups such as Orquesta de Baja California, Project Blank, Teatro Estudio de la Baja California, Teatro en el Incendio, 9 Spiral Project, and Italo-American Institute of International Cooperation. She has participated in masterclasses, workshops and festivals in Mexico, USA, Perú, Costa Rica, Hungary, Austria and Germany with remarkable artists, like Meredith Monk, Ellen Fisher, Mary Mackenzie, George Lewis, Alejandra Sandoval, and Lourdes Ambriz. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Music at the Autonomous University of Baja California and her MFA degree in Music Performance at UC San Diego under the tutelage of the prestigious Soprano, Susan Narucki. She is co-director of the vocal ensemble “Radical Ensamble” at Tijuana, Mexico, and she is currently pursuing a DMA in Performance at UC San Diego.

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. His most recent book, Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is a collection of 9 essays that show what this foundational creation story of the indigenous Americas (the Popol Vuh) has to teach people about the relation between emergency and emergence. His scholarship and poetry are likewise inquiries into the relation between crisis and creativity or world creation—often experimenting with literary and disciplinary form to bring ideas and feelings to life. Alongside his books, his work has appeared in such venues as Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), Modern Philology, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Portable Gray, and Fence. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the Departments of English and Creative Writing. He has also served as guest editor in chief of Fence, a journal of innovative literary writing.

Alec Goldfarb is a Downbeat Magazine award winning guitarist, composer, and Hindustani classical musician based in Brooklyn. Active in the NYC jazz and new music communities, his work explores musical traits as historical vestiges of migrations, geographies, labor, and ritual. An exponent of the Seniya-Maihar Gharana, Alec performs Hindustani classical music across the globe on the guitar using a novel synthesis of sarod and sitar technique. Performances include Roulette Intermedium, the Joyce, Skanu Mezs, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, the Yellow Barn, the Kimmel Center, Frequency Festival, Asia Society NYC, and more. He has premiered works by Vicente Hansen Atria, Matthew Schlomowitz, Taylor Brook, Austin Wulliman, Joshua Mastel, Alyssa Regent, and played on the Deutscher Jazz Preis Award winning album “Orlando Furioso” in 2023. He has performed with Anthony Braxton and the Creative Music Orchestra at Darmstadt, JACK Quartet, John Wetton (King Crimson), Patrick Bartley Jr., Immanuel Wilkins, and more.

Kyle Motl is a bassist, composer, and improviser described as a “spectacularly adventurous and dynamic musician” whose playing is noted for both “iridescent delicacy as well as abrasive force” (The Wire). His solo music “promise[s] to change us by revealing things we could never have imagined” (Free Jazz Collective). Kyle’s work inhabits territories composed and improvised, including projects with Keir GoGwilt, Earl Howard, Clucas/Motl/Hubbard, a trio with Anthony Davis and Kjell Nordeson, and work with contemporary music ensembles including the International Contemporary Ensemble and Ghost Ensemble. His recent album, Hydra Nightingale, features solo works written for him by Caroline Louise Miller, Anqi Liu, Jessie Cox, and Asher Tobin Chodos. Kyle’s book, Bells Plucked From Air, sheds light on harmonic techniques for the double bass. He is assistant professor of bass and contemporary music at University of Minnesota.

Wilfrido Terrazas (Willy/he/él) is a San Diego-based Mexican flutist, improviser, composer, and educator whose work explores the borderlands between improvisation, musical notation, and collective creation. He co-founded the pioneering Mexico City-based improvisers’ collective Generación Espontánea in 2006, and has performed more than 400 world premieres, written over 70 compositions, and recorded more than 50 albums, eight of them as a soloist or leader. His recordings have been published in Mexico, the US and Europe, and he has presented his work in 22 countries in a career that spans over three decades. He has also carried out residencies at Omi International Arts Center (NY), Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida) and Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture (Greece). Wilfrido co-curates the Semana Internacional de Improvisación, a festival in Ensenada, his hometown, and is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California San Diego, where he has worked since 2017.