Looking for the Clave

String quintet. (2015)

Premiered at Sheldon Concert Hall, St. Louis, Missouri

To be honest, the coolest Haydn’s symphonies for me are the ones who have some kind of humor. He just got rid of that obligation of writing “serious” music and then tried to have fun. I also love when Shostakovich stops being so serious and then introduces a fast Russian dance in the middle of a section, as a pun on his own culture. In my case, I like to use some of the Latin rhythms that I learned how to dance and play when I was growing up in Colombia. Early, I had a sort of resistance agains these genres, later I have learned to see and hear the value of this music impregnated by cultural and social context.

This piece was written for a particular concert on the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis whose topic was Latin American music and I was in the middle of Piazzolla and Villalobos in the program—how about that? Happily, Leo Brouwer was not in the program because his string music was my inspiration. The performers were members of the St. Louis Orchestra who did a great job with all the recurrent syncopation in the music.