Flutist and composer Wilfrido Terrazas presents Trilogía del Dolor (Trilogy of Pain), a collection of works blending music and poetry to explore the complexities of the human experience of pain. Going beyond common idealizations, the trilogy seeks to spark conversations and challenge taboos around pain, featuring poignant texts by Mexican authors Nuria Manzur–Wirth, Ricardo Cázares, Tania Favela, Mónica Morales Rocha, Nadia Mondragón, and the composer, in conversation with the unique visual imagination of artist Esther Gámez Rubio. The album features the vocal artistry of soprano Mariana Flores Bucio and tenor Miguel Zazueta, and the fiery talents of clarinetist Madison Greenstone, cellist rocío sánchez, percussionist Camilo Zamudio, and Terrazas on flutes and narration.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 64:41 | |||
Part One: Llevarás el nombre |
||||
| Miguel Zazueta, tenor, Wilfrido Terrazas, flutes | ||||
| 01 | Intento recoger nuestra memoria | Intento recoger nuestra memoria | 6:25 | |
| 02 | No recuerdo cómo | No recuerdo cómo | 5:26 | |
| 03 | Lengua nueva | Lengua nueva | 5:22 | |
Part Two: Pequeña familia |
||||
| Madison Greenstone, clarinet, rocío sánchez, cello, Wilfrido Terrazas, narrator | ||||
| 04 | Recuento | Recuento | 7:46 | |
| 05 | Duelos | Duelos | 6:46 | |
| 06 | La tumba de Zapata | La tumba de Zapata | 7:08 | |
Part Three: Ten Thousand Regrets |
||||
| Mariana Flores Bucio, soprano, Miguel Zazueta, tenor, Wilfrido Terrazas, flute, Madison Greenstone, clarinet, rocío sánchez, cello, Camilo Zamudio, percussion | ||||
| 07 | Esta es la orilla | Esta es la orilla | 4:28 | |
| 08 | Y nada, los árboles esos | Y nada, los árboles esos | 4:55 | |
| 09 | No hay posibilidad de movimiento | No hay posibilidad de movimiento | 6:50 | |
| 10 | No volverán mis pasos | No volverán mis pasos | 5:16 | |
| 11 | La pérdida | La pérdida | 4:19 | |
Composer and flutist Wilfrido Terrazas has cultivated a practice that merges many disciplines into one powerful musical ritual. Crafting music that is at the edge of notation, improvisation, folk and experimental traditions, philosophy, and collectivism, Terrazas’ work cuts deep into an audience’s psyche, transforming the listener’s experience into something other worldly and deeply earthy at the same time. Trilogía del Dolor: An Investigation of Human Pain in Three Parts is scored for instrumental quartet, including Terrazas who does double duty on flutes and narration, two voices, and visual artist in live performance, is an eleven movement meditation on the universality of pain. Terrazas does not valorize or idealize pain, instead he sees it as a driving life force of its own, a catalyst for accepting change and embracing impermanence.
The first section of the trilogy, Llevarás el nombre, sets texts by NuriaManzur-Wirth and is in three movements for tenor and flute. “Intento recoger nuestra mem” opens with an improvisatory flute solo accompanied by tolling chimes before introducing Miguel Zazueta’s tenor with passages dripping with pathos. Zazueta and Terrazas pull phrases out from each other as if exorcising deep wells of emotion. Terrazas’ flute establishes steady drones in the beginning of “No recuerdo cómo” over which Zazueta explores the expressive tension and release inherent in various intervallic relationships. After a narrated passage the music explodes as both musicians launch into fraught, spastic phrases of release. “Lengua nueva” opens once again with an embellished line in the flute supporting a narrated passage before Zazueta ascends into the high register with a rhapsodic song evocative of a bolero, with Terrazas’ flute harmonizing. A visceral passage of extended vocal techniques is broken by the ritualistic tolling of the chime before the movement closes with an introspective, hummed phrase.
Read MorePequeńa familia, the work’s second large section, features Madison Greenstone on clarinet and rocío sánchez on cello with Terrazas reading his own texts. In “Recuento,” the cello and clarinet open with skittering, animated figures, creating a flurry of disjunct activity before settling on a searching unison line that features microtonal subtleties. Terrazas enters in a storytelling pace above the gradual refraction and distortion of the instrumental timbres. “Duelos” opens with an ambivalent dialogue between the cello and clarinet, blooms into an ethereal chorale on the words “Ah la perdida. El dolor original (Oh the loss. The original pain),” before a gripping primordial growl emerges from the two instruments, and eventually spins out into virtuosic flights of unbridled energy. The movement ends on the text, “Fuego que arde en el sonido, dime quién soy (Fire that burns in sound, tell me who I am),” as clarinet and cello exhale fragile multiphonics, the flames of the internal fire quietly burning away. “La tumba de Zapata” takes a lighter turn, with Terrazas in full story-recounting mode over a gentle melody in the instruments. The text tells of a visit to the grave of Emiliano Zapata, a key figure in the Mexican Revolution, and avoids direct word painting; the line, “I was there for a few minutes, in silence,” is met with a cacophonous instrumental reaction. Terrazas finds just the right mysterious tone to express why some experiences conjure powerful reactions within us while others leave us empty.
For the final section, Ten Thousand Regrets, Terrazas utilizes the entire ensemble and two vocalists. A nod to Josquin des Prez’s Mille Regretz, it was initially conceived as a set of variations on Josquin’s chanson theme, but ultimately the reference remained a source of inspiration and not a structural component. A chorus of bells introduces Mariana Flores Bucio’s soprano in “Esta es la orilla” before Zazueta joins with the rest of the ensemble for a mournful incantation. The increased forces allow Terrazas to revel in more lush harmonies, but the revelry is brokenly dramatically by a strident clarinet and forceful tenor phrase. “Y nada, los árboles esos” begins with a gestural percussion solo on non-pitched drums, and later progresses to a tangle of instrumental lines underneath long-limbed, elastic tenor phrases. An extended instrument only passage follows, building to a frenzy of interaction before Camilo Zamudio’s percussion closes the movement, this time with pitched gongs and bells that elide into the next section, “No hay posibilidad de movimiento.” Soprano and tenor sing chant-like melodies over a haunting cello pedal point, while pitches from their lines echo and percolate in the other instrumental parts. Midway through the movement, a melancholic waltz supports fluid, elegiac vocal lines in flights of embellishment. Song form underpins “No volverán mis pasos” as well, with a triple meter dance that flirts with a hemiola rhythm as Flores Bucio, Terrazas, clarinetist Madison Greenstone take off in liberated ornamentation and modal improvisation before eventually breaking apart into an explosive free passage. The work’s final section, "La pérdida,” is a hymn that is at once woeful and full of hope, a siren song for Trilogia’s profoundly personal journey through grief and anguish and towards resignation and acceptance, ending with a simple utterance of gratitude, “la vida tiene un sonido perfecto (life has a perfect sound).” Wilfrido Terrazas has created a musical work that simultaneously functions as a process of healing, drawing on his broad range of practices to find ways in to the soul through sound.
- Dan Lippel
All music composed by Wilfrido Terrazas
Produced by Wilfrido Terrazas
Recorded by Christian Cummings at Studio A, Warren Lecture Hall, UC San Diego, on February 13th and 21st, 2025
Mixed and mastered by Christian Cummings at Studio A, Warren Lecture Hall, UC San Diego, June 18th–20th, 2025
Cover art and design by Esther Gámez Rubio
Wilfrido Terrazas is a flutist, improviser, composer, and educator whose work explores the borderlands between improvisation, musical notation, and collective creation. He has performed over 380 world premieres, composed around 70 works, and recorded more than 40 albums, six of them as a soloist or leader. His recordings have been published in Mexico, the US and Europe, on labels like Abolipop, Another Timbre, Bridge, Cero, Creative Sources, New World, Umor, and Wide Hive. Wilfrido has presented his work in 20 countries in Europe and the Americas. He has been a guest performer at international festivals such as Creative Fest (Lisbon), ¡Escucha! (Madrid), Festival Cervantino (Guanajuato), High Zero (Baltimore), MATA (NYC), NUNC! (Chicago), and TENOR (Hamburg), and at venues and series for experimental music like Auditorio Nacional (Madrid), Bowerbird (Philadelphia), Teatro Nacional Cervantes (Buenos Aires), CCRMA (Stanford University), Splendor (Amsterdam), Flagey (Brussels), Littlefield Hall (Mills College), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin), St. Ruprechtskirche (Vienna), The Wulf and REDCAT (Los Angeles), Soup & Sound and The Stone/New School (NYC). 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 is a member of two influential Mexico City-based ensembles: the improvisers’ collective Generación Espontánea, widely acknowledged as one of the pioneering groups for freely improvised music in Latin America, and Liminar, one of Mexico’s leading new music groups. Since 2014, Wilfrido co-curates La Semana Internacional de Improvisación, an improvised music festival in Ensenada, his hometown. Other current projects include Filera, a trio with vocalist Carmina Escobar and cellist Natalia Pérez Turner, and the Wilfrido Terrazas Sea Quintet, an Ensenada-based creative music group, paradoxically formed by six people. Recent collaborations include projects with Amy Cimini, Angélica Castelló, Michael Dessen, Lisa Mezzacappa, Roscoe Mitchell, Abdul Moimême, artist G.T. Pellizzi, and poets Ricardo Cázares, Nuria Manzur, and Ronnie Yates. Additionally, his compositions have been performed by José Manuel Alcántara, Anagram Trio, Aldo Aranda, Ensamble Süden, Ghost Ensemble, in^set, International Contemporary Ensemble, Omar López, Low Frequency Trio, Kathryn Schulmeister, Alexandria Smith, and wasteLAnd, among many others. Wilfrido has also published more than 30 texts about music, amongst them four book chapters. Some of his writings can be read in the Pendragon, Routledge, and Suono Mobile presses. He has been an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego since 2017.
Miguel Zazueta is an interdisciplinary voice artist specialized in contemporary music and opera, from Tijuana, Mexico. He has studied and collaborated with artists like Jorge Folgueira, Wilfrido Terrazas, Carmina Escobar, Robert Castro, Yuval Sharon, and Meredith Monk, as well as groups like the LA Phil New Music Group, Orquesta of Baja California, Ópera de Tijuana, Kallisti Ensemble, Bodhi Tree Concerts, Meredith Monk & Ensemble, and the ItaloAmerican Institute of Interna- tional Cooperation. He obtained his MA and DMA degrees in Contemporary Music Performance at UC San Diego and is the founder and co–director of Radical Ensamble, an interdisciplinary vocal collective with singers from the Baja California Region.
Madison Greenstone is a Brooklyn-based performer, writer, and clarinetist of TAK Ensemble and the [Switch~ Ensemble]. Notable performances have been as a soloist at the Vigeland Mausoleum (Oslo), the Merce Cunningham Centennial Night of 100 Solos (LA), and as a soloist presented by ISSUE Project Room. As a writer, Madison has published through the Museum of Art and History in Neuchâtel, TEMPO, Cambridge, and upcoming in Contemporary Music Review. Madison has performed as a soloist and chamber musician at Fondation Abbaye Royaumont (FR), Darmstadt (DE) Petersburg Art Space (DE), Ende Tymes Festival (NYC), Harvard, The Stone, Studio 8 (DE), Princeton, Space for Free Arts (FI) among other venues and presenters. Madison has worked with Michelle Lou, Bryan Jacobs, Suzanne Thorpe, Stephan Moore, John McCowen, Eric Wubbels, Joy Guidry, and RAGE Thormbones. They can be heard on Wandelweiser Editions, Another Timbre, TAK Editions, and Tripticks Tapes.
rocío sánchez is a Mexican cellist, composer, improviser, and educator. Their practice connects composition with the use of virtual animation and collages. rocío’s performances encompass improvisation, prepared cello, solo and ensemble acoustic and electroacoustic pieces, interdisciplinary collaboration, and collective composition. rocío is humbled to have collaborated with Matana Roberts, Pamela Z, Frank Gratkowski, Wilfrido Terrazas, gabby fluke-mogul, Kyle Motl, Laura Cocks, Kennet Jimenez, Drew Wesely, Madison Greenstone, Orchid McRae, among others. They have performed at Klangspuren Schwaz, the Darmstadt Summer Courses, Red Ecología Acústica México, Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada, Méx- ico, The Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale, Carnegie Hall, Roulette Intermedium, Americas Society, (NYC), among others. rocío is currently based in Brooklyn and is a 2026 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room.
Mariana Flores Bucio is a Mexican singer whose work spans contemporary music, Mexican traditional musics, opera, and experimental performance. Her artistry reflects vocal versatility, expressive nuance, and collaborative exploration. She has premiered many new works and performed with the American Modern Opera Company, Project [Blank], Orquesta de Baja California, and Péndulo Cero, and collaborated with artists such as Wilfrido Terrazas, Susan Narucki, and Steven Schick. She has performed across Latin America, Europe, and the U.S., including at the Lincoln Center and at Mexico City’s Zó- calo. Mariana holds MA and DMA degrees in Contemporary Music Performance from UC San Diego, co–directs Radical Ensamble, and develops her project MEXPERIMENTAL.
Camilo Zamudio is an explorer of new sounds and an advocate for Latin American musical cultures. For him, percussion is an intimate form of expression that invites listeners to expand inherited sonic notions while enhancing their musical curiosity and imagination. He merges diverse musical languages: the legacy of Colombian musical communities, the chants of freedom from Afro–diasporic voices, and the endless complexity of contemporary sounds. Camilo joined the National Symphony Or- chestra of Colombia and performed at major festivals such as the Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Germany), Neofonía (Ensenada, Mexico), Ojai Music Festival (US), and the Cartagena International Music Festival (Colombia). He is currently a member of red fish blue fish percussion ensemble, and a DMA candidate in contemporary music performance at the University of California San Diego.
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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