Bahué to Virtually Premiere 7 New Works as Part of Their Latinx Composer Miniature Challenge

Community is at the heart of Bahué's Latinx Composer Miniature Challenge. The bi-coastal duo, Aliana de la Guardia and Ariel Campos, whose mission is to advocate for and uplift Latinx artistry and culture through music, challenged Latinx composers to write miniature pieces of 60 seconds or less. Now, the dynamic new voice and percussion duo will virtually premiere seven new works, posting them at 8:30 AM on Thursdays from July 20th through August 31st on their social media and on the Bahué website.

The works to be premiered are “I Am I” by Paolo Griffin, “Vamonos a Guyana” by Álvaro Gallegos, “refraction” by Joshua Marquez, “Mirando hacia el Firmamento” by Ida Sánchez Tello, “me estimo a mi mismo en la tierra” by Jaime Díaz, “Velando” J. Andrés Ballesteros, and “Explosión” by Alex Guerrero.

Inspired by the popular Black Composer Miniature Challenge (#BCMC) from Castle of our Skins, the duo created the Latinx Composer Miniature Challenge (#LCMC) with a goal to amass a repertoire of new works from composers of the Latin diaspora and, more importantly, to foster community around and within them. The seven composers all identify as Latin diaspora and are located throughout North and South America and Europe. 

“I read that there are 62.5 million Hispanic Americans in the US, that we know of. This makes us the largest minority group, and within that, we embody such varied and complex cultural and ethnic identities. There is so much about the Latin American identity to investigate, and this project allows us to come together around it and to share it in a broad way.” (Aliana de la Guardia from Bahué)

Bahué dedicates the Latinx Composer Miniature Challenge to the memory of Ida Sánchez Tello (1979-2023), who wrote the music and lyrics for "Mirando hacia el Firmamento" for Bahué's miniature challenge. The duo premiered the work in a live concert in April 2023 and will have its #LCMC virtual premiere on August 10th. 

The featured works were performed and recorded by Ariel Campos and Aliana de la Guardia at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, CA, HC Media in Haverhill, MA, and the Community Music School of Springfield in Springfield, MA. Sound and video editing is by Jeffrey Means of Suonovivo Audio in Boston, MA. 

The #LCMC is supported in part by a grant from the Springfield Cultural Council, a local agency that is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
 

BAHUE

Bahué is a dynamic new Latin American duo that focuses exclusively on Latin American/Hispanic identity and culture through music. Their vision is to amplify the collective artistic voices of their peers and champion their community by celebrating and investigating complex Latin American identity through new and existing concert music repertoire written for their instrumentation of voice and percussion. Founded in 2022, they are a sponsored project of Guerilla Opera, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. 

They are a bi-costal duo with home cities of Springfield, MA, and Los Angeles, CA, both of which boast significant Latin population demographics greater than 40%. This duo was founded as a collaborative experiment utilizing both live and virtual performances to generate a distinctive repertoire by composers of the Latin diaspora. Learn more at bahueduo.com.

#LCMC FEATURED COMPOSERS

Paolo Griffin is a Peruvian-Canadian composer based in Tkarón:to/Toronto whose music explores notions of focused/unfocussed listening, repetition, and formal structures while maintaining a focus on close collaboration and creative spontaneity with the performers he works with. Paolo's music has been featured in concerts and on the radio by the Resident Orkest (NL), The New European Ensemble (NL), Avanti! Chamber Music (FI), Duo Holz (CA), Freesound (CA), and more. Paolo is also the Artistic and Executive Director of Freesound, a Toronto-based performer's collective that consists of a core group of the city's most adventurous young musicians and interpreters of contemporary music.

Born in 1979, Álvaro Gallegos is a Chilean music journalist, lecturer, scholar and composer based in Santiago, Chile. He has written for newspapers, magazines, and websites, and has produced CDs, including two albums for Naxos Records. He has composed some twenty pieces for solo instruments and orchestral works. In 2017 he won the “President of the Republic” Music Award, and in 2019 the “Domingo Santa Cruz” Award from the Chilean Academy of Fine Arts.

Joshua Marquez is a Philadelphia-based Filipinx-American composer, guitarist, and sound artist whose music explores the liminal space between tone/noise.  Searing a sonic imprint of cultural identity, his explorations of the noise spectrum represent alienation and assimilation through the fusion and fission of disparate timbres.  Joshua's music is described as “upsetting and calming in equal measure” with atmospheres that “sink into your skin” (Prism Reviews). Hailed as "cutting-edge" (The Gazette), “expertly crafted” (We Write About Music), "haunting" (The Daily Iowan), and "creepy" (Fanfare Magazine), Marquez's polemic deconstruction and disintegration of sound aims to present music through a decolonized lens.

Ida Sanchez Tello (1979-2023) studied voice at the National Conservatory of Music and later transferred to Mannes, majoring in Choral Conducting under Mark Shapiro, and harmony and counterpoint with Robert Cuckson, Chris Park, and José Suárez. Her first published works premiered in 2018 in Mexico City as part of the "Testimonios de la Tierra" cycle of songs. She also studied Biomedical Engineering.

J Diaz is a queer, Mexican sound maker based in Glagow, UK. They are currently a PhD student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where they investigate the biases of staff-based notation.

J. Andrés Ballesteros is a composer, educator, and speaker based in Cambridge, MA. His works are centered in classical music but include a variety of musical styles, from Latin music to electronics and theater. Andrés regularly works on collaborative projects that engage with youth and community organizations in creating original works around issues they face. He has been recognized for his leadership in working to expand the representation and performance of works by historically underrepresented composers. His work was recently recognized in Ana Francisca Vega's book Corazón de Mexicanos Como Yo, highlighting 50 Mexican-Americans who broke boundaries.

Alex Guerrero's background as a singer greatly informs his compositions: as an operatic lyric tenor who performs with The Metropolitan Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago Choruses; as a concert soloist; and as a chamber, concert, and liturgical choral artist who's performed with the Grammy Award-winning True Concord, the Sephardi Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue (the oldest North American Jewish congregation) and the Choir at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue (both in New York City), and the symphonic choruses alongside the world-renown Philadelphia Orchestra and The New York Philharmonic. His setting of “Tenebrae factae sunt” was a prize winner in The New York Virtuoso Singers' composition competition.

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