Coming Soon

Thank you to the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University for commissioning this work.

Program Notes from Benavides:

When I was a little boy, my parents bought me a book of bilingual stories by the famous New Mexican author Rudolfo Anaya and José Griego y Maestas that I would read repeatedly to practice speaking Spanish. These short stories, adapted from a collection by folk historian Juan B. Rael, are passed down oral histories from rural New Mexico. In this story a traveler is caught on the road late at night (a frequent theme in this collection) and decides to ask a house for hospitality until morning. In it he meets two women who give him supper and a bed, but as soon as they think he is asleep they begin to fill a tub with a strange liquid, cover themselves with a mystical powder, recite the seven names of Satan, and jump in. In an instant they turn into tecolotes (owls) and fly out the chimney. The frightened traveler wants to run, but then curiosity gets the better of him, and he decides to also transform into an owl to follow them after saying many prayers and removing his cross. Once outside, he sees dozens of owls dancing together and after observing this for a while and getting in a fight with a cat he returns and transforms back into himself so he can pretend to be asleep before they return. The next morning, he wakes and tells them he must go before breakfast is ready, but they tease him that he must be hungry after dancing with them all night! They laugh and we are left to wonder if this was all a dream, though the traveler still has scratch marks from the cat on his arm...

My version is in three movements, with the first two being short (and relatively slow) and the third being the longest and the fastest. We meet the traveler at twilight with starry high piano lines and rumbling log drums and then watch in horror as the witches cast a spell, with an ever-growing symmetrical melody over the curious/waiting music of the traveler in the log drums. Finally, the infernal dance is on, and the traveler joins the witches in the night sky.