Ficciones Program  

Voz (2026)     Gabriel Bolaños  

I’m interested in music and language: how we can hear speech as music, or hear music as speech-like. This collection of short songs for soprano voice, flute, accordion, and guitar explores many different kinds of ambiguities, continuities, and contrasts between music and language, and the rich, underexplored border that separates these.

To focus the listener's attention on the beautiful, complex sounds of language rather than the meaning of a text, I invented imagined languages for each song. Each has its own phonology, behavior, idiosyncrasies, and rules. The texts are not devoid of emotional content: rather, emotion is expressed through prosody, context, and extra-linguistic elements. Like listening to a language we don’t understand.

The work’s form- a collection of short, highly contrasting songs- is ideal for exploration and experimentation. These are the first few songs of a longer work-in progress:

  1. Voz
  2. Triangle
  3. Pedal
  4. Ostinato

Special thanks to Fonema Consort for awarding me the Cántaro Fellowship to write these songs, and for their musicality and openness in exploring these (sometimes crazy) ideas.


Glittery Girl (2026)   Jianing Yang

ShindanMaker said, I am made from neon lights, mushroom,
skolls stars, bay brackish water.
So what do I like? Wannabe magical girl, ten years of
wasted time, holding brushes mimicking footsteps on the end of
snow, fracturing pains, so I don’t ever have to worry again?
So where am I running from? From here to there, then to
now, want to be surrounded by everything I love, not so pop pop
culture, pop pop culture, with glittery charms and dream girl
syndromes, to be that girl not myself, lying down in space built
of shimmering debris———
where I dream once more!


Dormilones (2025)    Genie Alvarado

In Nicaragua, there is a game played with a special plant called dormilones, which involves touching the plant in order to trigger it to shut. Dormilones (2025), takes inspiration from that game, and the disruption to the plant’s peace. In two parts, it explores the closing of the plant, and then its reopening, but it is haunted by the knowledge that the plant will likely be forced to shut again. The textures are inspired by the soundscapes of the Nicaraguan mountains and fields, and the loud presence of bugs and birds.


Epitafio de Don Quijote (2016)    Alberto Carretero

Epitafio de Don Quijote constructs a subtle and ambiguous sonic dramaturgy based on one of the most enigmatic excerpts in literature: the funerary inscription that Miguel de Cervantes placed on the tomb of his hero, Don Quixote. This brief text, conceived as the closure of a fictional life, becomes here an expanded space where memory, identity, and doubling converge.

Rather than offering a linear portrait, the work constantly oscillates between different planes: reality and fiction, character and author, historical past and creative present. Not only does the piece evoke Don Quixote as a literary figure, but also brings him into an intimate, almost autobiographical dimension, in which the music enters into dialogue with the myth. This ambivalence is translated musically into materials that moves between fragility and abruptness, the recognizable and the veiled, the structured and the fragmentary.

One of the most significant elements is the appearance of the famous song of the 16th century Mille Regretz by Josquin Des Prez, known as the “The Emperor's Song” and associated with Charles V. This melody, deeply rooted in the sonic imagination of the Spanish Golden Age, emerges in the work as a distant echo, a historical trace that functions as a lament or farewell. Its presence is not merely citational: it operates as a symbol of loss, nostalgia, and transition, encapsulating the farewell of a character who lived on the threshold between madness and lucidity.

The instrumentation—soprano, bass clarinet, and guitar—reinforces this dramatic tension. The voice, bearer of the text and its expressive weight, intertwines with the bass clarinet, whose low and flexible register adds a shadowy, almost spectral dimension. The guitar, in turn, establishes a bridge between the historical and the contemporary, evoking both tradition and its distortion in the present.

In this context, Epitafio de Don Quijote presents itself as a space of intersecting resonances, where time folds in on itself and where identity—that of the character, the author, even the listener—remains suspended in an uncertain territory. Like Don Quixote himself, the work inhabits that unstable threshold between the real and the imagined, where farewell is not an ending, but a transformation.


Just An Attempt To Dissipate (2019)   Michelle Abondano

The four instruments determine a space of interaction where the created timbre presents a continuous change of density. The piece is just an attempt to dissipate, not only the tension generated in that process, but the perception of mass in timbre itself, even though it could seem to be unbreakable and impossible to disperse.


Flesh (2018)    Rebecca Saunders

Flesh is dedicated to Krassimir Sterev with whom I worked closely investigating this very particular palette of sounds for the accordion combined with the voice.
Each change in the direction of the bellows is closely controlled: the opening of the bellows is accompanied with a fast and regular rhythmic changing of the chin registers, and the closing of the bellows then with the voice.

The text is recited on an out or in-breath, half-whispered, nearly "silent" or suppressed
beneath a hand. The text flows unrelenting yet beneath the surface, barely comprehensible. At times single words or phrases rear up and become clear, and are then consumed back within the flow of the recitation.

The text explores a particularly explicit fragment of Molly Bloom ́s interior monologue, the final chapter of James Joyces Ulysses. I wished to rebuke any coy clichéd interpretation of Molly Bloom, exploring the fathomless depths this monologue unleashes: a raw sexual energy per se and not confined to any narrow definition of sex and gender



Composer Biographies:

Gabriel José Bolaños Chamorro (b. 1984 Bogotá, Colombia) is a Nicaraguan/American composer of solo, chamber, orchestral and electroacoustic music. He enjoys collaborating closely with performers, and writing music that explores unusual techniques, structures, and timbres.

Bolaños is an Associate Professor of Music Composition at Arizona State University, where he teaches courses in composition, analysis, music technology, and acoustics, and co-directs the PRISMS contemporary music festival. He received a BA in music from Columbia University and a PhD in Composition and Theory from UC Davis. His music is published by BabelScores.


Jianing Yang is interested in using music to create a surreal and twisted experience. She draws inspiration from literature & pop-culture, ecological research as she is a researcher herself hoping to deliver music in an interdisciplinary form. She is currently pursuing a BM in Music Composition and BA in Environmental Science and Biology from Northwestern University.


Composer and multi-instrumentalist Genie Alvarado enjoys exploring nuances in sounds through her compositions. With a rich performance background–including various orchestral, jazz, marching band, chamber, and choral ensembles–her experience has informed her unique perspective on timbre, influencing her approach to composition. She is interested in incorporating movement and physicality into her works in order to explore changes in sonorities. She also co-directs the student-led monthly concert series Tuesday Night New Music at the New England Conservatory, where she is currently studying composition under the tutelage of Efstratios Minakakis.


With a polyhedral background in Composition, Musicology, Piano, Computer Engineering and Journalism, Alberto Carretero holds a Doctorate in Arts with an Extraordinary Doctorate Prize for his thesis on bio-inspired composition and artificial intelligence. Trained with masters such as Cristóbal Halffter, Tomás Marco, José María Sánchez-Verdú, José Manuel López López and Mauricio Sotelo, he has received numerous national and international awards, including recognition with the BBVA Foundation's Leonardo Scholarship on two occasions.

His music has been performed in venues such as Carnegie Hall and the National Opera Center (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Auditorio Nacional de Música and Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Espacio Turina and Teatro de la Maestranza (Seville), Wien Modern Festival (Vienna), Musica Festival (Strasbourg), Venice Biennale, Asian Saxophone Conference (Taiwan), Ran Baron Hall (Tel Aviv), Prisms Festival (Arizona), etc.

He has worked with Klangforum Wien, Musikfabrik, Ensemble Recherche, PHACE, Ensemble Intercontemporain, IRCAM, SWR ExperimentalStudio, ROSS, SWR Orchestra Stuttgart, Trio Arbós, PluralEnsemble, Neopercusión, Zahir Ensemble, Taller Sonoro, OCNOS, etc.

He has taught at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid and is currently Professor of Composition at the Conservatorio Superior de Música 'Manuel Castillo' in Seville.


Michelle Abondano's work has been developed in the areas of instrumental music for soloist, chamber music, ensemble and orchestra, as well as electroacoustic music, including acousmatic compositions, experimental performances with live electronics, collaborations with dance, soundscapes, and installations. Her study on timbre has led her to approach it in her compositions as a process of interaction between the parameters of sound, which is perceived as a multidimensional and dynamic experience. She has been a fellow of the Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen as well as a winner of the Ibermúsicas Prize of Composition and Premiere of Work with suono mobile argentina, the Grant for the Creation of Contemporary Music awarded by the Colombian Ministry of Culture, the ECOES-UNAM Scholarship for an Artistic Residency at the Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts CMMAS, and the Melos/Gandini Grant.

Her electronic music has been programmed at international events such as Ars Electronica Festival, Espacios Sonoros, SONIC MATTER Festival, Festival En Tiempo Real, OUA Electroacoustic Music Festival, CLICK Electroacoustic Music Series, FIME Festival Internacional de Música Experimental, Spectra: Festival internacional de música electroacústica, and Audiograft Festival. Her instrumental works have been commissioned by Azione Improvvisa with the support of the Kunststiftung NRW, the Klangwerkstatt Berlin – Festival für Neue Musik with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Stiftung, the rainy days festival with the support of the Philharmonie Luxembourg and Luxembourg Philharmonic, Isabelle Raphaelis and Dalton Harris, Frauen im Licht, the Hannoversche Gesellschaft für Neue Musik for the project TRAIECT Vietnam, Aleksandra Demowska-Madejska with the support of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Collective Lovemusic, XelmYa, and Illuminate Women's Music. Currently, her works are published by Babel SCORES.


With her distinctive and intensely striking sonic language, Berlin-based British composer Rebecca Saunders (b.1967) is a leading international representative of her generation.

Saunders pursues an intense interest in the sculptural and spatial properties of organized sound and seeks a close collaborative dialogue with a variety of contemporary musicians and artists.

Born in London, she studied composition with Nigel Osborne and Wolfgang Rihm. Saunders has received numerous prizes, including the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 2019, and most recently received the Golden Lion for Music from the Venice Biennale 2024. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the Universities of Huddersfield in 2018 and Edinburgh in 2023. She is a member of the Academies of Arts in Berlin, Dresden and Munich.