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Musical Tribute to Victims of August 3rd

Conversiones, meaning Conversions, is a tribute to the victims of El Paso, Texas, tragically fallen in August 2019. As a proponent of new music by Latin American composers, Dr. Vince Dominguez commissioned Juan Trigos to write this work in fall 2019 and presented it as part of his dissertation project at Arizona State University in May 2020.  Conversiones is not a programmatic or descriptive work, but a composition that in the abstract aims to express the feeling of loss. It is a kind of mournful singing with multiple nuances and transformations that evoke this feeling. It is built from a small musical segment of few bars (subjective sound image), which contains the main formant elements. Conversiones consists of five movements (Conversiones, Evocación, Scherzo, Elegía, and Ecos) and in each one, the elaboration process is unalike. All of them contain characteristic differences that distinguish them from one another and in turn, similarities that serve to give unity to the general form of the work. 

Dr. Vince Dominguez is an award-winning Mexican clarinetist, educator, and creative consultant, based in Providence, RI. As the owner of Tonal Memories Creative, a consulting agency founded in 2014, he uses his experience and knowledge as a self-made creative to help others discover their voice in today’s ever-changing world. An El Paso native, Dr. Dominguez completed his Doctorate of Musical Arts at Arizona State University in 2020.

Juan Trigos

After the search for his own expressive language and the accumulation of his artistic experiences, composer Juan Trigoscame to the creation of the concept he refers to as Abstract Folklore. Some of the principles behind this concept are elements such as primary pulsation, resonance and the interrelation of polyrhythmic/polyphonic musical events and segments of different density and duration. The procedures and codes that emerge from this musical conception serve to transform and manipulate original timbres in order to create nuances from the original voice.

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