A-ph-u-ll-u (2025) for violin, cello, and piano
This trio was commissioned by the TrĂo Apolo, who invited me to create a work that could engage with traditional Bolivian music from a current perspective. I draw inspiration from musical expressions native to the region of Apolo, located in the Franz Tamayo province in the north of the La Paz department. Among them, the Leco dance and the T’alla dance appear not as literal quotations, but as sonic vestiges—inner echoes that survive in
the memory of musical gesture.
The title, A-ph-u-ll-u, is a phonetic and symbolic reimagining of “Apolo.” It suggests a resonance between the Andean region and the cosmic ambitions of the Apollo space missions, while simultaneously evoking the sound of
an ancient or sacred name.
The piece unfolds in a single movement, like a celestial body spinning on its axis while traveling through space. Its sound world evokes a cosmic atmosphere, but also gestures toward another kind of journey: one in which the spirit enters into contact with ancestral memory.
The music shifts between suspended moments—where pulse dissolves—and others where ritual forcefully emerges. Certain melodies and rhythms allude, in subtle ways, to living musical traditions whose circular nature
invites the listener to glimpse a different kind of time: a time in which origins still breathe.
Thus, A-ph-u-ll-u becomes an act of inward listening. It does not seek to represent or document, but to open a constellation where the ancestral and the cosmic, the ancient and the possible, briefly touch in a timeless instant.