Musiqa in Motion: A new music performance with Luis Quintana

Drip Drop by Luis Quintana is a new work by Musiqa’s 2023 Emerging Composer Commission winner. Quintana is an award-winning Puerto Rican composer based in Paris. After completing studies at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMDP) and the IRCAM Cursus, he has been involved in various projects internationally. Equally at home with a wide range of media—acoustic, electronic, interdisciplinary—he has achieved recognition from institutions such as the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France (2022), the Contemporary Music Lab at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece (2021), the Ise-Shima Art Committee in Japan (2021), and most recently, the Guggenheim Foundation in New York (2024). His work engages with multiculturality as an aesthetic principle and ecology as a vehicle for expressions of identity. In this sense, he draws from a diverse array of musical traditions, techniques, landscapes, and art to create soundscapes that can serve as a starting point for personal and emotional storytelling. His visit to Houston is supported by the French Consulate General in Houston and Villa Albertine. 

Saudade is a new work choreographed by Houston Ballet soloist Jacquelyn Long. Gustave Le Gray was written by American Caroline Shaw who, at the age of 30, was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. This work for solo piano is inspired by groundbreaking French photographer Le Gray and Chopin’s Op. 17 #4, which Shaw layers into the larger work.  

Dzov Yerku Kooynov is inspired by the life of Komitas, the Armenian priest widely considered to be the father of Armenia’s national school of music, and a key figure in Armenian ethnomusicology. Traumatized by his experience of the Armenian genocide, he suffered from PTSD and died in a psychiatric hospital in 1935. His works are collected in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Mary Kouyoumdjian is a composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores. Dzov Yerku Kooynov is written for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano.