Myths for Orchestra
Water as threshold: boundary, oblivion, and living continuum
1. The Styx (2024), Orquestra de València
2. Wells of Oblivion (2026), Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife
3. Havasu Falls (projected, 2027)
Myths for orchestra is an orchestral triptych that explores mythological imaginaries in which water functions as a liminal space between life and death, understood not only as a narrative motif but as a conceptual and experiential framework. Rivers, wells, springs, and waterfalls appear across cultures as thresholds where memory, identity, and temporality are suspended, transformed, or renewed.
The cycle resonates with broader concerns in my recent work, particularly those articulated in VISITACION[e]S: the idea of music as a space to be inhabited, a temporal architecture in which perception, memory, and imagination unfold. Rather than presenting myths as narrative illustrations, these pieces propose symbolic landscapes—zones of passage in which listeners are invited to dwell, to traverse, and to experience time as a layered and unstable dimension.
Across the three works, water becomes a metaphor for liminality, memory, and temporal experience:
- as a boundary that separates worlds (The Styx),
- as a medium of erasure and transformation (Wells of Oblivion),
- and as a living continuum that binds landscape, ancestry, and present experience (Havasu Falls).
In this sense, the triptych forms part of a wider aesthetic inquiry into thresholds, transitional states, and the phenomenology of listening, where musical form is conceived as a space that enables experience rather than a structure that merely unfolds in time.
1. The Styx (2024)
The Styx was born after reading Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui’s book Catábasis—a sensitive compendium of classical sources on the journey to the afterlife—and is the first work in the orchestral triptych Myths for orchestra, which explores mythological traditions in which water appears as a liminal element in the transition between life and death.
Following the Greek myth of the Stygian lagoon through the classical images gathered by Herrero de Jáuregui, the piece accompanies the soul on its descent into the “land of mists.” In this particular catabasis, as Charon’s boat glides over the waters of the Styx, we traverse through shadows into ever more incorporeal and elusive landscapes; we sense the trembling of departed souls taking “steps in the dark,” moving like “falling leaves,” “fluttering birds,” or even “screeching bats.”
The Styx unfolds a near-cinematic narrative —a succession of symphonic terraces of subtle hues and great contrasts— appearing and vanishing in turn, alternating musical flow with sonic spaces that, in suspending time, invite us to dwell within them.
Premiere and reception
Commissioned by Festival ENSEMS, the work was premiered by the Orquestra de València under Baldur Brönnimann at the Palau de la Música de València on 20 September 2024.
Reviews
The premiere received an especially strong critical response, with reviewers returning repeatedly to the work’s orchestral refinement, poetic depth, emotional impact and economy of means.
The full reviews in are available below:
2. Wells of Oblivion (2026)
Wells of Oblivion is the second work in Myths for orchestra.
This piece engages with Chinese mythological and folkloric conceptions of the afterlife, particularly the River of Forgetfulness (Wangchuanhe), the Wells of Oblivion, and the figure of Meng Po, who offers the soup that erases the memories of past lives before reincarnation.
In some versions of the tradition, the soul encounters a well in which fragments of its former existence are progressively forgotten, marking the final separation from earthly identity.
The wells are conceived as vertical thresholds, symbolic openings into depth and introspection, where memory dissolves and the soul prepares for rebirth. Rather than representing punishment or judgment, these waters embody forgetting as a form of purification: a necessary condition for renewal within a cyclical conception of time and existence. Although the Wells of Oblivion do not belong to a fixed doctrinal canon and derive largely from folklore, literature, and popular religious imagination, they resonate with broader Chinese understandings of death as a process of transformation rather than an absolute end. Within this symbolic framework, water becomes a space where identity is suspended and reconfigured, and where memory itself is subject to ritualized dissolution.
A central gesture in the work is the appearance of a recurring expansive tremolo in the bass drum, conceived as a structural sfumato: when its intensity dissipates, the music emerges in a different perceptual space, without the listener being able to follow consciously the transition, generating a threshold in which sonic memory dissolves and reappears transfigured.
If in The Styx the listener traversed the threshold, in Wells of Oblivion the experience is one of identity dissolving within it.
The work was commissioned by the Sinfónica de Tenerife and announced for premiere on 17 April 2026 under Ariane Matiakh. The season announcement also situated the new score explicitly as the second panel of Myths for orchestra.
Premiere and reception
Commissioned by Festival ENSEMS, the work was premiered by the Orquestra de València under Baldur Brönnimann at the Palau de la Música de València on 20 September 2024.
Reviews
The premiere received an especially strong critical response, with reviewers returning repeatedly to the work’s orchestral refinement, poetic depth, emotional impact and economy of means.
The full reviews in are available below:
3. Havasu Falls (projected, 2026-27)
Havasu Falls is the third work in the orchestral triptych Myths for orchestra.
The piece takes as its point of departure the cultural and spiritual significance of Havasu Falls for the Havasupai people, the “People of the Blue-Green Waters.” Located in Havasu Canyon within the Grand Canyon, the falls are deeply embedded in Havasupai origin narratives, cosmology, and ceremonial practices, and are understood as part of a sacred landscape shaped by ancestral presence.
For the Havasupai, water is a central symbol of life, continuity, and spiritual connection to the land and to ancestors. While Havasu Falls is not traditionally conceived as a boundary between worlds in the sense of the Styx or the Chinese waters of oblivion, it embodies a profound sense of continuity between living community, ancestral time, and landscape. The falls function as a site of renewal, stewardship, and identity, reinforcing the enduring relationship between people and place.
Within the conceptual framework of Myths for orchestra, Havasu Falls broadens the notion of liminality beyond death and afterlife, proposing water as a living threshold between generations, memory, and presence, delving into Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies.
