Wilfrido Terrazas’ Trilogía del Dolor moves through strange terrain, a collision of soundworolds that melt together in ways that feel impossible to predict. The work explores pain without idealizing it, treating it instead as a foundation for transformation and acceptance. The work is scored for instrumental quartet, two vocalists, and a visual artist in live performance. Texts by Mexican authors, including Nuria Manzur-Wirth, Ricardo Cázares, and Terrazas himself, anchor the work, building a conversation about how pain connects us all, regardless of where we come from or what we’ve lived through.
Flickering moments of whimsy from Terrazas’ flute paint pointillist memories against the raw intensity of the vocal performances. Mariana Flores Bucio and Miguel Zazueta carry entire lifetimes in their voices, something both earthy and divine that pulls us deep into the work’s emotional core. Madison Greenstone conjures impossible tones from the clarinet, weaving alongside rocío sánchez’s cello with uncanny precision. I find myself getting especially lost in the silences of Trilogía del Dolor, those empty spaces where the air itself feels charged. They breathe like their own lifeforms, heightening every moment of sound that surrounds them. This is music as reckoning, as catharsis, as something essential.
Trilogía del Dolor is OUT NOW on New Focus Recordings. Wilfrido Terrazas’ website can be found HERE.
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What are some of your earliest memories of sound or music that still resonate with your practice today?
There are sounds from my childhood that still resonate with me in a strange, distant, unclear way. I’m thinking of tortilla-making machines, playground sounds of school recess, such as balls bouncing, kids running and yelling, or rusty old swings in motion, playing outside sounds, such as bicycle riding sounds, or the sounds produced by a bag of marbles. There are also scary sounds, such as water in my ears from attempting to swim (for which I consequently developed a phobia), adults yelling, or dogs chasing me. I’m a Gen Xer and experienced the world growing up in absolute peril! But early music experiences were also powerful. My parents used to sing in the house, not really as performance, but rather to themselves, like a sort of absent-minded meditation while doing chores or in moments of leisure (my mom still does). No one in my family is a musician except me, but music was always present in my childhood. The radio or record player was always on, and I remember the strong presence of música norteña blasting through the neighbors’ radio all the time. I remember singing in school, the Mexican national anthem and children’s songs as well, but also plenty of ranchero songs and corridos like El Cachanilla, which I had to memorize in a weird display of Baja California regional pride (I grew up in Ensenada, which I think is the strangest Mexican town).
When did you first recognize that music could function as a space for addressing difficult human experiences like pain and grief?
I don’t know if there was a specific moment, though it is at least partially a consequence of my experiences in psychotherapy and recovery work. I guess in an intuitive way, I have always known, but didn’t make the connection to my creative work until relatively recently. Emotions have almost always been at the core of my work, but pain and grief were not a focus until I started working on Trilogía del Dolor. As a young artist, I was much more interested in expressing my anger and frustration, as well as my yearning for freedom and belonging. My early work is all about reclaiming agency and rebelling against oppression (but whose isn’t?). Later, I was more focused on hope and reconciliation, the latter being at the center of my Torres Cycle.
Can you talk about what sparked Trilogía del Dolor? Was there a specific moment or experience that made you feel this was necessary to create?
There is, at the same time, there isn’t. In 2024, I read Nuria Manzur-Wirth’s Exilio de la palabra at a moment when I was navigating an extremely difficult moment in my personal life, and the poems resonated with me very strongly. I decided to select three poems from the book to write Llevarás el nombre in response to that moment, but also to fulfill a commission from the incredible vocalist Miguel Zazueta. I didn’t know at the time that it would become the first part of a trilogy. The longer answer to your question is that I am a trauma survivor and have struggled with depression my whole life. Even though I have been in therapy for years and I care about (and work with) my mental and emotional health a great deal, I never before felt the need to address pain and grief directly in my music. I decided to compose these pieces first to face my own shame about living with trauma, and then it beautifully transformed into this broader conversation in which I felt empowered to address what I see as the ultimate taboo for artistic expression: pain as humans actually experience it, in all its naked horror. After I wrote Llevarás el nombre, I realized the piece was laser-focused on emotional pain, and I decided to write two more pieces, one focused on grief (Pequeña familia), and the other focused on regret (Ten Thousand Regrets).
You chose to work with texts from multiple Mexican authors rather than writing all the text yourself. How did you find these collaborators, and what drew you to their particular voices?
I have been interested in poetry for most of my life, and while I lived in Mexico City, I met many poets and enjoyed hearing them read and share their worldviews. To me, poets are the heirs of not just bards and troubadours, but also of seers and shamans. They have the power to see through appearances and go deeper into the human soul to reveal it in all its complexity and contradictions. Poets wield the power of saying, somehow, what cannot be said. By hanging out with poets, especially women poets, I realized how narrow my experience was and how much I still had to learn. I met Nuria in Mexico City in 2012, and we became instant friends and collaborators. Choosing her poems for Llevarás el nombre was an easy choice because of our previous work together. Something similar can be said about Ricardo Cázares, with whom I had also collaborated before, for my album My Shadow Leads the Way. As for Nadia Mondragón, she and I have been friends for a long time, I have loved her poetry and visual art, and it felt very natural to invite her to the project. I also knew Tania Favela from Mexico City, whose poetry I always appreciated as being particularly musical, and more recently started collaborating with the phenomenal Tijuana-based poet Mónica Morales Rocha. I basically reached out to all of them and sent a prompt asking them to write a short poem about regret. They came up with not just hauntingly beautiful texts but also somehow perfectly fitting as a group. I also wanted to have various authors to expand the conversation beyond my personal experience. Said conversation ended up touching upon underlying questions about Mexican identity and the immense pain that I see is inherent in it. Pequeña familia is a bit different because I felt I needed to express my own personal grief and couldn’t delegate that to someone else. How can you say “I am in pain” in music? I felt the only way was to write the actual words myself. I also felt the need to surmount my own shame and express directly my grief and pain to finally embrace them as a part of who I am. I could not borrow someone else’s words for that. Finally, Pequeña familia is also important because it marks the decision of accepting that I can also write poetry and let it become an extension of my musical work and beyond. I don’t have any ambition to become a poet with a capital “p”, but I have written poetry for a long time, and it was time for me to be open about that. I guess I could have written the whole trilogy myself, but it never occurred to me, and I am glad I didn’t, because I wanted to both leave space for what I wanted to say and what I wanted to hear from others.
How did Esther Gámez Rubio’s visual imagination enter the conversation? What does her presence add to the live performances?
Esther’s presence in my life is immensely powerful. She is not only one of my best friends but also one of the most amazing artists I have ever met. Collaborating with her for around 12 years on countless projects has completely transformed my work in many ways. In Trilogía del Dolor, her presence is rather modest but potent. Because all the texts are in Spanish, we decided to project English translations in real time for non-Spanish-speaking audience members. But Esther’s projections are so much more than your usual subtitles, they introduce a whole visual universe to the pieces, powerful and moving in their own right. We can get a glimpse of that world and its conversation with the music in the artwork for the album.
You’re explicit about not valorizing or idealizing pain. That feels important. Can you talk about what you mean by that and why you wanted to avoid those common pitfalls?
I believe that one conventional function of art, at least in Western and westernized societies, is to be a palliative for difficult emotions. Sad music, for instance, serves as a mirror for our own pain, which is thus kept at a safe distance. We deal with the song so that we won’t have to deal with our pain. We can cry a little bit and move on. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, by the way. But I wanted to go to a different place with these pieces. A place where my/our pain could actually be dealt with, a sort of unavoidable, uncomfortable intervention of truth, reckoning, and, hopefully, transformation. I have no idea, obviously, if I succeeded or failed, and luckily, that is not for me to decide, but that was the intention.
Were there moments during the creation or performance of this work where engaging with pain this directly became overwhelming or required you to step back?
Yes. Several. But I kept going, and the music kept coming, often accompanied by tears. I am immensely grateful for these pieces.
The trilogy has distinct sections with different configurations of performers. How did you decide which voices and instruments belonged with which texts?
Since I worked on each of the three parts on its own and in the order given in the album, this was not much of an issue. As aforementioned, Llevarás el nombre responded to a commission by Miguel Zazueta, who originally asked for a solo voice piece, but I just felt that a voice and flute duo would allow me to go deeper into the texts and their emotional contents. Similarly, Pequeña familia responded to two commissions: one from Madison Greenstone and the other from rocío sánchez. I decided to write one piece (instead of two), which can be a solo for clarinet or a solo for cello or a duo, with or without a narrator. I’m very practical! Finally, for Ten Thousand Regrets, I decided to use the four performers so far included in the first two parts plus percussion and a second voice, because I wanted to include soprano Mariana Flores Bucio, who is fantastic and whose artistic interests mirror mine in many ways, and the wonderful percussionist Camilo Zamudio. Having more people allowed more nuance in the approach to the texts and obviously more musical possibilities.
Can you walk me through your approach to the relationship between the spoken/narrated text and the music? How do they inform each other?
The spoken texts in Trilogía del Dolor, especially in the second part, are there to create an intimate connection between performers and audience. Not everybody can express themselves through singing, but most humans do express themselves successfully by speaking. I wanted to visit several worlds of sound and emotion that could deliver many possible experiences with various degrees of emotional transgression. Speaking might be the cleanest in its penetration, followed by tonal or diatonic musicking, while more abstract microtonal/noisy sound worlds might be the harshest. But they are all here, coexisting inextricably, evoking the wide spectrum of human pain, which doesn’t ask for our permission to erupt in its infinite forms. Perhaps the clearest example of this is “La tumba de Zapata”, which summons the melodic world of traditional corridos while the narration is telling a true story from my life. The melody transforms beyond recognition several times during the piece as the story develops and visits hard emotional states. Beyond that, speaking and singing are treated in my vocal music as two points in a continuum. I play with this idea to explore different emotional contents and expressive possibilities. For instance, coming and going between speaking and singing in a passage can create tension or drive a process of transformation, thus elevating energy levels in the musical discourse. A passage where you only sing or only speak, on the other hand, tends to create a sense of stability and the idea that change is either not happening or happening at slower rates. There are many examples of this strategy in Llevarás el nombre and Ten Thousand Regrets.
What was the rehearsal and development process like with this ensemble? How much room is there for the performers to bring their own interpretations?
Great question. As in most of my notated music, in Trilogía del Dolor, there is a lot of creative input from all the performers within the framework of my compositional work. The only major difference between these pieces and most of my compositions from the last 15 years or so is that the texts’ intelligibility is important, and so that was something we took care about in the development process. To give you an example of how everybody’s participation helped shape the pieces, I will mention “No volverán mis pasos”, the fourth song in Ten Thousand Regrets. This is an actual song, in the most conventional way. When I read Mónica’s beautiful poem, I was inspired to write a song informed by the huapango ranchero tradition. Mariana has a strong background in Mexican folk singing, and so I wanted her to sing a Mariachi song. That’s what I set out to do, and I think the song is successful in summoning that spirit. Mariana’s singing channels ranchero style vehemently, and all my flute ornamentation and improvisation at the beginning of the song is inspired by traditional mariachi arrangements. But Camilo’s percussion groove is closer to the Colombian bambuco because he is Colombian, and Madison’s clarinet improvisations channel Klezmer traditions of clarinet playing, as they have a Jewish background. I could never have conceived these blends on my own. There’s a lot of collective creation on this album, and that is my absolute favorite thing about music-making.
The piece seems designed for live performance with the visual artist present. How does it change when experienced as a recording versus in the room with everyone?
I agree, but I hope the album can be a meaningful experience on its own. Recordings have the beautiful advantage that you can replay them as many times as you want, allowing you to discover many details that can expand your listening experience. This album is built upon many layers, and it therefore warrants many listenings! The work also aims to spark conversations about difficult themes, and having the recording at hand can be a valuable tool for that.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The wind. Always the wind.
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