La Calavera

La Calavera La Calavera for solo horn was composed one evening while I was looking through a stack of loteria cards. The loteria is a popular and traditional game in Mexico. It is similar to bingo in that players are given cards with pictures on them and have to place them in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line as a caller announces them. There are fifty-four loteria cards, which have pictures of familiar objects such as a woman, a rooster, the devil, watermelon, and the moon. When a card is drawn, the call has to spontaneously create a rhyme using the name of the object on the card. I began composing this piece without having a title for it. While thumbing through the loteria cards, I became fixated on card number forty-two, la calavera. A calavera is a skull with crossbones. While working on this mysteriously peculiar piece, I had a strong feeling that the image on the card was guiding me through the composition. I became so spooked, I wasn’t sure if I could continue working on the piece. I was only able to finish it by choosing to believe that the image presented itself to me as a remembrance of a long lost soul.