Music for Transitions (2026)
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On Tuesday, September 15, 2026, New Amsterdam Records announces Music for Transitions, the first full-length album to exclusively feature works by inti figgis-vizueta, performed by Rothko String Quartet and GRAMMY Award-winning cellist Andrew Yee. Building from figgis-vizueta’s 2020 cello quartet of the same name, described as “raw, scraping yet soaring” by The Washington Post, the album’s five pieces invoke Indigenous cosmologies and trans futurism through organic, ecstatic soundscapes. These blazing compositions pronounce the latest heights of a catalogue in which figgis-vizueta creates, per composer George Lewis, “a music of awareness, and you cannot be passive in listening to it.”
Music for Transitions mirrors her growth, exploration, and relationships spanning eight years of figgis-vizueta’s time in New York City. She explains: “This album is deeply connected to my life in New York City with its vibrant creative fabric and rich community of artistic collaborators. From early lessons at Columbia University, to commissions from Carnegie Hall and National Sawdust, and performances in all five boroughs, New York City has been both a welcoming home and vivid, creative laboratory. Throughout, the string quartet has been much the same: an infinitely inspiring ensemble and musical form, with deep improvisational potential born of an intimate sensitivity to collective sound.” |
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A Celebration of First Contact
George E. Lewis, 5-2-26
George E. Lewis, 5-2-26
This recording, which for many will constitute a kind of first contact with the music of inti figgis-vizueta, reminds us that twenty-first century new music is becoming ever more marked by a condition of créolité. Here, I want to invoke the book Éloge de la créolité (“In Praise of Creoleness). This influential 1989 manifesto by Caribbean writers Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, all highly influenced by Edouard Glissant, begins with this ringing declaration: “The daughter of Irish and Ecuadorian heritages, born and living in the United States, will be torn between several languages, several histories, caught in the torrential ambiguity of a mosaic identity. To present creative depth, she must perceive that identity in all its complexity. She will be in the situation of a Creole.” In fact I slightly revised this quotation to address inti’s specific history—born in Dublin Ireland, grew up in Washington, D.C.
inti is pursuing a form of what the Nigerian composer Akin Euba called intercultural music, which Euba called “the great event of the 21st century.” Indeed, inti’s music brings together listeners and performers together with herself to create an intercultural encounter. Her work reminds us that to become a true world music, what the new music field needs now is to recognize its place in the world as exemplifying a mosaic, creolized identity that recognizes historical, geographical and cultural cross-connections--not so much to achieve diversity as to pursue a new complexity that can yield the kind of creative depth that Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant demand: “Our aesthetics cannot exist (cannot be authentic) without Creoleness.”
inti’s work provides new understandings of graphic scores, or what she calls “iconographies.” For many, graphic scores hold the potential of creating a transhistorically and transnationally imagined community of thought and practice. This is because non-determinate notation transforms whatever combination of traditions the composer and the performers have emerged from, thereby transforming the entire intercultural network from which the music emerges.
When I first met inti and began working with her in composition lessons, I realized just how much her music presents a co-creative conception, in which a heightened sense of agency is always available to the performers. As inti told the Kronos Quartet in 2022,
I really tried to encourage creativity in musicians, and my entire kind of writing style is around ways of constructing material that people can really kind of expand and joyously like explore….a piece that's both really approachable but also has the capacity for complexity, communication, and perception…the biggest thing that I want to encounter in performances of my work is feeling like I can hear this interpretive and perceptual process all happening at the same time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOR0vhMe-vs&t=199s).
This kind of co-creation constitutes a form of pedagogy that encourages what the score for her work mayu calls “multiple modes of mentality, sonic interaction, and listening”—not only among the musicians, but among us, the listeners, who are engaging in these multiple modes at the same time that the performers are realizing the work. We listen not only to the sounds, but also to the ways in which sound becomes a window into the minds and emotions of the musicians. inti’s is a music of awareness, and you cannot be passive in listening to it.
What I hear in inti’s music are the dynamics of the decolonial, which for me are marked by contingency, heterogeneity, nonlinearity, emergence, mediation, remediation, and bricolage--but also by what she calls “organic non-linearity”—a position that leads inexorably to a refusal of all complacency. Thus, the instructions inti gives to her musicians often require a form of introspection that foregrounds agency and leads to action: “what do you hear? what do you hear too much of? what do you hear not enough of? can you change it?”
My mentor Muhal Richard Abrams once said that “change is synonymous with any conception of deity.” It is at this point, among many, that the music of inti figgis-vizueta touches upon the spiritual.
Let me welcome you to the sound.
inti is pursuing a form of what the Nigerian composer Akin Euba called intercultural music, which Euba called “the great event of the 21st century.” Indeed, inti’s music brings together listeners and performers together with herself to create an intercultural encounter. Her work reminds us that to become a true world music, what the new music field needs now is to recognize its place in the world as exemplifying a mosaic, creolized identity that recognizes historical, geographical and cultural cross-connections--not so much to achieve diversity as to pursue a new complexity that can yield the kind of creative depth that Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant demand: “Our aesthetics cannot exist (cannot be authentic) without Creoleness.”
inti’s work provides new understandings of graphic scores, or what she calls “iconographies.” For many, graphic scores hold the potential of creating a transhistorically and transnationally imagined community of thought and practice. This is because non-determinate notation transforms whatever combination of traditions the composer and the performers have emerged from, thereby transforming the entire intercultural network from which the music emerges.
When I first met inti and began working with her in composition lessons, I realized just how much her music presents a co-creative conception, in which a heightened sense of agency is always available to the performers. As inti told the Kronos Quartet in 2022,
I really tried to encourage creativity in musicians, and my entire kind of writing style is around ways of constructing material that people can really kind of expand and joyously like explore….a piece that's both really approachable but also has the capacity for complexity, communication, and perception…the biggest thing that I want to encounter in performances of my work is feeling like I can hear this interpretive and perceptual process all happening at the same time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOR0vhMe-vs&t=199s).
This kind of co-creation constitutes a form of pedagogy that encourages what the score for her work mayu calls “multiple modes of mentality, sonic interaction, and listening”—not only among the musicians, but among us, the listeners, who are engaging in these multiple modes at the same time that the performers are realizing the work. We listen not only to the sounds, but also to the ways in which sound becomes a window into the minds and emotions of the musicians. inti’s is a music of awareness, and you cannot be passive in listening to it.
What I hear in inti’s music are the dynamics of the decolonial, which for me are marked by contingency, heterogeneity, nonlinearity, emergence, mediation, remediation, and bricolage--but also by what she calls “organic non-linearity”—a position that leads inexorably to a refusal of all complacency. Thus, the instructions inti gives to her musicians often require a form of introspection that foregrounds agency and leads to action: “what do you hear? what do you hear too much of? what do you hear not enough of? can you change it?”
My mentor Muhal Richard Abrams once said that “change is synonymous with any conception of deity.” It is at this point, among many, that the music of inti figgis-vizueta touches upon the spiritual.
Let me welcome you to the sound.