después de esto, el cielo

Based on one of my piano miniatures titled Tonada, I wanted to expand on the idea of memory and tradition. The name of this piece revealed itself later, as I listened to a home recording from one of my family’s gatherings. Those cherished moments when everyone would sing, play, or dance together. Amid the laughter and melodies, I heard my grandmother exclaim, “¡Mejor dicho!... y después de esto, el cielo...” (“I mean... and after this, heaven...”) following a song that had clearly stirred something deep within her.

While listening to the recording, I felt as though I was there. Not watching a memory unfold, not storing it like a file on a hard drive -but inhabiting a space, distant yet vividly alive. In that moment, I wasn't just recalling the presence of my family - I was with them, wherever “there” is. And then came my grandmother’s phrase, suspended in the air, encapsulating the

weight and wonder of it all.

That experience helped me understand what the music had been reaching for all along. This piece is about that inhabiting - about the way music and memory can place us within a space shaped by emotion and ancestry. Built around the opening motif of a tonada, a traditional melodic form passed down orally in rural Colombia. The composition transforms this gesture within the orchestra. Tonadas, often sung in duet with improvised rhymes or coplas, carry stories and sentiments across generations. Their lyrics shift, but the melody endures - a quiet act of preservation through repetition.

In this piece, I stretch, deconstruct, and reassemble that melody. The orchestra becomes a place where memory is not just evoked but entered - where the past is not behind us but around us.