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Press Releases

'The Zarabanda Variations' Album by Composer/Violinist Keir GoGwilt Now Available on Carrier Records

August 7, 2026 | By April Thibeault | AMT PR | april@amtpublicrelations.com

 

The Zarabanda Variations (Carrier Records)
a co-authored collection of songs and dances reflecting Baroque histories and futurisms of New Spain

Featuring violinist/composer Keir GoGwilt, poet Edgar Garcia, vocalist Mariana Flores Bucio, flutist/composer Wilfrido Terrazas and the Zarabanda Variations 

Album Release Concert at National Sawdust, New York City, August 31, 2026

"Global Album of the Month" - The Guardian
 
NEW YORK, NY — The Zarabanda Variations (Release Date: 08.07.26) is a uniquely combined chapbook and musical digital album that explores the historical and present syncretism of Baroque music in 12 original songs, dances, and poems. A group of musicians convened by violinist/composer Keir GoGwilt, and in collaboration with acclaimed poet Edgar Garcia, work at the intersection of free improvisation, microtonal jazz and contemporary classical to bend the historical rhythms, rhymes and resonances of the BaroqueThese artists traverse the colonial histories of the zarabanda dance in this unique multimedia collage of contemporary folkloric and improvised traditions, personal reflections, and new compositions.

The zarabanda was a fast, rhythmic, and highly sensual dance with origin stories in pre-Columbian, Arab, and African traditions, which via the Caribbean became wildly popular in the streets of Spain. It was considered so provocative that it was temporarily banned. By the Baroque period, it evolved into the sarabande—a slower, elegant, and stately dance popular in classical suites. 

“Nowadays classical music lovers are familiar with the Sarabandes of Baroque composers such as Bach, Lully, or Handel. The Zarabanda Variations plays on the prehistory of the sarabande/zarabanda as a syncretic dance arising from colonial encounter. The idea was not simply to recycle elements of Baroque music, but to trace the aftershocks of its power in our present time and place. The Zarabanda Variations is an exercise in split sight: one eye on the projected unity of the Baroque, and another on the fractured, migratory reality of its past and future.”  — KEIR GOGWILT, violinist & composer
 
 
About Edgar Garcia
Edgar Garcia is an acclaimed poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. He was born in California to a family of Central American extraction. He earned an associate degree from Chaffey Community College, a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from Yale University. He is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago and works in the fields of indigenous and Latinx studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental criticism. He also teaches in the Department of Creative Writing, where he serves as director of Undergraduate Studies.

Garcia's collection of poems and anthropological essays, Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, won the 2018 Fence Modern Poets Series award. He is also the author of the chapbook Boundary Loot (Punch Press, 2012) and the coeditor of American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Columbia University Press, 2017), as well as a collaborator on Infinite Regress (Bom Dia Books, 2021). 

His other books include a scholarly monograph, Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and a collection of essays, Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). His poems and translations have appeared in the Antioch ReviewBerkeley Poetry ReviewFenceJacket2MandorlaPortable Gray, and the anthology The Alteration of Silence: Recent Chilean Poetry (Diálogos, 2013); and his essays on poetry and related topics have appeared in American ReligionChicago ReviewLos Angeles Review of BooksMAKEModern PhilologyNew WritingPMLA, and Tupelo Quarterly. In 2022, he was the guest editor in chief of Fence magazine.

About Keir GoGwilt
Keir GoGwilt is a violinist and composer whose work combines historical & musicological research with collaborative experimentation. As a violinist, he is known as a "formidable performer" (The New York Times) with an "evocative sound" (London Jazz News) and "finger-busting virtuosity" (San Diego Union Tribune). He has soloed with groups including the Basel Sinfonieorchester, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Chinese National Symphony, Orquesta Filarmonica de Santiago, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. As a founding member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), he has performed original, collaboratively-devised music, dance, and theater works at The 92nd Street Y, Luminato Festival, PS 122 COIL, Stanford Live, the American Repertory Theater, Carolina Performing Arts, the Momentary, and the Ojai Music Festival. This past season he has been composer-in-residence with the JACK Quartet and has received commissions from the Barlow Foundation and the Copland House. His recompositions of renaissance and medieval music with violinist Johnny Chang have been released on Another Timbre; his improvising duo with bassist Kyle Motl has been acclaimed for their "rhapsodic gestures" (The New Yorker) and "keen musical intellects" (The Wire). He has worked closely with a broad range of artists including Mark Dresser, Eyvind Kang, Tan Dun, Steve Schick and George Lewis. GoGwilt earned his PhD in Music (Integrative Studies) from UC San Diego in 2021, where he received the Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal for the Division of Arts & Humanities. His musicological research has been published in the Bach JournalCurrent Musicolog, Naxos Musicology, and the Orpheus Institute Series.      

TRACK LIST:
1.              “Monday ~ Friday, January 11” by Edgar Garcia & Zarabanda Variations
2.              “Baroque Concerto” by Keir GoGwilt
3.              “Ortiz Sobre la Folia” by Keir GoGwilt, feat. Wilfrido Terrazas
4.              “Saturday ~ Wednesday, November 28” by Edgar Garcia & Zarabanda Variations
5.              “Otra Llorona” by Vicente Atria
6.              “Humiliation of the Victors” by Keir GoGwilt, feat. Kyle Motl & Wilfrido Terrazas
7.              “Saturday ~ Wednesday, October 17” by Edgar Garcia & Zarabanda Variations
8.              “Matachín” by Keir GoGwilt, feat. Alec Goldfarb & Wilfrido Terrazas
9.              “Monday ~ Friday, November 23” by Edgar Garcia & Zarabanda Variations
10.          “Plegaria” by Wilfrido Terrazas, feat. Mariana Flores Bucio
11.          “Wednesday ~ Sunday, December 30” by Edgar Garcia & Zarabanda Variations
12.          “Tonada Americana” by Vicente Atria

ALBUM CREDITS:
Performed by the Zarabanda Variations: Mariana Flores Bucio (voice), Wilfrido Terrazas (flutes, whistles, hand percussion), Jonny Allen (percussion), Miranda Cuckson (violin), Carrie Frey (viola), Keir GoGwilt (violin and hardanger d’amore), Alec Goldfarb (guitars), Kyle Motl (contrabass), and John Popham (cello); and Edgar Garcia (recitations)
Conceived by Keir GoGwilt
Poetry by Edgar Garcia
Composed by Keir GoGwilt, Vicente Atria, and Wilfrido Terrazas
Sessions produced by Christopher Otto
Edited by Keir GoGwilt and Charles Mueller
Mixed by Charles Mueller and Keir GoGwilt
Commissioned and produced by the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) with additional support from YellowBarn Music Festival, YoungARTS, Clark Art Institute, Frequency Festival, the Peabody Essex Museum, National Sawdust and Lincoln Center
Recorded at Tiny Panther by Charles Mueller, July 2025
Label:       Carrier Records
Catalog:     097
Release:    August 7, 2026
Available: Digital release only
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