Cody Criswell-Badillo

Como agua para chocolate (in progress)

for ensemble

PROGRAM NOTE:

This piece is raw, sharp-edged, and unsettled — a reckoning with my Mexican family and the fractures I carry from them. The title, Como agua para chocolate, means “like water for chocolate,” a phrase used to describe boiling anger, just short of spilling over. The music is less about resolution than about exposure. It dwells in dissonance, in unrelieved tension, in the textures of silence broken by sudden eruptions. It is an exorcism, a way of naming what has been endured but not healed.

— Cody Criswell-Badillo