21st WASBE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS, RIO DE JANEIRO – BRAZIL - SINFONÍA NÓMADA (NOMADIC SYMPHONY)for Wind Ensemble by ARTURO MARQUEZ (Mexico,1950)
[#381] Nov 09, 2026
Mexico | 2026 | Wind Ensemble | Grade 5 | 21' | Symphony
Published by Peer Music Donated by Mark Customs, performance available for purchase.
Premiered by Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble conducted by Brian Messier
on May 23, 2026 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, Spaulding Auditorium.
Sinfonía Nómada by Mexican composer Arturo Marquez is our Composition of the Week.
Sinfonía Nómada received its world premiere on May 23, 2026, at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, Spaulding Auditorium, performed by the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble under the direction of Brian Messier. Two months later, on July 25, Messier conducted the Latin American premiere with the WASBE World Youth Wind Orchestra during the closing concert of the 21st WASBE International Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the prestigious Teatro Municipal.
This long awaited first large-scale work for the medium by Arturo Marquez was made possible by a large group of commissioners lead by The Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth.
The symphony is structured in three movements, it has a duration of about 22 minutes, and it is scored for a standard wind ensemble setting, using a large percussion section (8+ players).
I. Marcha Natura: Pole to Pole (Natural March)
II. Faro Verde: Sahuaro (Green Lighthouse)
III. Looking South
The music is published by Peer Music. The exclusivity period runs until the end of the academic year 2026 – 2027.
Sinfonía Nómada (Nomadic Symphony) is a work centered on migration, approached not as a single narrative but as a series of perspectives. Across its three movements, the symphony moves from the natural world to the human experience, ultimately confronting one of the most urgent issues of our time: immigration. Framing the entire work is a recurring batucada-inspired rhythmic language that opens each movement and returns with heightened meaning in the finale, where its character is revealed in full.
The first movement, Marcha Natura : Pole to Pole (Natural March), reflects the vast cycles of natural migration that define life on earth. Its steady, processional character evokes the movement of species across great distances : caribou traversing the tundra, salmon returning upstream to the waters of their birth, and the Arctic tern’s extraordinary annual journey between the poles. The music unfolds with patience and inevitability, suggesting motion not as urgency, but as necessity, embedded in the rhythms of the natural world.
The second movement, Faro Verde : Sahuaro (Green Lighthouse), draws inspiration from the poem Saguaros by Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora. In Saguaros, Javier reflects on his journey on foot from El Salvador through the Sonoran Desert into the United States. Undertaken in an effort to be reunited with his parents, the journey took two months, with the poem set at the moment of his arrival at the U.S. border. In the Sonoran Desert, the composer's birthplace, the towering saguaro cactus stands as both witness and guide. These behemoths grow slowly, approximately one meter every sixty years, with some living for centuries and reaching heights of over sixty feet. Márquez translates this imagery into sound through a gradual unfolding of musical material: a long crescendo shaped by shifting meters that mirrors the slow growth of the saguaro. This rise is later reversed, the music fading as if the landscape itself is falling away. This expansion and decay can be heard as the life cycle of the cactus, a reflection on environmental loss, or perhaps the saguaros serving as sentinels, rising before by Javier Zamora, only to recede as he leaves them behind him.
The final movement, Looking South, addresses contemporary human migration directly. Márquez, himself an immigrant during his studies in California, has described this subject as inescapable: “How could I write anything else?” Yet rather than framing the movement in present-day rhetoric, he turns to the words of William Shakespeare, written over four centuries ago. The movement is structured around “The Strangers’ Case” speech from The Book of Sir Thomas More, in which Sir Thomas asks his listeners to imagine themselves as the very strangers they seek to expel. Though the text is never spoken, it is embedded musically, first in the trumpets and later in the clarinets. The final word of the speech, “inhumanity,” is revealed as the fundamental motive, not only of the movement, but of the batucada drumming that frames the entire symphony. Here, in the third movement, the drumming is accompanied by whistles. These whistles are not - as I first believed - the police responding to rioters, but rather, a warning call to the community that dangerous, inhuman forces are descending.
Program Notes by Brian Messier
SAGUAROS
by Javier Zamora
“It was dusk for kilometers and bats in the lavender sky,
like spiders when a fly is caught, began to appear.
And there, not the promised land, but barbwire and barbwire
with nothing growing under it. I tried to fly that dusk
after a bat said la sangre del saguaro nos seduce. Sometimes
I wake and my throat is dry, so I drive to botanical gardens
to search for red fruit clutched to saguaros, the ones at dusk
I threw rocks at for the sake of slashing hunger.
But I never find them here. These bats say speak English only.
Sometimes in my car, that viscous red syrup
clings to my throat, and it’s a tender seed toward my survival:
I also scraped needles first, then carved those tall torsos
for water, then spotlights drove me and thirty others dashing
into palos verdes, green-striped trucks surrounded us,
our empty bottles rattled and our breath spoke with rust.
When the trucks left, a cold cell swallowed us.”
THE STRANGERS’ CASE, SPEECH BY SIR THOMAS MORE
(very likely written by William Shakespeare)
“Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an agèd man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
[...]
Say now the king,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.”
Arturo Marquez began his musical training in La Puente, California, in 1966, later studying piano and music theory at the Conservatory of Music of Mexico and composition at the Taller de Composición of the Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico with such composers as Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras, Hector Quintanar, and Federico Ibarra. He also studied in Paris privately with Jacques Castérède, and at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick, Stephen Mosko, Mel Powell, and James Newton.
In recent years, Marquez has written a series of danzones, works based on an elegant Cuban dance that migrated to Veracruz, Mexico. His Danzon No. 2 is among the most popular Latin American works to emerge since the 1950s, enhanced by its use by Gustavo Dudamel with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in their 2007 tour of the United States and Europe. In February 2006, Arturo Marquez received the Medalla de Oro de Bellas Artes (Gold Medal of Fine Arts), the highest honor given to artists by Mexico’s Bellas Artes. That evening the concert El Danzon según Márquez (The Danzón according to Márquez) was presented at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The concert included six danzons, all contained on a forthcoming CD.
Márquez has received commissions from the OAS, the Universidad Metropolitana de Mexico, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Festival Cervantino, Festival del Caribe, Festival de la Ciudad de Mexico, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has received grants from the Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico, the French government, and the Fulbright Foundation. In 1994 he received the composition scholarship of Mexico’s Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Márquez’s Octeto Malandro (Misbehaving Octet) was commissioned and premiered by Philadelphia’s Relâche Ensemble in 1996 and subsequently recorded by Relâche for Monroe St. Records. Márquez’s flute concerto, commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Consejo Nacional para las Artes, was premiered by James Newton. Other works by Márquez include En Clave for piano, Son a Tamayo for harp, percussion, and tape (featured at the 1996 World Harp Congress),Homenaje a Gismonti for string quartet, and Zarabandeo for clarinet and piano.
Other works for winds include:
• Danzón N°2 (transc. Nickel)
• Conga del Fuego Nuevo (transc. Nickel)
• Rumba Fugata (for Clarinet Quartet and Wind Ensemble)
• Marcha Sonora (transc. Messier)
• De Juarez a Maximiliano
