Album de Retratos

"Album de Retratos, (Family Portraits) is based on my grandmother’s family photo album. What inspired me to write this work was the death of my grandfather. When he passed away in June of 2011, I was hit by an enormous sense of loss. For the weeks that followed, I carried with me several pictures of him. These photos had been taken at different times in our lives, and I could see clearly how much we had changed throughout the years; how time had done its insatiable job. Photos have a way of freezing thousands of memories and moments, which we recall in a split second from looking at a single print. But a picture is just a picture. More important are the memories and the events that took place when a picture was taken.
But what happens when too much time goes by and following generations can no longer remember or identify whom the person in the photo is? I myself have looked at pictures of unrecognizable faces of people who were related to me, but because I don’t know much about them, their images and stories will eventually fade into oblivion. This thought, and the fact that this piece was written for two very special members of my family–my father and uncle Sergio & Odair Assad–led me to the idea of preserving some of these memories in form of music.

Although the memories I speak of might only make actual sense to me and to my family, I know that when translated into music, the meaning become something entirely different for someone who is purely listening to the music itself. Ultimately, no one even needs to know what inspired a musical composition to be created, in order to feel something. And this is what is so wonderful and amazingly powerful about music: It can stand on its own and is able to convey many emotions, detached from everything else."