My musical genesis was, in many ways, the vicarious fulfillment of a dream deferred. I was born into a resonance that preceded me; my mother, harboring her own unfulfilled musical aspirations, named me after a music teacher who had profoundly impressed her during her school years. My earliest auditory memories, formed around the age of five or six, are of her playing the guitar. Surrounded constantly by working musicians, the understanding that I, too, was inherently a musician felt less like a choice and more like an inevitable biological imperative.
Growing up in the church where my uncle, Joseph Mendoza, was the pastor provided an unconventional but fertile conservatory. For the first ten years of my life, the sanctuary was my playground, granting me unrestricted access to every instrument left on the altar. The church musicians became my first informal mentors, handing me drumsticks and teaching me the percussive backbone of live performance. When my cousin Ruby hesitated to continue her formal musical education, the opportunity shifted to me. I had already been experimenting on a tiny keyboard my parents had given me at age eleven, but by fifteen, formal instruction was presented to me as a profound gift.
The Manhattan Mentorship: Virtuosos in the Living Room
The true architectural rigor of my playing began with Elana. A rare, hyper-verbal force of nature with Cuban and French blood, she was a performing virtuoso in the Tri-State area. She was exceptionally strict, intensely eccentric, and operated at a thousand words a minute. Our adventure together unfolded every other week, alternating through the summers, centered entirely on technique and Hanon exercises. She did not merely play our professional upright; she dominated it, riding the instrument like a thoroughbred to achieve absolute symphonic perfection right in my living room.
Simultaneously, my intellectual understanding of music theory was being forged by Sam Gindin, my high school theory professor who sadly passed away this year. A master of orchestration, a French horn player, and a conductor, he elevated my understanding from mere keystrokes to the sprawling mechanics of a full ensemble. Later, as an older student of seventeen, I studied under a dedicated instructor at a beautiful Presbyterian church on 19th Street in the Village. In that massive first-floor space housing multiple pianos, she guided me through the intricate, mathematical architectures of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. I never needed to travel to a formal conservatory; the conservatory came directly to my home in Manhattan, delivered by working performing artists.
The bedrock of my auditory identity was a rich amalgamation: the visceral energy of rock and roll, the profound, folk-rooted classicism of Mexican Mariachi music, and ultimately, the intricate depths of Western classical repertoire. I have always maintained that Mariachi is the true classical music of Mexico. This formal tutelage continued until I was twenty-five. The pivot occurred in 2008—the year I voted for Obama—when I welcomed my daughter into the world. The role of student gracefully gave way to the responsibilities of fatherhood. I transitioned into working in the arts, wielding a camera as a freelance photographer and passing on the craft as an instructor of beginner piano, a mantle I have carried proudly into my forties.
The Formative Opus: Six Pieces of Youth
The vault of a composer’s mind is a living archive, and my early output is less a written record than a physiological memory. While I do not possess a sprawling catalog of sixty-seven works from my teenage years, I hold six or seven distinct original compositions that I can withdraw from my hands instantly, like a withdrawal from an ATM. Three of these survive completely orchestrated on paper, but all of them live permanently in the muscle memory of my fingers.
These early works pulse with a raw, unrefined passion, capturing the urgency of youth before it is tempered by strict theoretical boundaries. One of my most significant early milestones involved composing the original score for a high school play. This was not merely an academic exercise; it was the catalyst that pulled me into a professional recording environment.
Manhattan Music House: Engineering the First Score
Throughout the early 2000s, I spent a summer interning at Manhattan Music House, located around 20th Street and 3rd Avenue. I traveled there almost every other day, surrounded by professional audio equipment, meticulously reproducing and recording the music I had composed for the stage. It was a baptism into the world of audio engineering, proving that the symphonies in my head could be tangibly manifested, captured, and ultimately shared with the world as a modern classical composer.
From Theory to Practice: Performing in the Tri-State Area
The transition from the rigid calculus of Bach and Beethoven into the fluid, breathing ecosystem of live performance occurred not in a formal concert hall, but in the sanctuaries of churches across the tri-state area. While my private Manhattan instructors demanded absolute, unwavering adherence to the printed page, the church required adaptability, intuition, and immediate emotional resonance. It was within this crucible that my theoretical knowledge was tested and transformed into practical, functional application.
The rigorous demands of my formal education had conditioned me to assimilate, distancing me from my native culture to fully embrace an American one—a transition I executed without hesitation. However, once I stepped outside the strictures of academia, I finally found the time and spatial freedom to explore my roots. This profound cultural rediscovery crystallized after the birth of my first daughter. Stepping into fatherhood ignited an urgency to reclaim my heritage, leading me to study and master a multitude of South American and Mexican instruments.
Simultaneously, my role in live worship expanded beyond the acoustic upright piano. Surrounded by the relentless, spontaneous energy of live performance, I absorbed the mechanics of the drum kit, mastering the percussive pulse that drives an ensemble. I also took up the guitar. While I have never sought the title of a master classical guitarist, I developed a rigorous, functional command of the fretboard—learning to voice complex chord structures, execute rapid scales, and, most importantly, improvise in real-time. This environment demanded that I not just play the music, but speak it fluently, reacting instantly to the energy of the room and the shifting dynamics of the congregation. It was the ultimate education in musical pragmatism.
The Breath of the Wind: Discovering the Flutes
If the piano serves as the architectural foundation of my symphonic mind, and the drums and guitar act as its rhythmic pulse, then the wind instruments are its pure, unmediated voice. My identity as a wind instrumentalist developed as a visceral reconnection to the indigenous resonance of the Americas. Over the years, I have curated and mastered a diverse collection of traditional flutes—ranging from the South American Quena and intricate panpipes to various Native American and Mexican flutes.
I dove profoundly deep into the folk music of the Andes, internalizing its sweeping, mountainous melodies. To this day, I know at least one hundred of the most emblematic, epic Andean musical titles entirely from memory, carrying them as a vast, internal library of indigenous sound.
Playing these instruments requires an entirely different physiological discipline than striking a key or plucking a string; it demands the direct translation of breath into melody. When you blow into a Quena, you are entirely responsible for the pitch, the vibrato, and the emotional timber. There are no mechanics separating the artist from the sound. This deep affinity for wind instrumentation heavily influences my modern classical orchestration today. It is the precise reason why, in works like my recent Symphony No. 4: Ascendido al Altiplano, I elevate traditional Andean panpipes to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the classical string section. It is a true synthesis: the strict theoretical architecture of my Manhattan upbringing breathing with the ancestral lungs of my heritage.
