written for & premiered by the Attacca Quartet at the Phillips Collection on 04.20.21

note| Imago is a response to artworks that, due to the pandemic, I couldn’t see or interact with in real life. The distance from the pieces and the wonderful Attacca Quartet created something of a disembodied writing experience. Untitled & The Allusion of Gravity exist most clearly in my mind, illuminated and filled in by imagination & impression. However, I can’t draw on the memories or emotions of first sight, deep study, or sketching in their presence. What did translate over the internet and staring my eyes red at the laptop screen, was the musicality and impossible figurations of Linn Meyers’ and Alyson Shotz’s incredible works. Their limited materials, repetition, and sheer physicality of process made me determined to bring those presences into this new work and seek proximities. 

Repetition, for me, is queer — pushing to see a single moment from every angle, the desire to experience multiplicity, recognizing the capacity of objects to move in a thousand directions at once. I wrote to invoke images of physical creation with timbre, process, and shared materials. I strove to interact the motion of drawing with the smooth movement of a quartet of bows, of adding detail with pen or brush as dragging tightened hair. I saw the physicality and endurance of continuous motion, bowing or harmonics or strums or dense harmonies, as the bending and beading of a complex work. I sought the infinite shapes and implications of a group orientation towards sculpture or magnified square of mylar - in their overlapping vision, a new and beautiful object. A wider perspective. 

(Imago is the final stage of insects metamorphosis - happy cicada year)

Imago [2021] | Attacca Quartet

[piece title] [year written] | [performing ensemble]

inti figgis-vizueta (b.1993) is a composer and educator who works to reconcile historical aesthetics and experimental practices with trans & Indigenous futures. Described as a “rising new music star” (LA Times), with “smooth and serrated melodies” (New York Times) and an “intriguing…highly integrated sound” (Gramophone), “wrought from a language we’d do well to learn” (Washington Post), inti has been commissioned and performed by leading artists including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Dallas Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, New World Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Reflektor, Aspen Music Festival, Ojai Music Festival, Spoleto Music Festival, Kennedy Center’s Sounds of US Festival, International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Wild Up, Roomful of Teeth, Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, Kronos Quartet, Attacca Quartet, JACK Quartet, Music from Copland House, Crash Ensemble, violinist Jennifer Koh, and cellists Andrew Yee and Jay Campbell, among many others. inti’s work has been featured at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Hall Concert Hall, Symphony Center, REDCAT, National Concert Hall (IE), Southbank Centre (UK), Philharmonie de Paris (FR), Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ (NL), and Konzerthaus Berlin (DE). 

Upcoming projects include Earths to Come in VR for the Venice Film Festival, mad scramble for crumbs for Opera Saratoga, Metahaven’s film The Feeling Sonnets, and works for flutist Claire Chase, pianist James McVinnie, and cellist Andrew Yee with Roomful of Teeth. inti is the recipient of the Lotos Foundation Prize, ASCAP Foundation Fred Ho Award, National Sawdust Hildegard Award, Café Royal Foundation Music Grant and residency fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks, Civitella Ranieri, Juilliard Summer Percussion, and Music at Copland House.

inti has held faculty positions with Luna Composition Lab (21-24’), Wildflower Composers (20-22’), Fresh Inc Festival (22’), and Atlanticx Composition (21’). She regularly lectures on her music with recent visits to Harvard University, The Juilliard School, Peabody Conservatory, and CalArts, among many others. inti has curated programs for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella series, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Current Series, Wild Up’s Darkness Sounding, and American Composers Orchestra SONiC Festival. She is the 2024 Robert M. Trotter Lecturer for the College Music Society 67th National Conference. 
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inti studied with Marcos Balter, Felipe Lara, Donnacha Dennehy, and George Lewis. Her mentors include ﻿Tania León﻿, Nico Muhly, Angélica Negrón, Derek Bermel, and Andrew Norman, among many others. inti honors her Quichua bisabuela who was the only woman butcher on the plaza central and used to fight men with a machete.