Information Americas, PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad, Tues. Sept. 23, 2025: Some lives unfold like a quiet melody. Trinidad and Tobago-born, UK-based composer and guitarist Dominique Le Gendre’s life is a complete rating – motifs layered and revisited, rhythms from Port of Spain to Paris to London, harmonies that refuse to resolve as a result of the dialog is rarely over.
“Music has been mapping a really, very clear route via life and tips on how to specific being alive. The music is the center, the blood, the oxygen.”
Dominique’s earliest school rooms had been dwelling rooms alive with music. Saturdays usually meant sitting beneath Auntie Olive Walke’s piano as La Petite Musicale – the beloved choir Olive based – rehearsed people and sacred songs from throughout the Caribbean. These rehearsals spilled past notes and lyrics; they taught kids like Dominique that music might be worship and storytelling, tradition and connective tissue. Olive even slipped Dominique and her sister into La Petite’s Christmas reveals at Queen’s Corridor, giving them an early style of stagecraft and the quiet self-discipline behind magnificence.
Household gatherings had been their very own live shows. Uncle John Henderson, armed together with his beloved cuatro, crammed the air with parang and old-time calypso. Her dad and mom’ love of classical information added a European counterpoint, whereas two older brothers opened doorways to the broader world—Jimi Hendrix, Mongo Santamaria, Miles Davis – stacked on the household turntable. Evenings in Port of Spain carried the soundscape additional: distant drums and late-night steelpan rehearsals drifting via the neighborhood air, an environment that seeped naturally into her musical creativeness.
By 9, Dominique had a guitar in her arms. By ten she was the youngest member of the Assumption Church people choir, stepping in with simply three chords and a courageous coronary heart. Inside weeks she was accompanying hymns with ease; earlier than lengthy, she and her sister had been taking part in weddings, funerals and christenings all around the metropolis.
“It was like dwelling in a pan yard. Everybody belonged, everybody had one thing to contribute. That philosophy of the pan yard—collective creation, shared possession – has by no means left me,” reminisces Dominique.
The pan yard – the place music is discovered by ear, the place preparations stay in reminiscence and each participant can change elements – turned the blueprint for her life. It’s nonetheless the metaphor she returns to: music as group, collaboration as artistry.
That Trinidadian basis carried her outward. Dominique educated as a classical guitarist in Paris with Ramón de Herrera, studied concord with Yvonne Desportes and music evaluation with Christian Accaoui. In London she constructed a profession composing for theatre, dance, movie and radio drama; she wrote music for all thirty-eight of Shakespeare’s performs and have become an Affiliate Artist of the Royal Opera Home.
But, the center of her follow by no means shifted. The work that nourished her most echoed the collaborative spirit of her Caribbean beginnings: theatre ensembles and radio studios the place writers, actors and composers constructed one thing collectively in actual time.
“After I’m totally invested in a mission, that’s dwelling. The place doesn’t matter as a lot because the work and the folks,” she famous.
After many years of making for others, Dominique has returned to the instrument that began all of it. “In over fifty-six years of being with the guitar, that is the primary time I’m sitting to write down items only for the guitar,” she disclosed.
Her new album, Portraits for Guitar, is each assertion and query. It asks, ‘What does Caribbean classical music sound like? Does this contact you? Is that this a part of you?’
The mission gathers six unique sketches for solo guitar and two suites of her personal alongside music by Cuban composers Flores Chaviano and Walfrido Domínguez and British composer Stephen Goss. Carried out with virtuoso Ahmed Dickinson, the works kind what Dominique calls “a dialog of guitars”—Caribbean, Latin and European voices assembly on the identical web page.
Right here her philosophy meets a wider dialog. In a current essay for The Atlantic, composer Matthew Aucoin argued that classical music isn’t outlined by a European sound or period in any respect however by writing – the act of placing music on paper so it could possibly stay once more in every new efficiency. For Aucoin, notation is the connective tissue throughout centuries, the best way concepts journey past the composer’s lifetime.
Dominique embodies that concept. For her, a rating is one other type of pan yard: a dwelling archive the place information is shared and reshaped. When she writes these guitar portraits, she isn’t simply recording an album; she’s making a written dialog that future guitarists can inhabit and remodel.
“After I’m composing I can really feel an urge to hurry forward—to succeed in the ending,” she says. “However with this music I’ve to let every part unfold in its personal time. Attending to the tip isn’t the purpose; the invention inside the method is.”
The method is as deliberate because the music. Recording will happen over 4 days in a resonant church outdoors London, adopted by modifying, mastering and the delicate sound-sculpting of a classical producer. The label will deal with licensing, design, distribution, critiques and radio submissions. The discharge is deliberate for September 2026, permitting the music to breathe and discover its listeners.
On this mild, Portraits for Guitar turns into greater than a ravishing album. It’s Dominique’s method of increasing what classical music can imply – a Caribbean creativeness inscribed in notation, prepared for anybody, anyplace, to find and play ahead.
Whereas the guitar attracts Dominique inward, SongMaps Rye sends her outward. This multi-year mission unfolds in a small English coastal city already on the entrance line of rising seas. Working with scientists, poets, circus artists and residents, she and her group use music, poetry and environmental science to assist folks see, really feel and act.
“Councils have determined which cities can be sacrificed, however they haven’t informed the folks. We’re not making activists – we’re giving folks the knowledge, instruments and creativity to ask the questions that should be requested and to make calls for,” she mentioned.
Workshops are free by design. Younger folks write and podcast about their world. Households study gardening and stilt-walking. Native specialists lead river walks and bird-identification periods. The purpose is empowerment and resilience.
“In any other case, it stays an elite exercise. These actions are too necessary. It’s about making the long run attainable for folks for whom hope is disappearing,” Dominique famous.
Right here the pan yard philosophy finds new life: collective creativity as resilience, a group orchestra of scientists, elders and kids writing their very own survival rating.
After I ask what hope appears like, Dominique pauses, then smiles. “My compositions sound as in the event that they’re by no means completed. The tip is at all times hanging within the air. That’s what hope is – his dialog isn’t over.” For her, openness is legacy: creating alternatives for others, fostering a spirit of collaboration and listening that outlives any single piece of music.
Dominique’s Portraits for Guitar marketing campaign is stay now. Your contribution immediately helps the recording – studio time, mastering, producer, visitor artists, and the quiet, painstaking work that turns new music into a long-lasting doc.
Supporters can select from fantastically crafted perks: early digital entry, signed CDs and scores, non-public classes, even Government Producer credit and intimate home live shows. Greater than a CD, your present helps safeguard a dwelling Caribbean classical custom and ensures that Dominique’s lifelong map of music continues to chart new territory.
Click on HERE to hitch the journey and make a present right now
Dominique Le Gendre: baby of La Petite Musicale and Auntie Olive’s living-room rehearsals, niece of Uncle John and his parang cuatro, composer of unfinished endings, keeper of reminiscence, builder of resilience. Her music reminds us that hope is a melody nonetheless unfolding – one we will all assist play.
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