Reinaldo Moya, associate professor of music, was getting ready for work one day in March when he saw an email come through on his phone with an intriguing subject line: Guggenheim. “OK, this is where they tell me, ‘Thank you so much. It was a very competitive year. We had many strong applications. Unfortunately, we were unable to offer you a fellowship this year,’” he said. Instead, he learned that he had been selected for a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Moya said.
The fellowship will support his work on his salsa opera Cantos y Tumbaos, which follows a young Venezuelan woman wrongly imprisoned in El Helicoide, a structure in Caracas that has been repurposed as a political prison. He said the story is a “Dantesque descent through five circles of institutional collapse, and it speaks directly to questions about democracy, diaspora, and what it costs ordinary people when institutions fail them.” He has been developing the opera since 2019.
Moya, who is from Venezuela, started playing the violin when he was 4 years old. He took part in the country’s music education system, El Sistema, which provides musical training to all children regardless of their background or ability to pay. “Music has the potential to change lives,” Moya said. “I think that to American audiences, some people think that it’s overstated … that I'm just being too grandiose. But it's so true for hundreds, if not thousands, of Venezuelans who received absolutely amazing musical training that created something quite beautiful and special in our country.”
Moya said that around 2015, Venezuelans started describing what was happening in their country as dantesco: “It was the closest word anyone had for the chaos, the darkness, and the helplessness we all felt watching our country become unrecognizable and not being able to stop it.” It’s also how he describes his opera. “What Dante understood is that hell has a logic,” he said. “Each circle is defined by a sin, and the souls are punished in ways that mirror the lives they led. The opera’s characters are ghostly souls, all of whom are haunted by these sins of the past.”
Moya will be working on the opera next year while he is on sabbatical. He’s just a bit nervous. “I’ve been talking about it for a long time, thinking about it for a long time,” he said. “It’s very ambitious. It has the potential to be great. Do I have it in me to pull it off? That’s in my hands now.”