Nicolás Lell Benavides’ music has been praised for finding “…a way to sketch complete characters in swift sure lines…” (Washington Post) and cooking up a “jaunty score [with] touches of cabaret, musical theater and Latin dance” (OPERA NEWS.) He has received commissions from groups like The New York Philharmonic/The Juilliard School, the LA Phil, Eighth Blackbird, New Century Chamber Orchestra with Daniel Hope, SFCM Orchestra with Edwin Outwater, West Edge Opera, Washington National Opera, The Glimmerglass Festival, Music of Remembrance, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Fry Street Quartet, Friction Quartet, Brightwork Ensemble, and Khemia Ensemble. His music has received support from organizations such as the American Composers Forum, The Barlow Endowment, New Music USA, Opera America, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Nicolás is the recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing him to focus on creative work. His opera about civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, with libretto by Marella Martin Koch, will premiere with West Edge Opera, San Diego Opera, The BroadStage, and Opera Southwest in the 2025-26 season. He is also developing a comic opera called Caravana de mujeres with librettist Laura Barati as part of MassOpera’s New Opera Workshop, which was a featured performance at Opera America’s New Works Forum.
Nicolás was the first ever Young Artist Composer in Residence at The Glimmerglass Festival and was also a fellow at the Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, the Del Mar International Composers Symposium, and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music Composing Earth Initiative. He was the first featured composer/conductor of San Diego Symphony’s Currents series, conducting his opera Tres minutos (libretto by Martin Koch.)
Nicolás has studied at Santa Clara University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and at the USC Thornton School of Music, where he currently serves on faculty.
Ricercares interválicos (Intervallic Ricercars) explore the creative possibilities of intervals, with each movement bound by a single interval type (second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh). I’ve always loved imaginative constraints that challenge my creativity, like a puzzle to be solved.
When I was a budding composer, I was given an assignment that has always stayed with me: write a piece using only a single interval. In undergrad we were tasked with choosing an interval type that would then be used to justify every single choice in a piece. Every pitch needed to be approached or left by that interval, and all harmonic construction needed to be created using it. It’s unbelievably frustrating at first, and then freeing.
Though we complained about the restrictions, inevitably all of us would turn in works that were inspired and distinct. To this day I still give my composition students this assignment, and without fail I am blown away by their new and inventive creations. I want them to understand that part of being creative is goal setting and dogged solution finding. This semester I decided to do “the assignment” at the same time as my composition class at the USC Thornton School of Music. They were only required to do a single interval but, wanting to lead by example I decided to do a whole new set.
Composers have been inspired to study motifs, pitch class sets, scales, harmonies, intervals, and themes since the beginning. Ricercar means “to seek” or “to study” from the Italian verb ricercare. Famous examples include works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Domenico Gabrielli, and Girolamo Frescobaldi, however my favorite is that by György Ligeti, his Musica ricercata for solo piano. Numbered I-XI (1-11), each movement uses a growing pitch class set from two pitches to three and so on. The works are stunning, with his Six Bagatelles for wind quintet being directly derived from this set.
My set is arranged in complementary interval order at the midway point. Starting with fourths, seconds, and sixths, it reverses into thirds, sevenths, and fifths. Not wanting the player to make any major assumptions aside from the interval itself, I opted to use traditional Italian tempo markings (Adagio misterioso, Moderato agitato, Andante espressivo) and Spanish for movement titles. The miniatures use a variety of styles from fast (IV. Terceras) to slow (V. Séptimas), rhythmic (II. Segundas) to lyrical (III. Sextas). They open with a free-flowing study on fourths (I. Cuartas), and close with my favorite, an uncharacteristically long rumination, a fantasia, on the perfect fifth (VI. Quintas) an interval that is full of possibility and natural beauty.