Known as the “Serpiente de Turquesas” for its turquoise-blue rivers, Mexico's Huasteca region has inspired myth and artistic creation for millennia: from the Venus of Tamtoc to the surrealist worlds of Leonora Carrington and Edward James. A native of the region, Julián Fueyo transforms its fluid landscapes and pre-Hispanic conceptions of cyclical time into music, drawing on the mythological turquoise serpent as both a central symbol and a source of musical structure.

The turquoise serpent is a recurring symbol in pre-Hispanic art and religion, where turquoise itself was closely associated with water. Among its most striking representations is the turquoise-mosaic, double-headed serpent now housed at the British Museum. Its two opposing heads and carefully balanced form embody ideas of duality, symmetry, and cyclical movement: there is no singular beginning or end, but rather a continuous relationship between one direction and its reflection. In Serpiente de Turquesas, these visual and philosophical ideas become musical ones, translating the serpent’s symmetry and cyclical form into principles of musical structure.

The work earned Fueyo his second ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award. Its fluid phrases unfold through retrogrades that follow as mirrored reflections of earlier musical material. The piece itself begins as it ends, while passages throughout its inner sections repeatedly circle back, mirror earlier gestures, and cascade into new musical spaces. By allowing the music to circle back upon itself, Serpiente de Turquesas connects the movement of the rivers with the serpent’s cyclical symbolism, creating a meditation on musical time, landscape, and natural memory.