Selected Works for Princeton Application
1. Just for Today
(2025) 30'
for singer/actress, chamber ensemble and fixed electronics
For time reasons, please begin with Part 3, which starts at 20' in the video and on page 49 of the score.
Performed on 12 June 2025 at the Southbank Centre
My mother shared her stories drawn from years shaped by addiction, homelessness, and survival. These stories were captured in sonic and written recordings, as she reflected on her journey towards recovery. I was drawn to incorporate these recordings into music and text, using them to amplify the emotions embedded in her experiences.
These stories carry different experiences of violence, portrayed in the piece both explicitly and structurally. Yet, alongside this violence, there is also lightness. My mother recounts her story with humour and ease, even in the most difficult moments, and that lightness is evident in the joyful way she writes and speaks, radiating resilience that is supported by a sense of defiance.
Later in the piece the setting changes, as the concert hall becomes the vast and elegant Sala São Paulo. Outside its walls, the population of Cracolândia has been displaced, pushed aside to make space for beauty and order. The contrast between what is welcomed in and what is excluded lingers uneasily.
My mother’s story is just one of many that could be heard in spaces like this.
A mantra for getting through the day without needing to fix everything at once, Just for today (Só por hoje) reflects on what we often choose not to see, what connects us, and the possibility that listening might change what we hear.
Pablo Martinez Just for today - World Premiere & LS Commission
Stephanie Lamprea soprano
Elayce Ismail director & dramaturg
Gabriella Teychenné conductor
Tony Simpson lighting design
Jonathan Green audio engineer
London Sinfonietta
2. Birthday Music
(2025) 6'
Performed on 26 June 2025 at the ANGELA BURGESS RECITAL HALL
Birthday Music is a semi-improvised collaborative work by composer-performers Courtney Cousins (flute), Martha-Maria Mitu (violin), and Pablo Martinez (piano). Inspired by the dynamics of a birthday dinner party, the piece explores the subtle theatricality inherent in everyday moments and transforms a familiar social celebration into an experimental musical dialogue.
3. Peel
(2025) 15'
Performed on 23rd September at the cockpit theatre as part of the Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival.
Peel is a surreal, comedic chamber opera for three singers dressed as bananas, who grapple with their looming fate as they ripen together in a fruit bowl. Their banter, anxieties, and dreams unfold in a tightly woven tragicomedy about life’s absurd impermanence. This short opera is a comic treatment of the search for transcendence, delivered through fruit.
Libretto: Hannah Hayden
Music: Pablo Martinez
Mo: Joseph Hancock
Sunny: Aimee Skye Wilmot
Speck: Amber Dixon
Piano: Tammas Slater
Conductor: Hilay Punnett
Directed by Sophie Deneman
More Music:
Myopic, watering eyes and city lights
(2023) 7'
String Quartet and Vibraphone
Song about living
from What now, Mané?
(2024) 7'40''
for soprano, actor, violin, cello, accordion and harp
Quando A Rosa Enxergou O Rio (When the Rose Saw the River)
Electroacoustic fixed-media (2022) 9'45''
Quando a Rosa enxergou o rio is an electroacoustic work that weaves together recorded speech and accordion improvisation. The voice belongs to my great-grandmother, Rosa Gonçalves, an 80% blind Brazilian woman who grew up in the early 20th-century countryside of São Paulo. In a 2012 conversation, she recalls playing in the woods with her siblings, wandering until they discovered a river — a memory reflecting resilience, and the courage to find one’s path in life.
Accordionist Neil Sutcliffe improvised over a hand-drawn map of the woods, responding to the places Rosa mentions in her voice recording. Material from both recordings were then explored, finding new ways to transfer their interaction.
Memórias de um Ponteio
(2024) 7'30''
for Solo Guitar
Ta Prá Cá Ça 51
(2021) 7'30''
for Percussion Duet