At the beginning of the new year, I began my first setting of an poem I’d been studying since the fall of 2024. “Estrellas Fijas” by Jose Asuncion Silva struck me as a distinctly poignant text. One of his shorter preserved works, it teeters tonally between despair and euphoria, often within a span of five words or less. I was fortunate to have Robert Rodriguez’s permission to use his translation of the text in my composition.