Graciela Carriquí specializes in vocal chamber music, giving voice to women throughout history 

whose words have been ignored. 

In 2025 Carriquí has the great good fortune of receiving both a Manhattan Arts Grant and a New York State 

Council on the Arts grant, the latter for the second cycle in a row, enabling her to carry out her next

major project, about a woman she has found fascinating for over 30 years: Edith Stein.

She was a German-Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and wrote to the pope about the threat  of

Nazism in 1933. He never spoke out against the Nazis. She was gassed at Auschwitz as a Jew in 1942.

It will be written for mezzo-soprano, violin, cello, double bass, and harp.

In 2023 she composed "In Her Own Words: Joan of Arc Speaks", funded by her first grant from the New York State 

Council on the Arts, using verbatim excerpts from the saint's condemnation trial testimony in the original 

15th century French, a dead language that Graciela had to learn to read the transcripts. 

Joan's testimony was paid no heed, and we all know the tragic price she paid. 

The 23-minute piece was performed by a large chamber ensemble consisting of 

soprano, bass-baritone, violin, cello, double bass, harp, flute, bassoon and flugelhorn. 

In 2022 Carriquí wrote "Indifferent Counsel", setting a speech that Queen Katherine of Aragon made in 

ecclesiastical court in defense of her marriage to King Henry the 8th after he asked the pope for annulment--

after 20 years and a child.  Rather than listen to her, the King started a new church that would accommodate him. 

It was recorded by a soprano, viola, cello and double bass.   

Graciela is moved by these women's stories to give them another chance for their words to be heard.

Do right by them, at long last, and listen.

~     ~     ~     ~     ~

Born and raised in the United States, Carriquí began classical voice studies at 15. She cut her teeth performing in her father’s jazz band a few years later.  At 21 she was tapped to work with salsa greats Willie Colón and Rubén Blades; 

she spent the next three years singing in nightclubs and large arenas like Madison Square Garden in the US and 

abroad, being interviewed on the radio and appearing  on TV in the Caribbean and Latin America. 

She has recorded recorded 8 albums, working in the booth with Colón on many,

all the while writing and arranging music.

In addition to jazz and salsa, she sang in opera choruses in New York City and along the Eastern seaboard with local and regional companies, and wrote and performed several one-woman cabaret shows in venues in Greenwich Village. She founded a music education company for young children, Música Para Mí, offering full-immersion Spanish music classes in New York City, for 16 years. It was the first such business of its kind in the U.S.

Her musical road didn’t stop diverging until she eventually realized the road she was meant to walk was her own. 

After many years of singing other people's music while writing her own, she dedicated herself 

to singing only her own compositions, and later solely to composing. 

As the poet Antonio Machado said, there is no road, you make the road by walking. 

Graciela makes her road by composing.