Paul Basler is Professor of Music (teaching Horn) at the University of Florida where he has been on the faculty since 1993. Prior to his appointment at UF, he served as the Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Music at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya, taught at Western Carolina University, and was the North Carolina Visiting Artist in Residence at Caldwell Community College. Basler is a frequent guest performer, lecturer, and composer at national and international music festivals, horn society workshops, and educational institutions.

Gabriel Navar is a California artist, poet, and college arts educator from the San Francisco Bay Area.  He describes his main focus in his work as the interconnectedness he feels with his natural and urban environment as well as with his culture (he is of Mexican descent), our planet, and the phenomenon and celebration of existence.

Basler’s initial introduction to Gabriel Navar’s poetry was in 2000, when he was commissioned by a Texas high school choir to write them a work based on a Spanish text – Navar’s “Portones abiertos y rostros brillantes.”  Basler was “immediately struck by the incredible imagery of the poetry as well as the obvious joy in life, nature, and love that is so present in Gabriel’s work.”  The collaboration that followed, in that piece as well as a number of subsequent works, was natural, considering the two artists’ compatible outlooks on culture, the human condition, and art itself.  Magnifying the artistic breadth of Navar’s work is his frequent creation of companion paintings for his poems, each set with the same name as the music:  Thus, with Basler’s added musical framework, music, painting, and poetry all interweave to create a rich world, which is, in Navar’s loving words, “about this great and often absurd human theatre we are currently living!”

“Adorable flujo”, was written for and commissioned by the ACDA Junior High/Middle School Honor Choir at the 2001 National Convention in San Antonio, Texas, and their conductor, Dr. Lynne Grackle.  The text by Navar, and the painting that goes with it, is about positively connecting with and truly appreciating the flow of history through our present and on to the future.  It is about “grandchildren to be.”