In Tune with a Calling
In May 2025, Pablo Gómez-Estévez ’18 presented the overture “Too Niche, Too Nietzsche,” a piece from his opera-in-progress, New Cibao, at Carnegie Hall’s popular Nuestros Sonidos (Our Sounds) festival, which celebrates Latin culture in the United States.
It marked an energizing milestone for an artist whose career began by trusting a calling few around him understood.
“My story is one of leaps of faith and serendipity,” says the prolific musician, composer, and educator.
Pablo Gómez-Estévez ’18
In his early teens, growing up in the Dominican Republic, he filled notebooks with ideas for stories and poems. Then his grandmother gifted him a cellphone, and he began capturing melodies, improvisations, and bits of writing whenever inspiration struck. But this growing creative world often clashed with the more conventional futures others envisioned for him.
“Music is the first controversial decision of my life,” he recalls, noting that his mother was always supportive. “The idea of studying music was essentially a foreign thing in the DR. They had no idea you could do that. And now I’ve finished my doctorate.”
On a friend’s recommendation (Victor Hernández Sang ’13), Pablo enrolled at Luther, where he majored in composition and piano, minored in philosophy, sang in choirs, and collaborated with the dance and creative writing departments on interdisciplinary projects. “At Luther, I was able to nurture my curiosity,” he says. “It gave me a strong foundation for what came after and what’s happening now.”
After earning a doctorate from Bowling Green State University, he relocated to New York City, where he became a research associate and creative fellow at the City University of New York’s Dominican Studies Institute. There, he studied the archives of Dominican composer Rafael Petitón Guzmán (1894–1983) while developing New Cibao, a Dominican sci-fi opera about a society addicted to synthetic dreams, structured as a large-scale TikTok. He hopes to premiere the work in 2026.
Pablo Gomez Estevez '18 earned a doctorate from Bowling Green State University.
Pablo says he’s living this current chapter of his life with adventure and ambition as he continues to learn about himself.
“The more time I spend in the U.S., the more Dominican I become,” he says. “At the same time, when I go home to Santiago, I need to retranslate myself. I feel like I’m in between.”
Pablo is also the founder of Pineo Media, an interactive music and storytelling platform that promotes emotional literacy in children. The idea originated during his time at Luther, and at Bowling Green, he received seed funding through the Hatch entrepreneurial program to expand the project.
“I connected with a calling through music,” he says, “to dream with my eyes open, to have this big vision, and to do it. God has given me these talents, and I was tasked with finding new ways to develop them and put them into service for others.”