When New Mexican folklorist and musician Cipriano Vigil died this week, he left behind an immense trove of music history: binders of music, recordings of his own music as well as that of other folk musicians from around the region, and hundreds of stringed instruments, many handmade.

"We were going through the computers, and it was just hundreds and hundreds of his compositions on his computer," son Cipriano Vigil Jr. said in an interview Friday. "It wasn't just the traditional folklore music — it was contemporary; it was little symphonies that he wrote."

Anytime a melody came to the elder Vigil's head, his son said, he rushed to figure it out and memorialize it.

Vigil earned renown far and wide for his lifelong commitment to all kinds of music, and particularly to the traditional folk

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