A forum for the appreciation of all things related to the classical music of Latin America.
Although Mackenna’s first work dates from 1909, it is her fourth composition, Lieder (1929), that is particularly significant. This is the first work to ensue from her relationship with German musicologist Hans Mersmann (1891-1971), with whom she had begun to study music composition three years earlier. Second, it also marks the beginning of a period …
Approximately two to three years after composing Chants (1988, for unaccompanied flute), Alfredo del Mónaco met with oboist Jaime Martínez, who provided the composer with specific suggestions about rendering extended techniques, special fingerings and other effects on the oboe.1)Martínez, email to the author, 3 August, 2018. Martínez, who is currently the principal oboist of the …
Born into an aristocratic family in Santiago, Chile, Carmela Mackenna Subercaseaux (1879-1962) showed an early inclination towards creative expression, including painting, writing and music. In 1917, for example, after a piano recital presented by Bindo Paoli’s students, she was lauded in the press for having the “soul of an artist.” Nevertheless, years earlier she had …
Chilean composer René Amengual was born in 1911 in Santiago de Chile. At the age of twelve, in 1923 he entered the National Conservatory, where he studied piano with Rosita Renard (1894-1949) and composition with Pedro Humberto Allende (1885-1959). Upon finishing his studies in 1935, Amengual began a career as an educator in the Conservatory, …
“Latin American & Spanish Masterpieces for Flute & Piano,” Stephanie Jutt, flute; Elena Abend and Pablo Zinger, piano. Albany Records. Stephanie Jutt is a free-lance flutist who lives in New York. Formerly on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her creative output also includes arrangements that she has published with International Music Company, as …
Teresa Carreño finished the composition of her Serenade for String Orchestra on September 13, 1895 during a summer stay in Pertisau, a small village located on the Archensee Lake of the Austrian Tyrol. She visited Pertisau for the purpose of resting from her busy concert touring engagements while meeting with a group of piano students …
Parnassianism was a French poetry movement that developed during the second half of the 19th century. It’s located chronologically after Romanticism and before Symbolism. Theophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle and José María de Heredia were Parnassian poets; also, Stephane Mallarme and Charles Baudelaire wrote some Parnassian poetry before becoming Symbolists. Parnassians declared art for art’s …
With the notable exception of a few early examples, the era of Latin American chamber music for wind instruments began with a smattering of compositions around the period of the First World War. One of the first of these, Villa-Lobos’s Sextuor mystique (1917), for flute, oboe, saxophone, celeste, harp and guitar, was followed with a …
Alcides Lanza (1929-) is an Argentinean composer who has been living in Canada since 1971, when he joined the music faculty of McGill University in Montreal. His extensive catalog includes works for conventional instruments as well as for electronic media of various types. I am familiar with only one of his compositions, his Tres piezas …
Although chamber music composition in the Americas is still a field largely populated by men, there are nevertheless encouraging signs that this tendency is changing; indeed, since about the 1990s there are increasingly more Latin American women who are gaining prominence and recognition as composers. In this article, I would like to review the contributions …