<aside>
Hello! I just released my first album, which has been a passion project for the past two years. This album features all Mexican composers that were commissioned by me to write unaccompanied and accompanied pieces for the saxophone. Give it a listen below!
</aside>
https://open.spotify.com/album/7pQcpWX74XiJrHQU2YHavV?si=F-gLbZNITe69ksSuf9QwBg
The project to record an album started two years ago, when in a lesson with my professor we discussed a possible project that would help my career. We came up with the idea to create an album of new commissions from Mexican composers. The entire process of commissioning the composers and recording the album is recorded in my doctorate dissertation. It has been a pleasure to work with these composers, the musicians and artists involved to bring this album to completion. Below you will find a Spotify mini-player of the album and more information about the composers and the compositions themselves. Enjoy!
Ana Lara is a vital personality in Mexican contemporary music. She is highly regarded as a composer, as well as a promoter and programmer. She has worked as artistic director of contemporary music at the Festival Internacional Cervantino (2007-2009) and created the Festival Internacional Música y Escena which she directed for 13 years (1998-2012). Since 1989 she has produced the program Hacia una nueva música at University Radio (Radio UNAM) devoted to contemporary music. Since 2015, together with Jean-Paul Bernard (former director of Les Percussions de Strasbourg) she has created Afinidades Insosuchadas (Unexpected Affinities), a platform for interdisciplinary works based on collaboration and academic education.
She was the Cultural Attachée at the Mexican Embassy in France and the Director of the Instituto Cultural de Mexico in Paris from 2016-2017. Recent works include Au-delà du visible for string quartet commissioned by the Louvre Museum and the Quatuor Diotima, Malgré la nuit, for piano, percussion and electronics commissioned by the CIRM, Callada Calma, composed to celebrate Mario Lavista's 70 birthday for mezzo, flute, bass clarinet and piano, and El Baile, musical theater commissioned by the National Institute of Fine Arts. An evening of Ana Lara's chamber music was presented at Théâthre Gralin in Nantes by the Ensemble Utopik and was part of their project Rencontres Utopik (2014).
The music of Arturo Fuentes, a composer born in 1975, has its roots in Mexico where he began playing guitar in a rock band in the 1980s. He then traveled to Europe in 1997 where he studied composition and philosophy in Milan and Paris. He finally found his artistic home in Vienna and became an Austrian citizen in 2020.
Premiered mainly in Europe and America, his music establishes a dialogue with literature, painting, performing arts, and philosophy. His catalog, consisting of more than one hundred works published entirely by LondonHall, is a sound tapestry enriched by an amalgam of digital, visual and acoustic media. This corpus of works which includes theatrical, chamber, and concert music blends contemporary compositional languages such as spectral, polyrhythmic, and minimalist textures with genres as diverse as jazz, pop, and electronic music.
At the intersection of genres and aesthetic forms, Fuentes creates a counterpoint that unfolds as a labyrinthine and colorful kaleidoscope of sound; he delves into the detail of writing, lyrical expressiveness, and a multiplicity of nuances. Fuentes has achieved a distinctive style from his earliest works three decades ago to his most recent musical theaters and operas which he directs himself, the search for a personal voice is evident. For him, music is not measured only by technique, but by the imaginative and artistic capacity it projects and by the link the artist manages to establish with society.
He began playing the guitar at the age of eight and studied music at the CIEM with María Antonieta Lozano. In 1992 he met composer Franco Donatoni, with whom he studied until his arrival in Milan in 1997. He also studied there with Luca Cori and met Horacio Vaggione in Paris, who opened new avenues in composition, and at the same time, completed a master's degree in philosophy with Antonia Soulez. In 2002 he was selected for the annual IRCAM Cursus, where he composed Objet-Object for theorbo, electronics and video. -Arturo Fuentes
She began her musical education at the age of nine with piano lessons. At the conservatory of her hometown she studied simultaneously piano and classical composition, to which she later would dedicate completely. After studying electroacoustic composition with Javier Torres Maldonado, she graduated at the Conservatorio Arrigo Boito in Parma, Italy. She has participated in several masterclasses with composers like Achim Bornhoeft, Iñaki Estrada, and Gabriele Manca, among others. Currently, she is studying to earn her master's degree.