Juan Orrego-Salas

Juan Orrego-Salas (b Santiago, 18 January 1919; d Bloomington, Indiana, 24 November 2019). Chilean composer and musicologist.

In 1943 he completed his composition studies with Pedro Allende and Domingo Santa-Cruz, and also took a diploma in architecture. He taught history at the Santiago Conservatory and conducted the Catholic University Choir, which he had founded in 1938. From 1944 to 1946 Rockefeller and Guggenheim grants enabled him to study in the USA: he studied composition with Thompson and Copland and musicology with Paul Henry Lang and George Herzog. He was then appointed professor of composition at the University of Chile (1947), editor of the Revista musical chilena (1949) and music critic for El mercurio (1950). After completing the degree of Profesor Extraordinario at the University of Chile (1953) he returned to the USA with a second Guggenheim Fellowship. Back in Chile he was for two years director of the Instituto de Extensión Musical and dean of the music department of the Catholic University. He moved again to the USA to found and direct the Latin American Music Center at Indiana University (1961–87), where he was involved in promoting Latin-American music through festivals, concerts, broadcasts and the compiling of the largest existing library of scores and recordings of 20th-century works from this area. In 1971 he received an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University, Santiago, and was accorded corresponding membership of the Chilean Academy of Fine Arts. He has won the Olga Cohen Prize twice (1956 and 1958) and a Biennial Chilean Music Festival Award three times. He received the Gabriel Mistral Prize in 1988 and the Chilean National Arts Prize in 1992. Works have been commissioned by leading institutions and ensembles, and his music has been widely performed.

A neo-classical craftsmanship, tempered by free invention, is characteristic of Orrego-Salas’s music. Formal procedures taken from all periods after the Middle Ages are used without strictness. Something of the variety in his output is demonstrated in the modal linearity of the Canciones castellanas op.20, the colourful instrumentation and energetic rhythm of the Sonata a 4 op.55, and the declamatory monody and concertante writing of the cantata América, no en vano invocamos tu nombre op.57. Since 1961, Orrego-Salas has allowed musical absolutes to permeate his music and play a role in the creation of through-composed forms. Through an architectural process which he describes as ‘minimalist’ he focusses the listener's attention on the most salient modules of a composition, thereby imparting an element of referentiality to ever-changing textures.