César Bolaños

César Bolaños, born in Lima in 1931, is one of the leading figures of the Peruvian musical avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century. A composer who was also a musicologist, his output combines electroacoustic experimentation with a constant concern for the word and for sound space, and his name is associated with the major centres of electronic creation in Latin America.

His training began in Lima, at the National Conservatory and at the Sas-Rosay Academy, where he studied with Sas between 1946 and 1953. While still in the Peruvian capital, he co-founded the group Renovación with Valcárcel and Escot. He then broadened his studies in New York, at the Manhattan School of Music (1959) and at the RCA Institute of Electronic Technology (1960–1963). He completed his preparation at the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires, where he worked with Ginastera, Nono, Messiaen, Dallapiccola and Maderna, and where he helped set up the electronic music laboratory, in which he taught electronic composition between 1964 and 1970. Those seven years in Argentina are, according to sources, his most fruitful period. There he collaborated with the mathematician M. Milchberg on probability calculation and on the use of computers for composition.

On returning to Peru, he directed the music and dance department of the National Institute of Culture (1973–1983) and taught at the National Conservatory and at the University of Lima. In parallel, he researched ancient and traditional music, making significant contributions on pre-Hispanic and popular instruments.

From 1963 onwards he abandoned references to popular music and firmly placed himself in the avant-garde. He conceived of music as inseparable from its social context and as an ideological expression, an idea embodied in stage works such as ESEPCO I and Divertimento III. The word and the voice occupy a central place in his output: in Intensidad y altura (1964), his first electroacoustic work, a poem by César Vallejo undergoes a dramatic treatment, and in Ñacahuasu (1970) the text is amplified against an instrumental line distributed among groups placed at different points in the hall. His spatial ideas also extend to Interpolaciones (1961), for electric guitar and tape.

His legacy lies both in this exploration of the relationship between word, space and technology and in his work as a researcher and teacher, which connected the avant-garde with the study of the Andean musical tradition.