Miguel Aguilar

Miguel Aguilar Ahumada (Huara, Chile, 12 April 1931) is a Chilean composer whose output centres on instrumental music, above all chamber and piano music, with a notable affinity for serialism and twelve-tone technique. Much of his work was carried out in Concepción, where he taught and worked in cultural administration.

His training began in 1945 with the Dutch teacher Fré Focke, in orchestration, and continued with composition studies at the National Conservatory of the University of Chile. From 1963 he trained in orchestral conducting at the Musikhochschule in Cologne with Wolfgang von de Nahmer. In Concepción he first directed the city's conservatory and then the university's arts department, a post he held between 1980 and 1983.

At the same time he published musicological articles in the Revista musical chilena and Atenea, and music criticism in newspapers in Concepción and Santiago. He received numerous distinctions, among them the Concepción Municipal Arts Prize in 1986.

His pieces are usually brief; the composer himself called them microforms. In them, both in his instrumental and vocal music, the influence of the writer Franz Kafka and the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro is clearly apparent. His importance lies in having united a very pronounced serial rigour with concrete literary references, which gave his catalogue a distinctive identity within the Chilean music of his time.