Pablo Garrido

Pablo Garrido Vargas was born in Valparaíso on 26 March 1905 and died in Santiago on 14 September 1982. He was a prominent figure in twentieth-century Chilean music, both a composer and a scholar of his country's popular traditions, and his output lies at the crossroads of jazz, interwar avant-garde and American folklore.

He trained as a pianist, violinist and composer in his native city, where his composition teachers were Edward van Dooren and Giuseppe Quintano. For much of his career, until the late 1940s, he devoted himself chiefly to popular music, with particular attention to jazz, and he was one of the founders of the Hot Jazz Club of Chile, established in 1939. His writing combines that jazz heritage with atonality and with elements of Chilean and Latin American indigenous music. He also supported the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, and was among the first Chilean composers to set texts by Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda.

Among his most notable works is the chamber opera La sugestión (1959), to a libretto by Cipriano Rivas Cherif, a contribution to a genre little cultivated in Chile. At the same time, he researched the cueca, Chile's national dance, in works such as Biografía de la cueca (1943) and Historial de la cueca (1979). He also wrote more than two thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, both Chilean and foreign.

His legacy lies in the integration of learned and popular idioms within a broad output and, at the same time, in his work as a researcher of the cueca, which makes him a reference point for the study of Chilean musical folklore.