Carlos Fariñas Cantero

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Endowed with elevated artistic and musical sensitivity, vast culture, a mind privileged by nature and great capacity for work, master Fariñas is an extraordinary man, determined and firm, strict and rigorous. Owner of a strong personality, with a severe face, marked by countless nocturnal hours of hard work, he hides beneath his exterior appearance a human being brimming with music and poetry.

Faithful to his principles and committed to his time, he is known fundamentally as the great composer that he is. However, his life has been so fruitful and rich in so many aspects that it is very difficult to compress it into a few lines.

He was born in Cienfuegos. After his first contacts with music in the family setting itself, he moved to La Habana, where he was a student of Ardévol, Gramatges, Serafín Pro, Edgardo Martín, Argeliers León and Enrique González Mántici.

In 1956 he received classes from Aaron Copland, Eleazar de Carlvalho and Seymour Lipkin at the Berkshire music center, in the United States.

Between 1961 and 1963 he studied at the Chaiskovski Conservatory, in Moscow with Alexander Pirumov, Dimitriv Kavalevski and Rogal Levitski.

Upon his return to Cuba he worked as a professor and musical adviser. He was director of the García Caturla Conservatory.

He composed Muros, rejas y vitrales for orchestra, Atanos and Tres sones sencillos for piano, Oda a Camilo, Despertar (ballet), Sonata for violin and cello, Cuartetos for string quartet, Tientos (Prize from the Biennial of Young Composers in Paris, 1970), Diálogos, Relieves, Hecho historia (ballet), In Rerum Natura for chamber, El Bosque ha echado a andar, Punto y tonadas, for string orchestra.

His extensive catalog of more than one hundred musical works of a wide variety of genres: chamber music, symphonic, choral, concertos, electroacoustic, soloists, opera, ballet, film and theater.

He used very innovative elements in his compositions (and worked with) electroacoustic media. He made music for film.

His Seis sones sencillos for piano are well known, inspired by the sones of Alejandro García Caturla and Carlos Borbolla.

From 1976 is his monumental El bosque ha echado a andar, dedicated to Che, where he integrates a wide set of Afro-Cuban percussion with the symphonic orchestra.

Very important for his professional life was the prize he received in 1969 at the VI Biennial of Paris, for his work Tiento II, composed that same year while cutting sugarcane as a volunteer machete worker.

Among his latest creations we want to highlight the Concerto for Cello, premiered in 1998 in Mexico by the notable Aztec cellist Carlos Prieto, and the Concerto for Guitar premiered in Poland, also in 1999, by Cuban guitarist Joaquín Clerch. In both concertos the composer manifests in a clear way that he has made his own the Martian thought that expresses: "Let the world be grafted into our republics, but let the trunk be from our republics". His music overflows with Cubanized universality and universalized Cubanness.

He was director of the Music Department of the José Martí National Library and Head of the Electroacoustic Music Laboratory of the Higher Institute of Art (ISA) until his last days.

He has given numerous lectures in Europe and the United States, and his music has been performed in Cuba and more than twenty countries. He has conducted the National Symphonic Orchestra, the Radio Orchestra of the former West Berlin and chamber ensembles in Venezuela, Mexico and Cuba, in the performance of his works.

He has also been invited to be part of a large number of juries in Composition and Musicology competitions in Cuba and other countries.