María Álvarez Ríos

María Alvarez Ríos began composing when she was five years old. She studied piano with Luisa Chartrand and composition with Enrique Bellver. She completed her primary studies in the city of Sancti Spíritus and her secondary and university studies in La Habana and at the University of Michigan, United States. She graduated with degrees in teaching for kindergarten, music from the Universidad José Martí, and composition from the Instituto Superior de Arte de La Habana. Among her teachers are Harold Gramatges, Roberto Valera, José Loyola, and Alfredo Diez Nieto.

Alvarez Ríos has written an extensive repertoire of songs for primary and secondary school studies for Cuba's Ministry of Education. She directed the premiere of twenty-eight works for the celebration of the Danzón Centennial Year (a century of Danzón) and composed music for a ballet based on The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry.

In addition to having dedicated much of her life to music, she has also collaborated on various publications. She is the author of theatrical works for which she has won important awards. She has also created and directed children's musical groups, and worked as a music teacher. Furthermore, she has devoted herself to cultivating poetry and has served as a translator of dramatic works, operas, operettas, and songs.

As a composer and performer, she has presented herself in theaters and children's television programs. She has set to music poems by José Martí, Nicolás Guillén, Félix Pita Rodríguez, and Gabriela Mistral. She has composed film documentaries, television serials and musical comedies, as well as choral, chamber, and symphonic music.

Alvarez Ríos developed her artistic life in another concurrent endeavor: teaching, and in this regard her work with the groups Meñique and Joven Meñique stood out, where children learned to develop their individual capacities and in which she put into practice her didactic production and children's songs that occupy a considerable segment of her musical output.

María Alvarez Ríos, a valuable Cuban intellectual and composer, dedicated her work to children.

It is and will be difficult to collect her triumphs in medals and decorations. If she had them, they would be stored in the drawers of oblivion. She is, never was, like the cloud of her hair. Light and silent, she occupied the place she preferred, free from the hurricane's mandates.

She scurried with the breeze, because the breeze is the daughter of the winds and she adored children. A cloud after all, she also knew how to be a whirlwind that swept away the ugly.

In interviews with Cuban artists, she will continue to appear in sentences. "My grandmother took me to Lenin Park, where María met with the children, those from the Meñique group, and she accepted me." "My father wanted me to follow his profession. My mother asked María and she told him that I had conditions for music. Mom convinced my father that way." "I performed on that TV program, Everyone Sings, and María taught me how to place my voice." "We premiered Italian operas translated into Spanish by María."

It could be an interview with a flutist, a sound engineer, a salsa musician, or a soprano. She distributed her immense culture like rain, but she favored the little ones.

The cloud María, embedded in the child's soul, sought to awaken art in any of its manifestations because she knew it as the elixir of spirituality; although, she preferred the language of music and for children, among other creations, she dedicated hundreds of songs, dormant for mass distribution, studied and known in music schools in Cuba and abroad.

In October, at the II Leo Brower Chamber Music Festival, the maestro congratulated her work on the day dedicated to Cuban female composers. Darkness falls on the clouds at night and time tries uselessly to dissolve them. Several generations speak of María.

The cloud María is, never was, among the educators inspired by the spirit of light and Caballero. She gave a path to live in peace and in balance with nature and men. The old girls remember her.