Aurelio de la Vega, Cuban avant-garde composer, has passed away

February 14, 2022

At the age of 96, in Los Angeles, California, Aurelio de la Vega, one of the most important Cuban composers of the twentieth century, passed away last Saturday, February 12.

Author of a significant catalog that encompassed symphonic and chamber music, scores for soloists and orchestra, songs and electroacoustic experiments, he had from a very young age a clear idea that art should explore uncharted territories and open new perspectives to the listener.

For this reason, he assimilated early on the discoveries of European avant-gardes from the first half of the past century –serialism, atonalism, dodecaphonism– and from that learning onward he was forging his own path.

In his trajectory, the following can be marked as representative milestones of his maturity: Triptych (1946) for string orchestra; Introduction and Episode (1953), for symphonic orchestra; Legend of the Creole Ariel (1953) for cello and piano; Cantata (1958) for two sopranos, contralto and twenty-one instruments, on texts by Roberto Fernández Retamar; Structures (1962), for piano and string quartet; Vectors (1963), electroacoustic music; Exospheres (1966) for oboe and piano, premiered by John Ellis; and Tangents (1973) for violin and magnetic tape.

Upon settling in Los Angeles from the early 1960s, he developed notable work as a university professor, lecturer and promoter of cultural projects. Two stellar moments of his career took place in that city, when in 1972 the celebrated Indian-born conductor Zubin Mehta commissioned him for his premiere with the Los Angeles Symphony of Intrata, a fact he repeated five years later with Adiós.

Alfredo Diez Nieto, with whom he maintained a long friendship, said on the occasion that in 2014 the Havana Festival of Contemporary Music of the Uneac shared a concert with De la Vega in the programming by the Soloists of Havana orchestra, directed by Iván Valiente: "By different paths, Aurelio and I dreamed of how to make Cuban music ours and at the same time of interest to audiences who wish to live new experiences."

In the 2020-2021 Cubadisco Prize edition, alongside a work by his disciple and friend, composer Yalil Guerra, Intrata appeared in the phonogram Cuba: the legacy (Rycy Producciones), by the National Symphonic Orchestra, conducted by Enrique Pérez Mesa, which won the award in the Instrumental Classical Music category.