Maiguashca Mesías Maiguashca

Mesías Maiguashca (born 24 December 1938) is an Ecuadorian composer and an advocate of the new music, especially electroacoustic music. Born to indigenous parents and a former student of Stockhausen, his musical language reflects the profound impact that the Andean folklore of his youth and the rigor of the European avant-garde have had on his perception of sound.

Biography

Born in Quito, Maiguashca studied music at the Conservatorio Nacional de Quito, at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY (1958–65), with Alberto Ginastera at the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires, and at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne. In 1965–66 he returned to Quito to teach at the National Conservatory, but then moved back to Germany to attend the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, and the Fourth Cologne Courses for New Music in 1966–67, where he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen (Béhague 2001; Stockhausen 1971, 201–202). He is regarded as one of the central figures of the Cologne School, active since the mid-1970s (Kapko-Foretić 1980, 50).

Maiguashca worked closely with Stockhausen in the Electronic Music Studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne from 1968 to 1972, and joined Stockhausen's ensemble for performances at the German Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. He also prepared the recording of the collective composition Ensemble, organized by Stockhausen for the Darmstadt Courses in 1967. In 1971 he became a founding member of the Oeldorf Group of composers and performers, as well as beginning work at the Centre Européen pour la Recherche Musicale in Metz, at IRCAM in Paris, and at the ZKM, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe (Béhague 2001). He has taught in Metz, Stuttgart, Basel, Quito, and Győr, amongst other places. From 1990 to 2004 he was Professor of Electronic Music at the Musikhochschule of Freiburg im Breisgau, the town where he has lived since 1996.