Alfredo Santa Ana

Special Appointments

Alfredo Santa Ana

Wall Composer In Residence

Alfredo cites the music of Ravel to be the beginning of an active and meaningful relationship with music. He began his studies in piano at the age of 12, and upon moving to the United States from Mexico City he continued to pursue an education in music at Drake University’s Community School of Music in Des Moines, Iowa. As an undergraduate at Missouri’s Truman State University, his commitment to music shifted entirely to composition when he was awarded third place in the Music Teacher’s National Association Composition for a song cycle for piano and tenor. Through a music scholarship by the Theodore Presser Foundation he was able to continue his education in Canada and has found a permanent home in Vancouver.

Since arriving to Vancouver in 2003, Alfredo has been both nominee and recipient of a number of awards and commissions. In 2008 he was a winner of the Canadian University Music Society composition competition at the University of British Columbia for his Eleven Dialogues for violin and cello, and was also a recipient of a BC Arts Council Music Scholarship. His work for film has premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, Sundance, and recently at the 2010 Morelia Film Festival in Mexico. Alfredo was awarded a “Best Soundtrack” award at the Romanian NexT International Film Festival for his work with Canadian filmmaker Jamie Travis, and has also been nominated for a BC Leo Award. Alfredo’s concert music has been performed by a number of new music ensembles and was commissioned by the Standing Wave Ensemble to write a work for their 2010 concert season, a piece which will also be performed at the 2011 Push International Performing Arts Festival. In 2006 the Victoria Symphony Orchestra performed his one-movement work Manifold in their opening concert of the “New Currents in Music” series.

Alfredo holds a doctorate in music composition from the University of British Columbia where his research involved composing music with alternate orderings through ‘impermanent large-scale form.’ His dissertation postulated that hearing music in fixed orders or prescribed formal arrangements may limit other alternative and more creative modes of listening where the listener’s power of inference is largely responsible for the overall aesthetic experience. In addition to having experimented with unfixed structures in music, his interest in multi-version compositions incorporates indeterminacy and aleatoric devices of overlapping segments of music to articulate the different characteristics of each rendering of the work. The emergence of new musical content during performance makes each experience unique and different from other realizations of the same music.

Serenity

The short prelude that introduces the Institute’s podcast was originally composed for piano and string accompaniment. A version for woodwind quintet was subsequently arranged for the members of the WW5, and was titled at its premiere at the DSIR Alumni Dinner on February 3, 2010. The focus of the piece is to overlay different musical textures characterized by dense rhythmic activity over a slow moving harmony. In combination, the music is intended to be as much an introduction as a transition into the subsequent talk.

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