Mario Lavista

Famed Mexican Composer Mario Lavista at Illinois Wesleyan’s
Symposium of Contemporary Music 2003

Feb. 28, 2003

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Mario Lavista, one of Mexico’s most respected composers, will headline Illinois Wesleyan’s Symposium of Contemporary Music scheduled for Feb. 24 and 25 in Presser Hall, 1210 Park St., Bloomington. Established in 1954, the symposium, which is free and open to the public, promotes and encourages the performance of contemporary music and recognizes prominent living composers.

Monday, Feb. 24, at 8 p.m. in Westbrook Auditorium, there will be a panel discussion on literary influences in Mario Lavista’s music. In addition to Lavista, panel participants will include IWU Associate Professor and Chair of Hispanic Studies Carmela Ferradans, and Professor of Composition and Theory David Vayo.

On Tuesday, Feb. 25, at 4 p.m. in room 258, special guest Carmen Helena Téllez, director of Indiana University’s Latin American Music Center, will give a lecture on “Choral Music and the Polarization between Modernism and Nationalism in Latin America.” Téllez’s visit is being funded by the International Studies and Latin American Studies programs at Illinois Wesleyan.

At 8 p.m. that evening, in Westbrook, there will be a concert of Lavista’s compositions performed by faculty, student and guest artists. Guest performers will include violist Omar Hernández-Hidalgo, winner of the 2002 International Music Presser Award, and the first violist in Mexico to win first prizes at both the National Viola contest and the National String Quartet Competition, and Angelo Favis, professor of guitar at Illinois State University. The concert also will feature the original composition “Mind’s Eye,” by Stephen Cabell. Cabell, who is a student at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, is the winner of IWU’s third High School Composers’ Contest. Students from the academy will perform “Mind’s Eye.”

Lavista, whose music is performed throughout Latin America, North America and Europe, is a professor at Mexico’s National Conservatory of Music, and serves as director of the contemporary-music journal Pauta. Lavista studied composition in Mexico before going to Paris and Darmstadt, where he took courses with Xenakis, Pousseur and Stokhausen. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and Mexico’s National Arts and Sciences Award.

Lavista’s compositions favor the intense exploration of tone color and special effects in voices and instruments. Despite his commitment to new sounds, he also allows himself to be influenced by the music and literature of the past, as in his Missa Brevis ad Consolationis Dominam Nostram, which pays tribute to the stylistic vocabulary of medieval and Renaissance composers like Josquin des Prez and Guillaume de Machaut. The Missa brevis was premiered in 1995 by the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble under the direction of Téllez at the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington.

According to Téllez, “Missa brevis is the first choral work by Lavista, but it already claims a place among the most important Latin American choral works of our time.”

For additional information, contact the Illinois Wesleyan School of Music office at (309) 556-3061.