Eduardo Marturet - Composer

Composer

Eduardo Marturet was born in Caracas in 1953. In 1971, after graduating as a science major in Venezuela, took residency in Cambridge, England, for 9 years. At East Anglia University he received his degree in Piano, Percussion, Composition, and Conducting, the specialty for which he is best known both inVenezuela and abroad.

As a pupil of Kathlin Wood, Alexis Rago and Roger Smalley, his special interest in new music led him, in 1976, to become founding president of the CCAT Contemporary Music Society; and also invited to join the SPNM Society for the Promotion of New Music and play his compositions. He became Music Director of the Cambridge Contemporary Dance Group, for whom he wrote and performed a number of works. After two years in Cambridge, as Music Director with the Arbury Orchestra, he returned to Venezuela in 1979 as Associate Conductor with the Orquesta Filarmónica de Caracas, thus beginning a long career as a conductor. He was the first Music Director at the Teresa Carreño Theatre, a position he held for three years before turning his full attention to a busy international career and his current activity as Artistic Director of the Sinfonietta Caracas and Artistic Director with the Orquesta Sinfónica Venezuela from 1987 until 1995.

Since his early days as a student in Cambridge, Marturet considered the “concert” to be an obsolete form of expression, from the standpoint of the creator. Despite his great success as a composer, over a period of seven years, he only wrote three scores that followed the traditional form of orchestral music: Notturno 1980, Sol por Occidente 1982, and Secretos 1986; Rubén Monasterios, the critic from the Caracas daily El Nacional had this to say about his debut: “The score written for this work by Eduardo Marturet is one of the most inspired of all those we have heard by contemporary Venezuelan composers in recent times.”

It does seem a paradox for a successful conductor to be the person proposing a split between the concert hall and new music. In 1980, Marturet founded MUSICA VIVA, a trio specializing in contemporary music.

In 1982, Marturet was entrusted with the musical design for the Venezuelan pavilion at the Epcot Center in Florida, USA. Although never brought to fruition, this project was fundamental for the further evolution of the ideas regarding environmental music that he had been playing with since his days as a student in Cambridge. Marturet experiments and develops concepts of his own, such as “soundscape architecture” and the subliminal effect of sounds that are inaudible to the human ear.

It was in 1986 that he turned firmly back to composing. His Canto LLano 1976, his most often-played work, as well as Secretos 1986, and his music for the Franco-Venezuelan movie Oriana 1985 (prize for best music at the Mérida Festival ‘86), already included elements of “environmental music,” and the feeling of sound manipulated in “real time,” which is the conceptual cornerstone of the 24-hour macroformat conceived for the music at Casa Bonita 1988: this composition consists of three great simultaneous works, each lasting eight hours, where the composer has poured in the results of 15 years of research and reflection about sound.

“Any attempt to explain Casa Bonita must first mention Eduardo Marturet, unquestionably one of the greatest talents in present-day Venezuela. This involves more than just discovering the composer, known up to now as a brilliant conductor. In the unconventional being that overflows with a work that fills the three main halls of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas.” —Pedro López, El Siglo, 19.2.88 “Eduardo Marturet is one of the few composers today working with extended duration time structures. His CABRE from Casa Bonita creates an electronic sound environment which demonstrates the composer’s craft from the level of minute microcosmic points to an expanded form of suspended macrocosmic euphoria inspired by meditation.” —La Monte Young, New York, 10.10.88

His most productive period began in the 1990s, with the composition of experimental works such as Las Campanas del Silencio (for all the belfries in the world) 1992, the chamber music pieces Tres Tiempos 1990, Música para 6 y Saxo 1992, La Hamaca 1998, Paramytha 2002, and the symphonic works Siglos de Luz 1995, Capricho Criollo 1996, Mantra 1997, Memorias de un Bravo Pueblo 2002.

In 2004 he received the “Best Music” prize awarded by ANAC (National Association of Cinema Authors) for the soundtrack of the movie Manuela Sáenz ("Best Music" Caracas Municipal Prize, 2000). 10.2004