Julio Estrada - Life

Life

Estrada was born in Mexico City, where his family had been exiled from Spain since 1941. He began his musical studies in Mexico from 1953–65, where he studied composition with Julián Orbón. In Paris from 1965-69 he studied with Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen and attended courses and lectures of Iannis Xenakis. In Germany he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1968 and with György Ligeti in 1972. He completed a Ph.D in Musicology at Strasbourg University from 1990-1994.

Since 1974 he became researcher in music at the UNAM Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, where he was appointed as the Chair of a project on Mexican Music History and as the head of "Música, Sistema Interactivo de Investigación y Composición", a musical system designed by himself. He is the first music scholar to be honored as member of the Science Academy of Mexico, and by the Mexican Education Ministry as National Researcher since 1984. He created a Composition Seminar at UNAM, where he has been teaching compositional theory and philosophy of composition.

He has written about a hundred articles based on his research. Some have been translated into English, French, German, Italian and Japanese. He is the General Editor of La Música de México He wrote with Jorge Gil (IIE UNAM, Mexico 1984). He has postulated a General Theory of Intervallic Classes, applicable to macro and microintervallic scales of duration and of pitch. In the field of the continuum Estrada has developed new methods of multidimensional graphic description of several parameters of sound or rhythm. His research on the continuum field was published in 1998 in France : Ouvrir l’horizon du son : le continuum.

He has been a visiting professor at Stanford, California, San Diego, New Mexico, Musikwissenschaft Institut, Rostock and Darmstadt.