Oscar Edelstein
Oscar Edelstein is an Argentine contemporary composer. Known for creativity and inventiveness, he is frequently described as leading Latin America's avant-garde. He is also a pianist, conductor, and researcher.
Biography
Edelstein was born in La Paz, Argentina in the province of Entre Ríos. He spent his childhood in Paraná, Entre Ríos's capital, a city known for its river Paraná, South America's second-longest river, and its name is drawn from the Tupi language, meaning "like the sea" due to its width. Entre Ríos is literally the province "between rivers", and for a short time it was an independent republic – a spirit it has maintained to this day and that has influenced Edelstein.Edelstein is from a family of musicians, but his father, a road engineer, also inspired him with a love of machines and technology. He triggered Edelstein's desire to compose by a birthday present at the age of five of a Geloso portable tape recorder. It was his first instrument and tool for composition before the piano.
His early interest in creating music was not easy for many of his schoolteachers to understand. To them, all the important composers were dead; therefore, it was up to Edelstein to prove that this was not true. Discovering information about living composers while living in a small province was not straightforward and required Edelstein's insatiable curiosity and persistent questioning. He was fortunate to have the imagination and open-mindedness of many of his family and teachers, who brought some of the answers he needed. One piano teacher, Eva Taubas, was significant for allowing him at seven to "improvise Beethoven" in his lessons, in a sense showing him it was possible, as Edelstein puts it, "to destroy Beethoven" and construct something new.
Piano – Bed or Ship?
At twelve, his aunt, the well-known Argentine pianist Sara Zimerman, played him a Vladimir Horowitz recording, hoping to encourage him to be a classical concert pianist, but in fact she gave Edelstein the big argument he needed to define his future. He remembers saying, "He has said all that you can say in this language, so let me try something different."He had a special relationship with the piano, and he desired to be another kind of player, seeing that the piano could either be a bed or a ship.
Speaking with God
One music theory teacher from Paraná would take Edelstein with him to Santa Fe Conservatoire, at the age of eleven, to try to begin his study of harmony and counterpoint as an unofficial student. The teacher told his mother, "Oscar is unusually gifted, but he really needs to be better at following the rules." His mother looked at Oscar in agreement; however, when the teacher continued with advice about how the young Edelstein would also need to follow the rules more strictly to make his own musical experience, his mother looked at the teacher and said, "You are the professor, but he is the music." This kind of environment gave Edelstein the conviction that he could be the creative source, something he still respects to this day whenever he teaches.Edelstein was also encouraged by a provocative "anarchist" uncle who told him, "You can believe in God if you want, but look at the priests and the rabbis, look at their faces and tell me, if God existed and was intelligent, would he really need to choose this face to speak to you?" Edelstein took the underlying message of all these experiences to mean that he could be the source of the music, and therefore, in his search to become a composer, he needed to link directly to composers, authors, and artists. With this in mind, he began his lifetime search for originality that fuelled years of intense private study.
El Rio, Juan L. Ortiz and interference
Sitting by the river listening to a Motorola Transoceanic Radio, as a young boy, he continued to seek out "living composers." There was Argentina's national radio station broadcasting concerts from Teatro Colón far away in Buenos Aires, stations from the BBC World Service, from Japan, and all over the world; and when asked by students, at a master class in London and in Birmingham in 2007, how a person from such a small town could become interested in contemporary music, he told a story that he has often told, describing how sitting listening to the radio in a car at night, with the rain, and a storm, and the sound of the river, he never quite knew what was the music and what was the interference.Still asking difficult questions that were difficult to answer, Edelstein discovered Juan Laurentino Ortiz, Argentina's poet most highly respected by other writers, artists, and musicians who spent the last years of his life in Paraná. Juan L. Ortiz was to profoundly influence Edelstein, and through many hours sat by the river talking, became a mentor and guide, for it was only he who had the connection to a world of literature, music, and culture that could begin to answer Edelstein's intense curiosity. Many intellectuals, young people, and important cultural figures came to visit Ortiz, so when he discovered news of Stockhausen, he shared it with Edelstein, as well as introducing him to other great works of culture. At thirteen, Edelstein went with Ortiz and some other boys on the long trip to Buenos Aires, taking the boat that crossed the river Paraná before the tunnel was built, to Teatro San Martín to see a work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Both the experience and the memory of it are like an extraordinary dream where Edelstein remembers dancers with mirrors, intense conversation with Ortiz, and the cultural thrill of being in Buenos Aires for the first time. Edelstein says that the sensation of being in the house of Ortiz was like being in another river, with incredible labyrinthic connections to the whole world through time and space. It was as if Ortiz had tunnels across the world, including to Mao Zedong and Chu En-Lai in Peking − who Ortiz visited in 1957 − and to authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Macedonio Fernandez, and Juan Jose Saer who all visited Ortiz in Paraná.
Buenos Aires: The Paradox
In 1972, it was with Ortiz's influence that Edelstein made the step of moving to the capital to study. He arrived in Buenos Aires with a recommendation from Ortiz to study with Juan Carlos Paz, but Paz died days before he arrived. Edelstein stayed in Buenos Aires, and it was paradoxically only many years later, in 1979, that he connected with Francisco Kröpfl, considered the best disciple of Paz. With him, he finally completed his study of composition by being given the most important tool – the mastery and control of pitch. This completed Edelstein's appreciation of the universe of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Vienna School − a world which Paz had introduced to Spanish-speaking countries.His other teachers, before Kröpfl, were the prominent Argentine composers from a different aesthetic and school, Mariano Etkin and José Maranzano. Later, during the most turbulent years of the period of Argentina's "Dirty War", Edelstein left the country and spent nearly three years traveling and studying. His travels included two years in France, staying near Paris and also going to the Abbaye de Solesmes, visiting libraries, museums, and monasteries to understand more about medieval music.
Career: revisioning and creating from nothing
Creating centers, reviews, and ensembles
Edelstein's career as a composer has been characterized by breaking new ground. He directs many chamber groups of improvisation in music, frequently exploring the interplay between music and theatre, and has attained several national and international awards for his chamber and electronic productions. He is known for his technical mastery of composition, his original methods of composition and direction of improvisation, and his librettos. As a young leading Argentine composer, he was left with a strong impression from many of the principal composers that he met, such as Pierre Boulez, Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki, Mario Davidovsky, and John Chowning. He has also helped to introduce many composers from around the world to Argentina, including Francisco Guerrero from Spain. However, it was with Luigi Nono, who visited Buenos Aires in 1985, that there was a special and shared sense of understanding.Centro de Investigación Musical
Between 1974 and 1977, Edelstein was a scholarship holder at the Centro de Investigaciones en Ciencia, Material, Arte y Tecnología, and between 1985 and 1986 he was one of the three young musicians selected to work at the Laboratorio de Investigación y Producción Musical It was here that he composed one of the works for which he is most known, Viril Occidente I. Another project of Edelstein's in L.I.P.M. was Estudio y Aplicación de los medios digitales en la Composición Musical, supported by a scholarship of the Fundación Antorchas, and used by Edelstein to compose Viril Occidente II.Edelstein also held a scholarship in Science and Technology from the University of Buenos Aires to work on several different projects related to music analysis and production with computers at the Centro de Investigación Musical , in the University of Buenos Aires. This center was founded and directed by Edelstein from 1985 to 1992, working with a team of professors: Pablo Di Liscia, Daniel Montes, Horacio Gutman, and Pablo Cetta. The CIM was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence as applied to music analysis, and the projects they developed were the first to be formally registered in Argentina.
Nueva Música, Otras Música, Antorchas' & Lulú
Edelstein was also a member of Nueva Música, the group of composers and teachers founded by Paz and continued by Kröpfl, until four years later, in 1984, when Edelstein decided to create a new group with eleven composers of his generation, all from different schools and aesthetics, called Otras Músicas. As an association of composers, Otras Músicas was dedicated to the diffusion of contemporary music in the continent.In 1991, he continued his efforts to develop Argentina's infrastructure for disseminating ideas and theories of contemporary music in Argentina, by co-founding and editing a specialist music magazine, Lulú: Revista de Teorías y Técnicas Musicales with Carla Fonseca and Federico Monjeau. It was the first journal in Latin America to be dedicated to the contemporary arts, and in the editorial committee were Argentina's most important composers, musicologists, painters, and writers.
In 1992, Edelstein was the youngest artist to win Argentina's prestigious award of the Antorchas ''Scholarship for Outstanding Artists of the Intermediate Generation'' which he used to compose his opera El Telescopio.