Carlos Alberto
Vázquez

Biography

Carlos Alberto Vázquez is one of the most outstanding Latin American contemporary composers coming from the Caribbean basin. Born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, he studied music at the University of Puerto Rico, University of Pittsburgh, New York University, and La Sorbonne in Paris, where he earned his Doctoral degree. His composition teachers have been Rafael Aponte Ledée, Frank MacCarty, and Bruce Saylor.

Vázquez has composed and presented two of the most ambitious works ever realized in Puerto Rico: the opera ##INLINE9## and the ##INLINE10##. His works have been premiered and performed across the Americas and Europe since 1972, at major festivals including the First Latin American Contemporary Music Festival in Venezuela, the International Electroacoustic Music Festival of Varadero, Cuba, and the Festival of Contemporary Music of Havana.

His works have been performed by prestigious orchestras including the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Mainz, Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Simón Bolívar, Orquesta Sinfónica de Panamá, and Orquesta Nacional de El Salvador, among others. Under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, he attended a seminar on new computer music techniques at Stanford University in 1995.

Vázquez has been commissioned by the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra (twice), the Inter-American Music Council of the Organization of American States, and Mexico’s CMMAS, among others. He completed artist residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy (2007), Fundación Valparaíso in Spain (2011), and CMMAS in Mexico (2014).

He was founder and first President of Puerto Rico’s National Association of Composers, Executive Director of the Caribbean Composers Forum Organization, and Professor at the University of Puerto Rico Music Department from 1978 to 2013, where he founded and directed the Electronic Music Lab. He currently resides in the Washington, D.C. area.