Juan Orrego-Salas
Juan Antonio Orrego Salas was a Chilean-American composer of contemporary classical music and musicologist.
Orrego Salas was born in Santiago, Chile. He began his studies in composition in his native country with Pedro Humberto Allende and Domingo Santa Cruz. His music came to the attention of American composer Aaron Copland with whom he subsequently studied at Tanglewood in 1946 along with a group of Latin American composers that also included Roque Cordero, Alberto Ginastera, Julián Orbón and Héctor Tosar. While in the United States, he additionally studied composition with Randall Thompson and musicology with Paul Henry Lang on a Guggenheim Fellowship. A second Guggenheim brought him back to the United States in the early 1950s. Throughout that decade, works of his were performed by the Juilliard Quartet, the Louisville Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra.
In 1961, he permanently relocated to the United States to work at Indiana University, where he co-founded the Latin American Music Center. In 1992 he was the inaugural winner of Chile's National Prize for Musical Arts.
He was one of the foremost Chilean composers and one of the most widely known of the musicians from that country around the world. Highlights from his catalogue include six symphonies, four string quartets, two piano concertos, a violin concerto, the cantata América, no en vano invocamos tu nombre, the vocal works El Alba del Alhelí and Canciones Castellanas, and the piece Un Canto para Bolívar composed for Quilapayún, the most important ensemble of Nueva Canción Chilena.
He died in Bloomington, Indiana, on November 24, 2019.
