Ana Lara

Ana Lara (Composer) is a native of Mexico City. She studied piano with Leopoldo González and voice with Charles Laila and Rosa Rimoch from 1979 to 1986. She studied composition with Daniel Catán at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Mexico City in 1982, where she also studied composition with Mario Lavista from 1982 to 1986. She attended a composition workshop with Federico Ibarra at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City from 1984 to 1986 and had post-graduate studies in composition with Wlodzimierz Kotonski and Zbigniew Rudzinski at the Frédéric Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw on a Mexican-Polish study grant from 1986 to 1989. From 2002 to 2004 she studied ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, where she earned her master of arts degree. Among her many honors are a 1990 grant for young artists from the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, two three-year grants from the Sistema Nacional de Creadores del Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) (1994-97, 1998-2001), the USA/Canada/Mexico Creative Artists' Residency Program Grant (1997) and the Bellagio Artistic Residency (2000). Lara was also a featured composer at the 1994 Sonidos de las Américas festival of the American Composers Orchestra and earned a 2000 Latin Grammy nomination as a producer for best classical album. Most recently she shared the Premio de la Asociación de Periodistas y Críticos de Teatro y Música for her work at the 2001 Música y Escena festival. As an organizer, she founded the Sociedad Mexicana de Música Nueva in 1989 and until 1991 served as its president. She later founded the Música y Escena festival in Mexico City in 1998 and has since served as its artistic director. She also served as artistic director of Puebla Instrumenta Verano in 2003-04.

Her song cycle De epitafios y otras muertes (“From Epitaphs and Other Deaths”) is a setting of several poems from Certantes’ Don Quixote, including four epitaphs and a love song. The cycle is essentially a description of the characters who are already dead. Based on old Spanish songs, the music is largely heterophonic, a term coined by Plato that is now used to denote an improvisational style of polyphony employing simultaneous variation of a single melody. The composer describes the work as an homage to Spanish music and, in particular, to two Spanish composers who moved to North America to share their cultural heritage: Rodolfo Hallfter in Mexico, and José Evangelista in Canada. Some of their music is actually incorporated into De epitafios y otras muertes.