Contreras Manuel Alejandro / Chili

Manuel Contreras Vázquez (b. Santiago, Chile, 1977) graduated in composition at the Universidad Católica de Chile in 2003. Began his career collaborating on a CD with other young composers supported by the Chilean Government. In 2004 he started his academic career teaching basic composition, theory, and other subjects at universities such as Católica Silva Henríquez, Del Pacífico, and Bolivariana. He also held assistant professorships at the Universidad Católica de Chile in musical history, where he also developed projects to help diffuse contemporary music, writing essays for academic purposes, and has been a columnist for the Music Journal, Resonancias, since 2009. In 2009, he completed his Master’s degree at Conservatorio “Giuseppe Verdi” di Milano, under the tutelage of Alessandro Solbiati and Gabriele Manca, recieving grants from the European Union and the Italian and Chilean Governments. Simultaneously, he completed a post-graduate degree at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome with Ivan Fedele, made possible by another scholarship of the Chilean government. His Compositions have been performed by world class ensembles, such as Divertimento Ensemble, The Sconfinarte Orchestra, Algoritmo Ensemble, S21 Ensemble and the Taller de Música Contemporánea of Santiago (Chile) in places like the Internationalen Ferienkurse of Darmstadt, Auditorium Parco della Musica and Real Academia de España of Rome, Conservatoire de Paris, UNIACC University and Galería Metropolitana of Santiago, Sala Verdi and Auditorium San Fedele of Milan, Festival de Nuevas Tendencias of Antofagasta and Festival de Música Contemporánea of Santiago de Chile, and Festival de Música Conteporánea de Santiago de Compostela in Spain, etc. As lecturer, he has participated in the Alban Conference Grenoble Universités in France and at the universities Católica de Chile and Católica Silva Henríquez in Santiago, in which he lectured on the state of composition today and it’s relation to modern society. On 2011 and 2012 he is composer in residence at the Real Academia de España in Rome, supported by the Spanish Government. Recently he won the first Prize of the Niccolò Castiglioni composition competition in Milan. In 2013 in the same city, he will work on commissions for San Fedele Cultural Association and the SugarMusic – Suvini Zerboni music publisher. The main objective of the project for the International Residence at Recollets it will be the creation of a string quartet, starting from the three compositional phases of being in touch, mediation device and writing. The physical-architectonic space of the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier, an icon for modern architecture, will be the starting point into certain sound images and observations. In historical and musical terms, the piece of architecture will be a program for the subsequent creation of compositional techniques, not willing to literally represent the piece of architecture or the program, but rather to reconstruct an acoustic space with the modeling keys of an architectonic space. Manuel Contreras will work with the composer Stefano Gervasoni, professor at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris.