Efraín Amaya
COMPOSER & CONDUCTOR
The music here is often intensely beautiful. Whereas in Phantasmagorilla one admires the sure hand of construction and, indeed, the wit, here one is transported to what might be termed higher realms. Minimalism is again touched upon at the "Transform" part of "The Ritual" (The sands shift in rare geometry). The important thing to grasp here is that, for all of its multimedia basis, Clepsydra works beautifully as a musical construct, and as imagined theater.
LATEST ABOUT EFRAÍN AMAYA
The North Dakota Music Teachers Association commissioned a new piece to be premiered on June 4, 2025 during their MTA Conference to take place in Minot.
Mr. Amaya was awarded the FY23 North Dakota Council for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship grant for which he wrote a song cycle entitled The Four Seasons in North Dakota with lyrics by Susana Amundaraín that premiered with the Minot Symphony Orchestra in the Finale concert of their 2023-24 Season.
My career as a musician has developed between orchestral conducting and the art of music composition. My first serious interest was piano performance, which is what had me started in this life path. At this point I can confidently say that I have been very fortunate to have maintained a rich conducting career; in 2015 I was appointed Director and Conductor of the Minot Symphony Orchestra, in Minot, ND, which has brought very new perspectives and experiences into my life. However, writing new music, and the act of creating itself, is the other aspect of my work that I treasure, and keep pursuing to achieve new levels of depth and meaning. I could say that I am in a mature phase of this work, and I enjoy tremendously the challenge of creating new and unexpected pieces. As a member of a global community, I am continuously influenced by multiple sources: the twenty century master composers of our Western culture, like Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartók, as well as Latin American composers such as Ginastera, Revueltas, Villa-Lobos and Antonio Estévez, but also the ones from the old Western world (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven) whose music I absorbed in my early education. I also have a strong influence of Latin American rhythms and sounds in my work, but no more than the rich range of American music of the last century. In synthesis, this is a time when art and music travel fast and easily, and I feel the excitement of being part of it, as a creator, audience, critic and educator. It has been said of my work that it usually has a lyric, or poetic, almost cinematic quality, where emotions and imagery surface from the musical gestures. Some of my most significant mentors and teachers throughout my career in composition are John Eaton, Juan Orrego-Salas, Ib Nørholm, Daniel Börtz and Ellsworth Milburn, in conducting are Samuel Jones, Uri Mayer and Benjamin Zander, and in piano Harriet Serr, Zadel Skolovsky, and Shigeo Neriki.
Efraín Amaya
Many times I have been asked how I would describe my music and I have always found it to be very hard to answer. In essence, I consider my music to have a very personal style, and yet it does show affinities with the music of many Latin American composers. The latter is due not only to the fact that we have grown from the same rich musical traditions, but also to a common love for folklore. Venezuelan folklore, my personal case, has many shades. It is the result of three interacting cultures: the Spanish tradition (which was in itself a melting pot), the black tradition brought by the African slaves, and the aboriginal Indian tradition. The first two of these traditions-curiously the two foreign cultures-are also the most explicitly represented in our folklore. Spain, as the colonizing power from which we inherited our language and religion, greatly influenced our folklore by establishing its musical system as the dominant force. Through the Spaniards we knew the harp and the guitar, and adapted those instruments to our local conditions and styles as they began to interact with other traditions. African culture is present in our folklore not only through a wide variety of percussion instruments and rhythms, but also through its manifold social connotations as music is almost inseparable from dance and ritual.
This fusion has left a very colorful and rich musical language, which one can observe in dances such as the joropo, merengue, samba, cumbia, salsa, and many more that sprung out of it. These rhythms are the backbone of my music. I have always been very attracted to modes. In fact one could say that in my music there is a constant confrontation of dissonance and modality.
Efraín Amaya.
