Rezongos (Grumbles) for wind quintet, piano, 8 voices, and bandoneon. Txt by John Cage. 8′ (1998)
Marcelo Toledo was born in Posadas, Misiones, Argentina. He studied at the National University of Litoral, in Santa Fe, Argentina, and privately with the composer Dante Grela in Rosario. He wrote “Stravinsky or The Sculpture of Time”, a study on musical form.
In 1992 he moved to the United States where he completed his Masters in Composition at Syracuse University, and his Doctorate in Musical Arts at Columbia University. Marcelo Toledo is interested in the friction between Latin American contemporary music, the central ideas of the European tradition, and the unique discoveries of the American Experimental Tradition.
Toledo’s conception of sounds as fluids in a permanent state of transformation, gave him the foundation to understand and expand the world of noises and complex sounds. The 2003 Ensemble Intercontemporain Commission Para el Encuentro en los Abismos, and his doctoral dissertation “Composing with Fluid Noises”, demonstrates his creative and theoretical approach to music composition during those years.
Toledo’s particular interest in music notation and visual representation of sounds led to the exhibition SOUND OBJECT in New York 2004, which featured his music, scores and drawings curated by the Dean of the Columbia University School of the Arts, Bruce Ferguson.
In 2005-2006 Toledo was the New York composition mentor of the intercultural project Global Interplay organized by “Musik der Jahrhunderte” for the ISCM World Music Days. He was also organizer and curator of the New York Global Interplay Conference and Concerts, at the Goethe Institute in New York, whose participants included young composers from Europe, Africa, Asia and America.
In 2006 his imaginary opera La Selva Interior (The Jungle Within) was premiered in Buenos Aires at the CETC Experimental Center of Colon Theater.
2009-2010 as a DAAD Artist in Residence in Berlin, Toledo composed and premiered several works for solo, chamber music and vocal ensemble. These include En la más ardua oscuridad for bass clarinet, cello and piano, Logomaquia for trumpet, trombone, tuba, percussion and tape, Heterofonías, for five contrabass clarinets, En la impenetrable maraña de lo no nombrado, for 24 voices.
http://www.marcelotoledomusic.com/