Becerra (-Schmidt), Gustavo

Becerra (-Schmidt), Gustavo, Chilean composer; b. Temuco, Aug. 26, 1925. He studied at the Santiago Cons. with Pedro Allende, and then with Domingo Santa Cruz. In 1949 he graduated from the Univ. of Chile, where he became a prof. in 1952; was its director of the Instituto de Extensión Musical (1959–63) and secretary-general of its music faculty (1969–71). From 1968 to 1970 he served as cultural attaché to the Chilean embassy in Bonn. In 1971 he received the Premio Nacional de Arte in music. His early works are set in the traditional neo-Classical manner, but soon he adopted an extremely radical modern idiom, incorporating dodecaphonic and aleatory procedures and outlining a graphic system of notation, following the pictorial representation of musical sounds of the European avant-garde, but introducing some new elements, such as indication of relative loudness by increasing the size of the notes on a music staff with lines far apart. His works include the opera La muerte de Don Rodrigo (1958), three syms. (1955, 1958, 1960), Violin Concerto (1950), Flute Concerto (1957), Piano Concerto (1958), four guitar concertos (1964–70), Concerto for Oboe, Clarinet, and Bassoon, with String Orch. (1970), seven string quartets, Saxophone Quartet, three violin sonatas, Viola Sonata, three cello sonatas, Sonata for Double Bass and Piano, pieces for solo oboe and solo trombone, the oratorios La Araucana (1965) and Lord Cochrane de Chile (1967), and numerous choral works.

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire