Agustín Fernández

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Bolivian composer, resident in the UK since 1984.

Born in Cochabamba, he started musical life singing for guavas at Don Abundio’s barber in Montero, eastern Bolivia. As a child folk musician, he sang and played the charango at peña Ollantay, a folk club famous in the 1960s in Cochabamba. Teen age and hormonal changes put and end to that.

Studied at Instituto Laredo - a specialist music school in Cochabamba - then at Universidad Católica Boliviana in La Paz, then had lessons in Japan with Takashi Iida for one year and with Akira Ifukube for two years. In the UK he studied at Liverpool University and at City University. He worked as composer-in-residence at Queen’s University, Belfast and as music lecturer at Dartington College. Since 1995 he teaches at Newcastle University, where he is currently professor of composition.

His music has been played at international festivals such as London International Opera Festival, Huddersfield Festival, onorities (Belfast), Focus (New York), Music for a Summer Garden (New York), Jornadas Musicales Bolivianas (La Paz and Cochabamba), Septiembre Musical Tucumano (Argentina), Nitida Musikdagar (Sweden), International Music Week (Bucharest) and many others.

The catalogue on last.fm contains, as well as recordings, some computer demo versions of Fernández’s works. This is either because the works in question have not yet been performed, as is the case with Distant Episodes, or the electroacoustic opera Teoponte, which was performed in London in 1988 but was significantly revised and the new version, as yet unperformed, is a fairer guide to what the pieces sounds like than the live recording of the première.