Juan Hidalgo Codorniu (14 October 1927 – 26 February 2018) was a Spanish composer, poet, an action and visual artist.

Biography

Hidalgo was born in Las Palmas, Canary Islands. After studying piano and composition in Barcelona and Paris with

Nadia Boulanger Juliette Nadia Boulanger (; 16 September 188722 October 1979) was a French music teacher and conductor. She taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century, and also performed occasionally as a pianist and organist. From a ...

and

Bruno Maderna Bruno Maderna (21 April 1920 – 13 November 1973) was an Italian conductor and composer. Life Maderna was born Bruno Grossato in Venice but later decided to take the name of his mother, Caterina Carolina Maderna.Interview with Maderna‘s thr ...

, he participated in the XII Internationale Ferienkurse Für Neue Musik festival in Darmstadt in 1957 with his work "Ukanga", a serial-structural composition for five chamber ensembles. With this piece, Hidalgo became the first Spanish composer to take part in that festival. In 1958 Juan Hidalgo met the Darmstadt American composers

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...

and

David Tudor David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music. Life and career Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan ...

who were crucial to his musical and career development. In 1964 he founded the

ZAJ Zaj was an experimental music and performance art group formed in 1959 in Milan, Italy by composers and intermedia artists Walter Marchetti and Juan Hidalgo with the support of the American composer John Cage. The group received major contributi ...

group along with Walter Marchetti, Ramón Barce, and was later joined by

Esther Ferrer Esther Ferrer (born 1937 in San Sebastián, Spain) is a Spanish performance artist. Ferrer received Spain's National Award for Plastic Arts (1999), the Marie-Claire Prize for Contemporary Art in France, and the Velázquez Plastic Arts Prize. Hi ...

and the writer José Luis Castillejo.

was an exponent of Spanish neodadaism with influences of zen and

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...

's vision of the arts. There were said to be similarities in the philosophy and aesthetics of ZAJ and that of the Japanese

Gutai The was a Japanese avant-garde artist group founded in the Hanshin region by young artists under the leadership of the painter Jirō Yoshihara in Ashiya, Japan, in 1954. The group, today one of the most internationally-recognized instances o ...

and American

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...

artistic movements. In 1966 he participated alongside

Gustav Metzger Gustav Metzger (10 April 1926, Nuremberg – 1 March 2017, London) was a German artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. Together with John Sharkey, he initiated the Destruction in Ar ...

, Otto Muehl,

Wolf Vostell Wolf Vostell (14 October 1932 – 3 April 1998) was a German painter and sculptor, considered one of the early adopters of video art and installation art and pioneer of Happenings and Fluxus. Techniques such as blurring and Dé-coll/age are ch ...

Hermann Nitsch Hermann Nitsch (29 August 1938 – 18 April 2022) was an Austrian contemporary artist and composer. His art encompassed wide-scale performances incorporating theater, multimedia, rituals and acted violence. He was a leading figure of Viennese Ac ...

and others in the ''

Destruction in Art Symposium The Destruction in Art Symposium (a.k.a. DIAS) was a gathering of a diverse group of international artists, poets, and scientists to London from 9–12 September, 1966. Included in this number were representatives of Fluxus and other counter-cult ...

'' (''DIAS'') in London. One of his possibly most interesting collaborations with

took place in 1978 when Cage and fellow composer Walter Marchetti prepared a musical ride on a train, full of microphones, monitors and sounds directed by Cage himself. The people on board would hear the train's very noises enriched by an additional mix of local music and sounds, giving an audio-portrait of each stop. Juan Hidalgo was considered one of the most creative artists of the Spanish avant-garde since the 1960s and had been active in other artistic fields such as poetry, photography, installation art, postcard art, print media, and performances, as well as participating in numerous international exhibitions and festival. In 2016 he received Spain's National Award for Plastic Arts. He died in Ayacata, Spain, aged 90.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Hidalgo, Juan 1927 births 2018 deaths Spanish composers Spanish male composers Spanish contemporary artists People from Las Palmas

Biography

References

Further reading

External links