César Bolaños

César Bolaños (1966). Photo via Fondation Daniel Langlois.

Peruvian

1931 —2012

César Bolaños was a composer and musicologist, and one of the first in Peru to write electronic and computer music. He helped build the electronic music laboratory at the Instituto Di Tella's CLAEM in Buenos Aires, and in 1970 he made two computer works with the mathematician Mauricio Milchberg.

Full Bio

César Bolaños was a composer and musicologist, and one of the first in Peru to write electronic and computer music. He went to New York in the late 1950s and studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music and electronics at the RCA Institute. In 1963 a fellowship from Alberto Ginastera brought him to the CLAEM, the Latin American music center of the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires, where he helped build the electronic music laboratory. His tape piece Intensidad y altura (1964), after a poem by César Vallejo, was the first work produced at the laboratory.

In 1970 Bolaños made two computer works with the mathematician Mauricio Milchberg: Sialoecibi (ESEPCO I), for piano and a reciter-mime-actor, and Canción sin palabras (ESEPCO II), for piano and tape. He returned to Lima in 1973 to head the music and dance office of the new Instituto Nacional de Cultura and turned to research on ancient Andean instruments.