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orlando jacinto garcía (b. 1954)
One of the leading post-minimalist composers working in contemporary classical music today, Orlando Jacinto Garcia has built a body of work exceeding 200 compositions across orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, soloists, electronics, and interdisciplinary forms including film, video, dance, and site-specific sound installation. His music — described as “time suspended sonic explorations” — is among the most distinctive voices in the post-Feldman tradition, shaped directly by his studies with Morton Feldman and rooted in a sonic world where stillness, texture, and time itself become compositional material. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1954, Garcia emigrated to the United States in 1961 and earned his DMA in Music Composition from the University of Miami in 1984. A Cuban-American composer whose work spans acoustic and electroacoustic idioms, Garcia has had his music performed by distinguished soloists, ensembles, and orchestras at major new music festivals and concert halls across Europe, Latin America, the US, Canada, and beyond, with recent performances in Poland, England, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba.
Garcia is a two-time Fulbright recipient. His first artist/lectureship (Caracas, Venezuela, 1991–92) brought master classes, new compositions, and a central role in establishing the Center for Electro-Acoustic Music and Research at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. His second, a Senior Lectureship at the Universidad de Salamanca (1996–97), included graduate teaching in analysis and composition alongside the creation and conducting of new works. The Rockefeller Foundation has supported his work twice: a 1999 summer residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy, where he completed a new work for the Simón Bolívar Orchestra — premiered at Venezuela’s Festival Latinoamericano de Música in 2002 and released on New Albion Records in 2004 — and a 2000 visiting artist residency at the American Academy in Rome, where he composed a piece for the Juilliard-based Continuum Ensemble, premiered on their Latin American tour and at the NYC Sonic Boom Festival in 2001. A two-time Cintas Foundation Fellow (1994–95 and 1999–2000), Garcia has also received a State of Florida Composer’s Fellowship, first prizes in Mexico’s Nuevas Resonancias competition and the Joyce Dutka Arts Foundation 2001 competition, and Latin Grammy nominations in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015, and 2021.
Significant premieres span an exceptionally wide range of forces and contexts. His orchestral work Auschwitz (nunca se olvidaran) was premiered by the New World Symphony in Miami in 1994, subsequently performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic with Trinity Church Choir at its 2003 NYC premiere, and again in 2010 with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, NYU Singers, and conductor Arkady Leytush. El viento distante for clarinet and orchestra was premiered by the Lviv Philharmonic in Poland in 2012 and has since received performances across Poland, Mexico, and Serbia. His experimental video opera transcending time — for chamber orchestra, five singers, video by John Stuart and Jacek Kolasinski, and text by MacArthur laureate poet Campbell McGrath — was premiered at the 2009 Biennale in Zagreb, Croatia with the Cantus Ensemble, exemplifying his long engagement with interdisciplinary and multimedia composition. In 2017–18, he presented two site-specific commissioned works for the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami: an interactive sound installation animating the museum’s historic instruments, and an acoustic work for string trio, wind chimes, wine glasses, and fixed media shaped around the resonant properties of the pool grotto. His interdisciplinary and electroacoustic works have been showcased at the Cervantino Festival in Mexico, the Spring in Havana Festival in Cuba, the International Music Festival in Lima, the Ear to the Earth Festival, and the New York City New Music Festival, with video collaborators Jacek Kolasinski, John Stuart, Daniel Viñoly, and Eric Goldemberg.
Recent orchestral premieres include In Memoriam Earle Brown, performed by the Miami Symphony Orchestra (MISO) in 2011 and by the Simón Bolívar Orchestra at the Festival Latinoamericano de Música in 2016. Among his many premieres for distinguished soloists: works for cellist Maya Beiser (JDAF commission, 2001), violinists Jennifer Choi and Mari Kimura (2015), pianist Kathleen Supove (2003 and 2016), clarinetist Michael Norsworthy (2016), trumpeter Andrew Kozar (2017), violinist Miranda Cuckson (2020), and bassoonist Rebekah Heller (2020). His electroacoustic and fixed-media works — a major strand of his output as a post-minimalist and sound artist — have been featured at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC, New Orleans 2004 and NYC 2019), SEAMUS Festivals (2007, 2008, 2011, 2014), FEAMF 2005, and the International Electro-Acoustic Music Festival in Santiago de Chile. Portrait concerts of his music have been presented in New York, Amsterdam, Mexico, the UK, Spain, and Chile, with residencies at Civitella Ranieri, MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, Millay Colony, Visby International Centre for Composers, and Sirius Arts Centre in Ireland, among others.
Garcia’s music is recorded on more than a dozen labels including New Albion, Innova, Toccata Classics, Metier/Divine Arts, New Focus, New World Records, Albany, and CRI. His 2014 Toccata Classics album features the Málaga Philharmonic with conductor José Serebrier; a 2018 follow-up on the same label includes soloists Jennifer Choi, Cristina Valdés, and Fernando Domínguez with Garcia conducting. A 2021 Metier/Divine Arts release presents his three string quartets performed by the Amernet String Quartet. The Loadbang Ensemble and Duo Duplum have also released recordings of his work on New Focus and Urtext, respectively.
An honorary member of the Colegio de Compositores Latinoamericanos, Garcia is founder and director of the Miami Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) at FIU, the New Music Miami ISCM Festival, and the NODUS Ensemble. He serves as Resident Composer for the Miami Symphony Orchestra and holds the rank of Distinguished University Professor and Composer in Residence at the School of Music, Florida International University.
