José Evangelista, composer and pedagogue, Montrealer by adoption since 1970, died Monday, January 9 at the age of 79. Professor of composition at the University of Montreal, he notably trained Ana Sokolovic, Samy Moussa and Simon Bertrand. It was Nino Gabrielli, former co-director of the Balinese music ensemble Giri Kedaton, who informed The duty of the disappearance of the master. “He opened the horizons of so many local musicians through his teaching and through his unfailing commitment to the dissemination of Balinese music in Quebec,” he wrote, thus underlining the composer’s openness to a number of music and culture.
At the head of a catalog of more than 80 works, the maestro had been at the heart of a tribute series from the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) during the 2017-2018 season. The organization then invited the public to discover his music “tinted by his Spanish origins and his many travels, especially in Bali”. In this sense, Evangelista was not the only one here to be fascinated by Balinese music: we think of Claude Vivier and, previously, on the Canadian level, of Colin McPhee.
Born in 1943 in Valencia, Spain, Mr. Evangelista conducted parallel musical and scientific studies, earning a degree in physics. His biography published by the SMCQ tells us that a job in computer science first brought him to Canada. Settling in Montreal in 1970, he pursued his musical career there and studied composition with André Prévost and Bruce Mather.
His mandate as professor of composition at the University of Montreal covers three decades, from 1979 to 2009. “José Evangelista also gave courses in ethnomusicology, which contributed to the decompartmentalization and openness to the musical traditions of the world. For him, there have never been borders, ”said the dean of the Faculty of Music, Nathalie Fernando, on Thursday.
The musical director of the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Lorraine Vaillancourt, paid her a touching tribute on Thursday: “You entered my life as a musician in 1970, as soon as I arrived at the Faculty of Music at UdeM. Since then, friendship, complicity and mutual respect have marked us for a long time. »
“I will never forget the extraordinary adventure of the Events of the New”, this concert society founded in Montreal at the end of the 1970s by José Evangelista, John Rea, Lorraine Vaillancourt and Claude Vivier, she underlined.
During the Evangelista year, in 2017-2018, the SMCQ took over Manuscript found in Zaragoza, an opera created in 2001 in Montreal to a libretto adapted by Jan Potocki, a work in which the composer Walter Boudreau saw “a compendium of everything that can seduce and fascinate us in the music of Evangelista”. The lyrical company Chants Libres had opted to conclude the season with melodrama for voice and percussion The door (1987), inspired by Persian, Indian and Arab tales, where the music acted as “illumination of the texts”, as wrote The duty at the time.
Matilde Asencio, widow of the composer, expressed the wish that instead of “flowers, the family will be grateful for donations to the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) for its youth component, whose objective is to awaken the ‘listening to music and the imagination of young people’.
A previous version of this text, which referred to Nino Gabrielli as the current co-director of the Balinese music ensemble Giri Kedaton, has been corrected. Please also read that the date of death of Mr. José Evangelista is Monday, January 9.