BIOGRAPHY
Marcelo Toledo was born in Posadas, Misiones, Argentina. He studied at the National University of Litoral, in Santa Fe, Argentina, and privately with the composer Dante Grela in Rosario. He wrote “Stravinsky or The Sculpture of Time”, a study on musical form.
In 1992 he moved to the United States where he completed his Masters in Composition at Syracuse University, and his Doctorate in Musical Arts at Columbia University. Marcelo Toledo is interested in the friction between Latin American contemporary music, the central ideas of the European tradition, and the unique discoveries of the American Experimental Tradition.
Toledo's conception of sounds as fluids in a permanent state of transformation, gave him the foundation to understand and expand the world of noises and complex sounds. The 2003 Ensemble Intercontemporain Commission Para el Encuentro en los Abismos, and his doctoral dissertation “Composing with Fluid Noises”, demonstrates his creative and theoretical approach to music composition during those years.
Toledo's particular interest in music notation and visual representation of sounds led to the exhibition SOUND OBJECT in New York 2004, which featured his music, scores and drawings curated by the Dean of the Columbia University School of the Arts, Bruce Ferguson.
In 2005-2006 Toledo was the New York composition mentor of the intercultural project Global Interplay organized by “Musik der Jahrhunderte” for the ISCM World Music Days. He was also organizer and curator of the New York Global Interplay Conference and Concerts, at the Goethe Institute in New York, whose participants included young composers from Europe, Africa, Asia and America.
In 2006 his imaginary opera La Selva Interior (The Jungle Within) was premiered in Buenos Aires at the CETC Experimental Center of Colon Theater.
2009-2010 as a DAAD Artist in Residence in Berlin, Toledo composed and premiered several works for solo, chamber music and vocal ensemble. These include En la más ardua oscuridad for bass clarinet, cello and piano, Logomaquia for trumpet, trombone, tuba, percussion and tape, Heterofonías, for five contrabass clarinets, En la impenetrable maraña de lo no nombrado, for 24 voices.
En la más ardua oscuridad, KNM Berlín, 2009.
The same year Toledo composed three works for the Neue Vocalsolisten as new sections of the “Imaginary ópera” La selva interior, The Jungle Within, presented at the Ultraschall Festival 2010 together with KNM.
The Jungle Within, Neue Vocalsolisten, January 2010.
In 2012 the Schömer-Haus commissioned the work Luminous Emptiness for the Wien Modern Festival, premiered by Klangforum Wien, a 74 minute work for 7 instruments.
Fluido Oblico I, Luminous Emptiness, 2012.
Fluido circular, Luminous Emptiness, 2012.
In 2016, extending his exploration on the relationship between sound and visual representation, Toledo composed the string quartet Cuatro Conciencias, premiered in Buenos Aires by Cuarteto UNTREF.
Cuatro Conciencias, 2016.
In 2017 his brass quintet and percussion work (Von Ungeträumtem) geätzt, written for Ensemble Apparat was premiered at the Mikromusik Festival in Berlin.
The same year CEPROMUSIC premiered his IBERMUSICAS Commission Tetexcalhuiliztli for 14 musicians at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The he work was presented several times in concerts and festivals in Mexico, Spain and at the Darmstadt Summer Festival 2018 in Germany.
His work Unterschrift for solo piano dedicated to Pavlos Antoniadis was premiered at The 2021 Contemporary Insights Academy for Present-Day Music, in Melle, Germany.
Toledo has given courses, workshops and lectures at Columbia University, Stanford University, New York University, Syracuse University, University of the Arts, Berlin, in Mexico at the UNAM, Radio Educación, and Ensenada, in Argentina at the IUNA, UNCUYO, UNTREF, Centro Recoleta, UNL, UNaM, CEAMC, in Uruguay at the UNR and Centro Cultural de España.
