Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played an important role in this process. As part of the interdisciplinary approach it had embraced since its very early days, the CAYC encouraged the pursuit of experimental practices, appropriating various creative ideas that had emerged in Argentina during the 1960s.
In 1969, with its first exhibition, Arte y Cibernética, the CAYC established its experimental credentials, which were in line with initiatives that had been presented on the international stage. The center hoped that this exhibition at the Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires would show what the new technologies could do for creative activity. The seminar therefore included electronic music composed by Dante Grela, Francisco Kröpfl, Carlos Rausch, Jorge Rotter, and Eduardo Tejeda. The center’s intention to blend disciplines was on display again in Argentina-Intermedios (Teatro Ópera, Buenos Aires, 1969), a show that included electronic music, stage arts, experimental films, and kinetic sculptures.
This newsletter announces the first vocational training seminar devoted to music: La música técnica en el siglo XX, to be presented by César Bolaños (1931–2012). Bolaños was a composer and pioneer of electronic music in Peru; he graduated from the Conservatorio Nacional de Música and the Escuela de Música Sas Rosay, both in Lima. He continued his education in New York, where he graduated as an electronics technician from the RCA School of Electronic Technology. In 1963 he arrived in Buenos Aires on a grant from the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), the Latin American Center for Advanced Music Studies that had been created at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. The CLAEM, under the direction of the famous maestro Alberto Ginastera, was to be the most avant-garde musical training institution in Latin America.
At the CLAEM, Bolaños was a teacher at the Seminar for Electronic Composition (1964–67) and for Composition (1964–70). He was also responsible for the design of the Electronic Music Laboratory. Many of the CLAEM composers and grant-holders staged concerts and musical events as part of the CAYC’s exhibitions (GT-9; doc. no. 1478580, GT-11; doc. no. pending, GT-15; doc. no. 1476277, GT-137; doc. no. 1478778, GT-161; doc. no. 1478696, GT-162; doc. no. 1478697), which helped to burnish the CAYC’s experimental credentials.
