Roberto Morales: Performance and Jam

Roberto Morales was born in Mexico City in 1958. He started his musical training in national folkloric music playing harps from Veracruz, Michoacan, and Chiapas, as well as different kinds of flutes from several regions. After receiving a Ph.D. in Composition from UC Berkeley, Morales studied at Escuela Superior de Musica, where he finished his professional studies on flute, piano, and composition. In 1981, he created an interdisciplinary workshop in music, painting, literature, and dance. In 1984, he founded the group Alacran del Cantaro, which he continues to direct.

As a composer, he has written music for theatre, dance, movies, TV, and radio; received commissions; and participated in festivals like Foro Internacional de Musica Nueva, Festival Internacional Cervantino, ICMC (International Computer Music Conference), and CIM (Contemporary Improvised Music Festival), among others. As an interpreter, Morales-Manzanares has participated on his own and with other composers in forums of Jazz, Popular, Folkloric and New Music in Mexico, Latin-America, the U.S., and Europe. As a researcher, he has been invited to national and international conferences such as ICMC, International Join Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), and Symposium on Arts and Technology.

In 1988, he co-founded the first computer music studio in Mexico at the Escuela Superior de Musica. In 1992, his composition Nahual II was chosen for inclusion on the compact disk for the 1992 ICMC. He has been invited as a composer in residence at the Center for New Music Art and Technology (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley, San Jose State University, Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UC San Diego, Yale University, McGill University in Canada, and Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie ZKM in Germany. Currently, he is the director of the Laboratorio de Informatica Musical LIM at Guanajuato, Mexico, which he founded in 1992, and is curator of the memorial at Centro de Cultura Digital. He is a former member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores.