Ramiro Cortés was an American composer.

Cortés studied with Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...

, Richard Donovan

Richard Donovan

Richard Donovan is an Irish runner and marathoner who won the inaugural South Pole Marathon in January 2002. In April 2002 he completed the first marathon-length run in the North Pole....

, Ingolf Dahl

Ingolf Dahl

Ingolf Dahl was a German-born American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator.-Biography:Born in Hamburg, Germany to a German father and a Swedish mother, his birth name was Walter Ingolf Marcus. He studied with Philipp Jarnach at the Hochschule für Musik Köln...

, Vittorio Giannini

Vittorio Giannini

Vittorio Giannini was a neoromantic American composer of operas, songs, symphonies, and band works.-Life and work:...

, Roger Sessions

Roger Sessions

Roger Huntington Sessions was an American composer, critic, and teacher of music.-Life:Sessions was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family that could trace its roots back to the American revolution. His mother, Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendent of Samuel Huntington, a signer of...

, Halsey Stevens

Halsey Stevens

-Life:Halsey Stevens was born in Scott, New York and educated at Syracuse University and the University of California, Berkeley. He studied with William Berwald at Syracuse and with the composer Ernest Bloch at Berkeley....

, and, in Rome on a Fulbright Fellowship, with Goffredo Petrassi

Goffredo Petrassi

Goffredo Petrassi was an Italian composer of modern classical music, conductor, and teacher. He is considered one of the most influential Italian composers of the twentieth century.-Life:...

. He worked for a brief period in the 1960s as a computer programmer, and then taught composition at the University of California, Los Angeles

University of California, Los Angeles

The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...

 (1966–67), University of Southern California

University of Southern California

The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

 (1967–72), and the University of Utah

University of Utah

The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...

 (1972–84).

His earlier compositions employed serial

Serialism

In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...

 technique, but beginning in the late 1960s he turned to a freer form of chromatic atonality

Atonality

Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...

.

Works (selective list)

• Piano Sonata no. 1 (1954)
• Sinfonia sacra (1954/59)
• Chamber Concerto for Cello and 12 Winds (1957–58/78)
• Prometheus, opera, after Aeschylus (1960)
• String Quartet no. 1 (1962)
• Three Movements for Five Winds, for wind quintet (1967–68)
• Rêve parisien (text: Baudelaire), for soprano and string quartet (1971–72)
• Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1975)
• Piano Sonata no. 3 (1979)
• String Quartet no. 2 (1983)
• Music for Strings (1983)

Sources

• Hitchcock, H. Wiley and Michael Meckna. "Cortés, Ramiro". Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 28 June 2007), (subscription access)
• Pitt, Roland Charles. 1990. "The Piano Music of Ramiro Cortés." DMA Dissertation. Austin: University of Texas.