This article presents perspectives on the artistic trajectory of Juan Allende-Blin, composer and researcher that was born in Chile (*1928) and resides in Germany since the 1950s. Beside of exploring some aspects of his poetics and contextualizing them within the general context of musical avant-garde in the second half of the 20th century, the article comments his own research projects about the musicians and artists that were forced into the exile during Nazism, manifested in publications, radio programs, and concert curatorship. The artistic exchange between Allende-Blin and his life partner for more than six decades, the organist and composer Gerd Zacher, is studied with a closer analysis of Allende-Blin’s Mein blaues Klavier (1969/70) for organ, with accompaniment of street organ and mouth harp. Finally, his “sound collages” are explored as places of individual and collective memory.
Keywords:
Juan Allende-Blin, National Prize of Musical Arts, modernity, exile, avant-garde, Gerd Zacher, sound collage
Fugellie Videla, D. (2019). Juan Allende-Blin’s blue piano: Poetics and politics of a witness of the twentieth century. Revista Musical Chilena, 73(232), 13–37. Retrieved from https://revistadeantropologia.uchile.cl/index.php/RMCH/article/view/55808
