CARMEN LILIANA
Colombian composer and flutist Carmen Liliana Marulanda absorbed the musical roots of her country at a young age. Her entire artistic and educational trajectory expresses essential links to these traditions. Her most recent project is an eloquent collection of studies for flute, guitar and percussion based on Colombian genres. The ingenuity of this work, in addition to the varied musical content, is the presentation: all the musical accompaniments are pre-recorded on CD, giving the flute student direct access to the original style of each region. Uniting teaching and composition, this work represents one of the newest musical trends, where the dialogue between composer and tradition is partnered with educational values.
From her early school years in the experimental public school INEM de Kennedy, her knowledge of popular music roots was consolidated by daily contact with the groups that surrounded the youth bands and orchestras in the fertile territory of urban fusion and new Colombian concert music. In her childhood and adolescence, she participated as a flutist in numerous national festivals of band music, winning – with the Cundinamarca Youth Symphony Band – the Comoro Best Professional Symphony Band prize at the celebrated Paipa Festival of Boyacá in 1999. During this time, she mastered the essence of a genre that has unified Colombian music over more than a century.
She completed her training in the Academia Superior de Artes in Bogotá (1994-96) with professors of the stature of Samuel Bedoya, a great traditional music scholar. In this important academy, a hotbed of talent in new Colombian music, she was influenced by formats integrating traditional and classical instruments and participated in the celebrated XXI Festival Mono Nuñéz with the experimental group Alkimia. She finished her studies at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional in 2001 and went on to join the valuable team of teachers at the Fundación Batuta, whose objective is to take music to all societal levels. As a pre-orchestra teacher in the Batuta project, providing ensemble training for the youngest children, she worked for several years with children from families who were displaced by violence in the poorest sections of Bogotá. She arranged dozens of pieces for these groups, adapting teaching materials to their particular musical and social processes.
Her contact with these children, and later with flute students whom she taught at the Academia Luis A. Calvo until 2006, enabled important educational experiments that nurtured her work as an arranger. With her group Camaradería (flute, clarinet, viola, cello and tiple or cuatro), most of whose repertoire she composed or arranged, she won the coveted Grand Prize for Best Instrumental Group at the XXIX Festival Mono Nuñéz in 2003 – the most important festival in Colombian music. The group’s new sound established a delicate balance between popular music and chamber music without diminishing the best of both worlds. The repertoire premiered at this festival was released on the CD Camaradería – Traditional Colombian Music, establishing a new concept of fusion of styles and colors.
With the objective of performing works by contemporary Colombian composers, she formed Trio Contratiempos in 2005 with Iván Borda and Juan Miguel Sossa. She has also appeared as a soloist in numerous recordings and concerts around the country with some of the most distinguished musicians of the new generation: Sandra Esmeralda Rivera, the Saboya brothers, Iván Borda, the Trio Colombita, Ricardo Gómez, and many others.
She has lived in Caracas, Venezuela since 2006, studying chamber music with Professor Rubén Guzmán and completing composition studies at the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Musicales del Sistema de Orquestas Juveniles de Venezuela (IUDEM). The National Association of Venezuelan Flutists magazine Aibú recently published her Scalattini III for flute and piano.
She is currently composing works for a new recording.