Photo © 2005 Jim Newman

Maria de Alvear was born in Madrid (Spain) in 1960. She studied music mainly in Spain and Germany: cembalo, organ, piano, conducting and composition.

In 1986 she finished studying “Neues Musiktheater“ with Prof. Mauricio Kagel at the Musikhochschule Köln. De Alvear´s work is an interactive work based on the knowledge of energetic connections. In every musical event (concert) she joins the power of visual art together with the musical structure. To give an example: She creates around a chamber orchestra an installation with several different materials as salt, stones, branches or leaves, clothes, golden or coloured threads, video installations in several different ways, depending on the needs that the music piece and the performing room have told her. She works also as a performer and singer in her own pieces. The inner essence of her work is to create protected open spaces (spiritual space, physical space, psychological space etc.) in which the performer and the audience can experience profound freedom of being.

Some of her pieces are based on taboo themes of our western society thinking, creating conflictive debates and interesting interactions as a response to her work. Which means that De Alvear´s work is also a courageous dialog with the establishment. The involvement of spiritual qualities and energetic knowledge in her work demands a responsible deep understanding of the strong power of music and art that should be taken care of in a good and strong way.

She has been very influenced by her travelling that she has done to different aboriginal nations in US and Russia looking for the deep essence of music, trying to understand also the roots of musical development. Very important for her has been the intense work with Tsolagiu M.A. RuizRazo (Cherokee nation) and Rahkweeskeh (Tuscarora nation). She thinks they were most important teachers concerning the interaction between music and physical as well as non physical reality.

Very interesting are the most diverse levels on which her work functions silmultaniously. “Sound has the quality of putting one persons mind and body in a specific place“. Sound combinations can work towards our state of mind as precise as a chirugical instrument, making that the change of one single note would cause the complete de-location of mind and physical place in which the person has been before. The way this specific places work in connection to the individual state of a person and how again the interact with a physical and spiritual reality is the fundament on which she bases her work.