Horacio Vaggione

Of Argentinean origin, Horacio Vaggione made a career in Europe in the musique concrète circuit. His compositions, especially those developing multiple time scales, have won him prestigious prizes from academic circles, but they never reached a wider audience. Select works have been released on labels such as Wergo, Fylkingen, ADDA, Le Chant du Monde, and Ampersand, but few albums are devoted solely to his music. He teaches computer-assisted composition at the University of Paris VIII and runs its Centre de Recherche Informatique et Création Musicale (CICM, the Center for Computer Music Research) Vaggione was born 1943 in Cordoba, Argentina. He studied instrumental composition at the National University in Cordoba. Thanks to a grant from the Fulbright Fund in 1966, he studied at the University of Illinois where he first came in contact with computers. From this point on he would focus most of his energies on musique concrète and computer music, although he never completely abandoned composition for traditional instrumentations. From 1969 to 1973, he was based in Madrid (Spain) where he took part in the electronic group ALEA and co-founded with Luis de Pablo an electronic studio and the Projects Music and Computer at the Autonomous University in Madrid. The next few years saw him visiting every electronic facility in Europe, from Italy to France, Germany, and the Netherlands. During this time he worked with computers and synthesizers on looped music (Cramps released La Maquina de Cantar in 1978, later reissued on CD by Ampersand). In 1978, Vaggione settled in France to work in the country's main academic studios (GMEB in Bourges, INA-GRM and IRCAM in Paris). His music went through a phase of formalization as he aligned his work to the Parisian and British schools. He won his first Bourges award in 1982 and a NEWCOMP award (in computer-assisted composition) in 1983. Two years later he was appointed Professor of Music at University of Paris VIII where he organized the CICM. The Bourges Electroacoustic Festival gave him the career-crowning distinction Euphone d'Or in 1992.
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