Julio Estrada

Julio Estrada Velasco (born 10 April 1943) is a composer, , historian, pedagogue, and interpreter.

Estrada was born in Mexico City, where his family had been exiled from Spain since 1941. He began his musical studies in Mexico from 1953–65, where he studied composition with Julián Orbón. In Paris from 1965-69 he studied with Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen and attended courses and lectures of Iannis Xenakis. In Germany he studied with in 1968 and with György Ligeti in 1972. He completed a Ph.D in Musicology at Strasbourg University from 1990–1994.

Since 1974 he became researcher in music at the UNAM Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, where he was appointed as the Chair of a project on Mexican Music History and as the head of "Música, Sistema Interactivo de Investigación y Composición", a musical system designed by himself. He is the first music scholar to be honored as member of the Science Academy of Mexico, and by the Mexican Education Ministry as National Researcher since 1984, and since 1985 at the top level (III). He created the Laboratorio de Creación Musical at UNAM, where he has been teaching theory and philosophy of musical creation.

He has written more than a hundred articles based on his research. Some have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Norwegian. He is the General Editor of La Música de México He wrote with Jorge Gil (IIE UNAM, Mexico 1984). He has postulated a General Theory of Intervallic Classes, applicable to macro and microintervallic scales of duration and of pitch. He has developed together with M. Díaz and Víctor Adán the computer music program MUSIIC to generate the combinatory potential of music scales based on the division of the octave.

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