Mirta Marcela González Barroso - University of Oviedo
Abstract
Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet (Montevideo, 1938 2022) developed her
career within a context of intense sound experimentation in Uruguay between
the 1950s and 1990s. Formed in a musical family environment and marked by
her connection to the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and the
Electronic Music Laboratory of Paris in the 1970s, she shaped an artistic
conception open to the convergence of academic and popular music with ethnic
expressions and electroacoustic avant-gardes. Her catalogue comprises 229
works along with an extensive activity as a performer, conductor, pedagogue,
manager, and cultural promoter, with an international presence and numerous
awards. This work proposes a first biographical approach from a microhistorical
perspective based on Ginzburg and Levi, which focuses on the singular to
articulate biography and historical context. The objective is to situate
Pietrafesa's contribution in relation to the musical searches of Latin America
and Europe in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the
21st century.
Keywords
Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet - Electroacoustic music - Latin
American - Latin American women composers - Latin American performers
Introduction
Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet, an Uruguayan composer born in Montevideo
on December 17, 1938, belongs to a particularly intense period of explorations
and discoveries in the sonic-musical field, spanning the decades between
1950 and 1990 in the American Southern Cone. A member of a family with deep
musical roots and a prominent cultural connection to the city of Montevideo
— through the Quinta del
Arte —, Renée Pietrafesa began her training in an
environment that proved propitious for exploring academic and popular music,
treating sound matter with curiosity and an experimental spirit. To this
initial context are added her life and training experiences closely linked
to the
Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and the
Electronic Music Laboratory of the American Center, Paris, which took
place in the 1970s. All of this led her to shape a conception of music and
art reflected in works that transition through various genres and languages
in which ethnic expressions coexist with electroacoustic avant-gardes, including
all the intermediate possibilities of this wide journey.
A composer with a catalogue of 229 registered works to date, she was a performer
in around 400 concerts offered in cities such as Montevideo, Paris, Manosque,
or Rome, among other cities. She was the founder of the Chorale de l'Alliance
Française, of Ars
Musicæ, and of the Grupo Barroco de Montevideo. An orchestra
conductor, director of instrumental ensembles, member of small chamber groups,
pianist, harpsichordist, and organist, she also developed an intense pedagogical
and dissemination work that she considered completely necessary. She released
vinyl records and compact discs featuring works by Schubert,
Brahms, Schumann, Bach, and her own. All this activity
received recognition, such as the Florencio de la Crítica Teatral
Uruguaya awards, which she won twice: in 1984 for the music for
Sophocles' Electra and in 2001 for the music for Ariel
Mastandrea's El Hermano Olvidado. She was declared "Woman of
the Year" in the category of Best Musical Performance, and in
2005 she received the "Morosoli Award" for her career in the field
of academic music. She was also named "Chevalier des Arts et des
Lettres" in 1984 by the Ministry of Culture of
France2. In 2016, she was recognized as
an "Illustrious Citizen of Montevideo" for being "one of the most
relevant musical personalities of recent decades in
Uruguay"3.
The objective of this work focuses on a first approach to the life path of
Renée Pietrafesa between her first years of life and 2022,
the date of her death, pointing out some milestones of that journey. The
execution of these initial biographical notes is carried out taking into
account the theoretical contributions of
Ginzburg4 who, since the 1980s, urged
to understand historical reality from the singular, "analysing infinite
parts, not just the
structures"4. Thus, from the
microhistories proposed by Giovanni Levi and Carlo
GinzburgAdriana Milano writes, "identifying fissures in social contexts
that appeared as compact and coherent
units"6. Without wishing to find a
generalization from the micro to the macro level, an initial biographical
review approached from this point of view can offer answers to more global
formulations. The task, as specified by Pinna and Oncina,
"would be to establish a 'hinge', an articulation between microhistories
and biographies and the studied historical
period"7. It is then proposed to offer
a series of coordinates that locate Pietrafesa's contribution in relation
to the musical searches of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning
of the 21st century, linked with sonic and artistic experimentations that
developed in Latin America and Central Europe.
To carry out this task, a series of sound documents are available, as well
as multiple interviews granted by Pietrafesa to different communication
media, which were considered from the perspective proposed by Paul
Thompson: oral history is the newest and oldest way of making
history8. Although oral testimony was
disqualified for more than a century by positivist sciences, its validity
has been reclaimed by the social sciences or ethnography-ethnomusicology
as a necessary richness that provides
contrast8. These testimonies were subsequently
collated with concert programmes and some press articles.
