Andrés Useche

Andrés Useche’s approach to editing music is nurtured by both his training and his practice as an instrument player as well as researcher, pedagogue and composer. His field of work is summoned to the outer edges of the repertoire. 

Andrés has an output that encompasses composing, transcribing, adapting and editing of music for solo instruments, electroacoustic music, chamber music, music for band, orchestral music and opera. Alongside his work as free-lance music editor, he has contributed to the catalogues of music publishers such as the Italian presses Ut Orpheus, Stella Matutina Edizioni and Subini Zerboni for their Urtext editions in common music notation or for specialized editions of contemporary musical notation.

In the field of ethnomusicology, he has worked on the recovery of the musical traditions of the Valle d’Agri in Italy as well as in transcribing music by the Anastenaria fire-walking ritual of Greece and Bulgaria. 

He has undertaken editions of works from the Baroque (J.S. Bach), the classical style (F. Petrini, D. Cimarosa), Romanticism (Mascagni) as well Twentieth-century composers (Salvi, Mortari, Liviabella, Margola, Escobar). 

In 2018 he undertook the edition of the opera La princesa y la arveja (The princess and the Pea) by Colombian composer Luis Antonio Escobar (1925-1993) in a production by Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá (Bogota Philharmonic) within the framework of Ópera al parque festival (Opera in the parks). 

It is his interest in literature and its semantic relationship to music which has seen the premiere of several of his compositions at reading sessions festivals in Northern Italy. His piece Simorgh for seven instrumentalists was his contribution to the reading session of Masnavi Mantiq al Tayr (The Conference of the Birds) by Farid al Din Attar. 

His piece Mensajero de la primavera (The Messenger of Spring) for five instrumentalists, intended at first for a reading session of Sapphic poetry later became the starting point of a visual/aural mixed media project called Safo, El mensajero de la primavera (Sappho, The Messenger of Spring). The resulting short film was part of the 2014 Official Selection at the Parma International Music Film Festival. 

Andrés is the current music editor of Florentine composer Daniele Garella as well as of composer Gabriela Montero, already a three-time Latin Grammy Awards winner.

September 2019