The Small-Scale Choral Works For Unaccompanied Mixed Chorus Of Juan Orrego-Salas

Among the twentieth-century’s lesser-known composers is Chilean Juan Orrego-Salas (1919-2019), who composed over 125 works in various genres and mediums and led a fruitful career in academia both in his homeland as well as the United States. Having studied previously with Domingo Santa Cruz and Pedro Humberto Allende, Orrego-Salas received grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations that facilitated his travel to the United States to study with Aaron Copland and Randall Thompson. He later served as founding director of the Latin American Music Center in Bloomington, Indiana. His ten unaccompanied works for mixed chorus demonstrate the composer’s early and advanced compositional style. One work, set to the Dickinson poem Let Down the Bars, Oh Death!, has been recently discovered, though the composer had presumed the manuscript lost. In addition, the Ave Maria, op. 111, no. 2 has garnered more attention, receiving a formal world premiere in recent months.