Martín Rincón Botero is a Colombian-German composer and conductor based in Lübeck. Harmony is at the center of his work. In his music and his writing, he treats harmonic stability as the result of musical syntax: intervals and chords have a color of their own, but their stability and meaning depend on the context in which they are used. Increasingly, his work focuses on the relationships between chord roots, which can make a harmonic progression feel tense or at rest even when its chords share the same degree of dissonance. To explore this, he is currently developing a method for determining chord roots based on findings from cognitive science.
Many of his works also take impulses from beyond the concert tradition: Jayme, for flute and double bass, transforms the Colombian popular song “Jaime Molina”, Brava Sal draws on salsa, and Squalos sets a poem of his own in an artificial language. Other pieces start from earlier composers such as Orlando di Lasso, Beethoven and Brian Ferneyhough, or from literature, such as Como una luna en el agua, after Julio Cortázar.
His music has been performed in Germany, Austria, Colombia, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands, at festivals such as Klangspuren (Graz), Mouvements (Saarbrücken), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin) and Zeitgenossen (Heidenheim), by the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken, Ensemble Volans, the Boreas Quartett Bremen, Trompo and the Gdańskie Trio Stroikowe, among others. In 2015 he won the Théodore Gouvy Composition Prize, which led to a commission from the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken. He was a finalist at the Witold Szalonek International Composers’ Competition and the World Percussion Group Competition, and received an honorable mention at the FestiQ-Artetos competition in Colombia.
He studied composition at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá with Diego Vega and at the Musikhochschule Lübeck with Dieter Mack, and attended masterclasses with Sidney Corbett, Samuel Adler, Sandeep Bhagwati, Rodney Sharman, Arnulf Herrmann, Reiko Fueting and Hèctor Parra. He is a regular speaker at the symposia of the International Anders Eliasson Society in Vienna and Stockholm and has published in MusikTexte.
As a conductor, he studied with Arturo Tamayo in Lugano and with Frank Hube in Lübeck, and attended masterclasses with Martin Sieghart, Ricardo Averbach and Nikolay Lalov. He has worked with the Győr Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orquestra de Câmara de Cascais e Oeiras, Ensemble 900 and the LandesJugendEnsemble für Neue Musik Schleswig-Holstein, among others. His conducting grows out of the same concerns as his composing: a clear gesture in the service of musical form and of the meaning that harmony, rhythm and context give to each moment of a score.
