Soles & Brumas II

Emiliana de Zubeldia

Emiliana de Zubeldia Inda was born in Jaitz/Salinas de Oro, Navarra, on December 6, 1888, into a middle-class family, she was the fourth of five siblings, of which two were priests. Since her early childhood she discovered her path in music and after studying in Pamplona and taking exams as an external student of all the degrees at the Royal Conservatory of Madrid, she traveled to Paris in 1904 to study composition, orchestration and conducting with Vincent D’Indy and Désiré Pâques, and of piano pedagogy with Blanche Selva. In 1910 she established the Zubeldia Academy of Music in Pamplona and in 1920 she earned a post as a piano professor at the Pamplona Municipal Academy of Music.

Fleeing from a soured marriage, she returned to Paris in 1922, to develop an intense international career as a piano soloist in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, England and Italy, while consolidating herself as a composer by performing her own works.

In 1928 she left for America, where she was welcomed by the Basque communities of countries like Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Upon entering the cultural elite, she gets acquainted with renowned Latin American poets of the time, like Juana de Ibarbourou, Alfonso Reyes, Luisa Luisi and other American poets and cultural personalities. In 1930 she traveled to New York, where she met the Mexican musician and researcher Augusto Novaro, who arrived in New York city around the same dates she did, to present his recently created System of Natural Music, and establish a new composition paradigm that proposes infinite practical possibilities of its fundamental harmonic scales for musical composition and its application to all musical temperaments. Emiliana is dazzled by these principles and devotes herself to their study, integrating them into her new compositions.

Novaro returned to Mexico in 1932, while Emiliana continued in New York composing under his musical system, though under the canons of traditional harmony. At the same time, she continued to give concerts on the newly created Radio City Music Hall, which broadcasted internationally, sharing the stage with Andrés Segovia and Nicanor Zabaleta, for whom she composed works for guitar and harp. She also made concert tours to Cuba, Puerto Rico and Mexico, premiering and conducting her own orchestral, piano and vocal works, and musicalizing for voice and piano the works of the great poets of the Caribbean such as José Martí, Martha Lomar, Pedro Juan Labarthe, Carmen Alicia Cadilla.

Finally, in 1937, Emiliana accepted Novaro’s invitation to work with him in Mexico and thus began a fruitful creative decade for this exceptional pairing of Zubeldia and Novaro, with new compositions of the most diverse genres, according to the Natural System, and the demonstration, in weekly private concerts in his own studio, of the pianos that the maestro himself manufactured to make the great variety of scales sound. The great musicians, musicologists, writers, philosophers and diplomats, both Mexicans and refugees from the Spanish Civil War and World War II, like Silvestre and José Revueltas, Rodolfo Halfter, Adolfo Salazar, Esperanza Pulido, Irma González, Luis Sandi, Sophie Cheiner and many other personalities with a very high cultural profile met there. Already determined to stay in Mexico she applied for permanent residency in 1942.

 A few years later, in 1947, Emiliana was invited by the newly founded University of Sonora to oversee the musical training of the university’s students. She accepted this invitation and moved to Hermosillo, the capital city, where she carried out a multifaceted academic work and social labor until her death at 98 years of age, on May 26, 1987.  

Since her arrival in this land that was so far from the cultural world at the time, and that was so dear and familiar to her, Emiliana began to teach music classes, to form choirs, to offer live talks, on radio and TV, and to organize concerts, inviting renowned Mexican and foreign musicians. She obtained scholarships for her most outstanding students and promoted them professionally. She continued composing music of all kinds and became an essential character in the cultural life of the city. In memory of her sister Eladia who died in 1939 in Pamplona, and following the principles of Novaro, Emiliana had composed the Elegiac Symphony which won the National Music Prize at its premiere in 1956.

Throughout her almost forty years of academic work at the University of Sonora and her cultural and social labor in different fronts and associations, Emiliana received the recognition of citizens, institutions and governments, in the form of tributes, appointments and, after her death, with the creation of a medal that bears her name, with which the citizens of Hermosillo, through the Municipal Government, annually award to a character of great cultural merits, mainly musical and the theater of the University of Sonora bears her name.