Carmen Helena Téllez
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Carmen Helena Téllez is a Venezuelan-American music conductor, "“a quiet force behind contemporary music in the United States today.” (Sequenza 21) Since the beginning of her professional career, she has concentrated in the relationship of music with other arts through her performances of contemporary works for chorus, orchestra and new opera in the United States, Europe, Israel and Latin America. After her tenure as Music Director of the National Chorus of Spain, she joined the music faculty at Indiana University in 1992, as Director of the Latin American Music Center and the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. For these organizations, she has commissioned and recorded several new works, and has founded the Inter-American Composition Workshops. During the 2001-2002 period, she was the Resident Conductor of the pioneering Contemporary Chamber Players of Chicago and became the Music Director of the Pocket Opera Players in New York City.
She is consistently sought after as a conductor of new music, even as she has maintained a relationship with masterpieces of the past, such as Bach's Weihnachts-Oratorium and Berlioz's Messe des morts. (She may be the first woman to conduct this gigantic work). In the year 2001, she conducted the American Midwest premiere of John Adams' El Niño, and in 2002 she conducted Stephen Hartke's Tituli and the second-ever performance of Ralph Shapey's Oratorio Praise. She has been responsible for several commissions and world premieres, including John Eaton's opera Inasmuch and his Mass for vocal-instrumental ensemble. She has also performed the Midwest premieres of many important compositions, including James MacMillan's Seven Last Words, Alfred Schnittke's Requiem and Lou Harrison's Orpheus. She is scheduled to conduct the world premiere of MacMillan's Sun Dogs in July 2006, which she co-commissioned.
As a scholar and conductor, she has won many grants and awards from the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission, the United States Information Agency, and the Circle of Music and Theater Critics of Mexico. She is a respected consultant with international organizations on contemporary composers and on Latin American music, and has written several articles on these subjects for the New Grove Dictionary of Music.
In 1996, she founded Aguavá New Music Studio, with composer Cary Boyce. With this organization, she has recorded two CDs. Her current research and performance interests involve the inter-disciplinary presentation of new music, in order to enhance the connection of composers with the concerns of present-day audiences, and reassess the ritual role of art in our time.
