Palabras de agradecimiento con motivo de la concesión de la Medalla de Oro del Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid / Words of gratitude on the occasion of being awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Higher Conservatory of Music of Madrid

(Madrid, Manuel de Falla Hall of the Royal Higher Conservatory of Music, 15 November 2019)


Madam Director General of Universities and Higher Artistic Education, Madam Director and members of the management team of the Royal Higher Conservatory of Music of Madrid, professors, students, friends, and all present:
I am deeply grateful for this Gold Medal awarded to me by the Royal Higher Conservatory of Music of Madrid, which moves me and overwhelms me at the same time. At least, those have been the two predominant feelings that have accompanied me while writing these words of gratitude, which I also wish to make a reflection and an overview of my intermittent relationship with this institution -sometimes intense, other times more distant- yet always present to a greater or lesser degree.
This relationship spans 45 years and has gone through four clearly distinct stages, which I shall briefly summarise below.
1) I arrived at the Royal Higher Conservatory of Music of Madrid in October 1973, transferring my enrolment from the Municipal Conservatory of Music of Barcelona, where I had completed Solfège studies and the first year of Harmony. I joined the classes of Manuel Carra, Hermes Kriales, and Antonio Ramírez Ángel, and during that decade I also studied with Genoveva Gálvez, Antonio Barrera, Francisco Calés, and finally with Antón García Abril and Román Alís, under whose guidance I completed my Composition studies in 1981.
Throughout that period, I endured -and became aware that I was enduring- the effects of a disastrous educational policy. This was partly because the absence of high-quality, non-regulated training had led conservatories to host all three levels (elementary, intermediate, and higher) within the same institution, with the inevitable consequence of an educational model that, in attempting to cater to the mass of students filling the classrooms, proved excessive for amateurs and wholly insufficient for those pursuing professional training -thus failing to serve either group satisfactorily. It was also due to the need to conform to an utterly disorganised and incoherent curriculum, in which students -often very poorly informed- in certain specialities (such as Composition, among others) could reach the belief that they were completing their higher studies, only to suddenly discover that they needed to take some elementary-level courses in an instrument in order to graduate.
2) After completing my training, I once again suffered, this time as a teacher, the many problems of that educational system, facing overcrowded classrooms with students of all ages -I once had 13- and 14-year-old teenagers alongside a retired military officer and a retired schoolteacher in the same group- and thus with vastly different interests in my subject. After several years teaching at the Professional Conservatory of Music of Cuenca, in February 1985 I applied for a post as an interim Harmony teacher at this institution, a position I secured on a permanent basis following the competitive examinations in June of that same year. This renewed contact with the Conservatory, teaching Harmony in the classrooms of the Plaza de Isabel II building, lasted until its closure, at which point I was transferred to the "Arturo Soria" Professional Conservatory of Music, where I still hold my permanent post. Until that time, I served as assistant professor in José María Benavente's department, alongside composer Agustín González Acilu, and I had the honour of being a colleague of excellent professionals with whom I have always maintained a cordial professional relationship -among them many important names in contemporary composition, of which the Royal Higher Conservatory of Music of Madrid can rightly be proud to have had among its faculty over the years.
3) My actual teaching duties lasted only a short time, for in 1992 I was invited to join the Music and Performing Arts Department within the General Subdirectorate of Artistic Education at the Ministry of Education and Science, which was then deeply engaged in the reform of these studies -a task that occupied the whole decade of the 1990s and to which I enthusiastically committed myself, firmly convinced that I was contributing to a reform as necessary as it was promising.
Had everything until then been a bed of roses, I doubt I would have embarked on such an adventure, which placed me -and the entire team of which I was a part- in the eye of the storm; but it also allowed us to count on the enthusiastic collaboration of many teachers, most of them from this Conservatory, who, aware of the need for such reform, generously contributed through theoretical arguments on the most appropriate approaches to teaching, technical input to the new curricular designs, or simply -yet most valuably- advice on the work being drafted into royal decrees, ministerial orders, and resolutions. Having endured the system, as I have said, first as a student and later as a teacher, it would have been truly inconsistent of me to refuse the invitation to help dismantle it and lay the foundations of a new legal framework -always taking this Conservatory, from which most of our team came, as the benchmark for the desired model.
4) I remained in that role until 2001, with a hiatus of a year and a half when I returned to teaching. At the beginning of that year, the then Director General of the National Institute for the Performing Arts and Music, Andrés Amorós, offered me the position of Artistic Director of the Spanish National Youth Orchestra (JONDE) -which, after overcoming the natural shock, I accepted enthusiastically, and in which I still serve after almost nineteen years, from which I will retire in just a few weeks.
Through JONDE, I have had the opportunity to remain in close contact with the Royal Higher Conservatory of Music of Madrid, frequently calling upon its professors to supervise sectional rehearsals during the orchestra's gatherings, to serve on admission examination panels, or to recommend students for the orchestra in specific cases. More importantly, from the privileged vantage point that JONDE provides to gauge the state of higher music education -given the age of its members (18 to 23)-, we have been able to confirm year after year, as shown by the admission statistics we publish annually, that this Conservatory's students are not only the largest group of applicants (138 out of a total of 1,080 in the most recent call, representing 13% of the total), but also the largest proportion of the final selection (52 out of a roster of 275 members; in other words, nearly one-fifth of JONDE's current members come from this institution). These figures speak for themselves, and I am moved not by any special bias but by the quiet satisfaction of seeing that the many efforts and challenges endured in the last decade of the previous century have borne excellent fruit -nationally and internationally- with Spain, for many years now, leading in participation and selection for the two most important European youth orchestras: the European Union Youth Orchestra and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. And indeed, the fact that the institution where I devoted so much time and passion as a student first, and later as a teacher, stands out above all others in Spain's higher music education sector is an added value that brings a healthy sense of pride to the general satisfaction with these results, helping to soften the bittersweet memory left by my time as a ministerial adviser.

With this fourth stage, my multifaceted view of the Royal Higher Conservatory of Music of Madrid comes to a close. The physical and administrative relocations this institution has endured throughout its history seem like a curse hanging over it -an endless wandering through spaces and institutions ill-suited to its needs because they were never designed for them. The problem of years of nomadic existence was solved with the inauguration, in December 1990, of this building, but the second issue still awaits an adequate solution. The 2010 administrative and academic affiliation to the Directorate General of Universities and Research of the Community of Madrid was undoubtedly good news, as it ended the inappropriate and unjust treatment of the Conservatory and other higher institutions by classifying them as secondary schools. But it would have been even better if the Royal Higher Conservatory of Music of Madrid -as well as all other higher conservatories in Spain- had been granted its own full legal status through a Law on Higher Artistic Education Institutions, which remained little more than an initial draft begun in the mid-1990s by the Music and Performing Arts Technical Department of which I was a member.
Let me conclude. In a display of cultured wit, a student of this institution circulated, shortly after this building was inaugurated, a witticism that was much enjoyed at the time -when the nostalgia still lingered for "La Matraca" [The Rattle], the satirical and mercilessly biting magazine of the 1980s that spared no target in its commentary on music education in general, and on this Conservatory in particular. The joke suggested that, on the main entrance lintel, above the allegorical figures, below the name of the Conservatory, and replacing the "San Carlos" designating the building, should appear the same inscription Dante imagined for the gates of Hell: Lasciate ogni speranza. The quip was much enjoyed, but it was far from prophetic. Nearly thirty years later, we can now affirm how wrong it was, and instead confidently believe -indeed demand- that there is still hope for a better future for this Royal Higher Conservatory of Music of Madrid, as well as for all higher artistic education institutions. And, once again thanking you for the award of this Gold Medal, I express the wish that this much-needed specific legal framework I have just mentioned will arrive as soon as possible -and that all of us here today may live to see it.
Thank you very much.

Madrid, November 2019