Carolina Noguera Palau

With more than 20 years of experience in the artistic field, Carolina Noguera is one of the most active composers in the Colombian environment, whose works are regularly performed in Europe, North and South America. She began her musical training as a pianist at the Antonio María Valencia Conservatory of the IDBA in Cali and obtained a degree in the Musical Studies Program at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá). She has an MMus and a PhD in composition from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (UK), as a fellow of the Banco de la República, ORSAS (Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme) and Colfuturo. She is an Associate Professor of the Department of Music at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, in whose team, in addition to research and teaching functions, she assumes the coordination of the emphasis on musical composition.

She has an intense interest in the creative powers of memory and forgetting within the framework of contemporary music, where beauty, rage and noise, autoethnography (as opposed to possible nationalist associations), as well as spirituality, have been at the center of several of her works. Her doctoral thesis addresses the expressions of carnival in musical composition from a Colombian perspective and others have been derived from that work, including her article “Forms of memory without territory”, published in the MAVAE Journal, which received the 'Research Award – Academic, symphonic music and the lyrical singing of the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra in 2018. Under this same title she published the monographic album that contains works that constantly circulate in the chamber repertoire of important groups. Among them is Furias, for violin and piano, published by the EAFIT Publishing House and winner of the Biennial Award for Javeriana Artistic Creation in 2016. Likewise, her work Ferocious: Contorting Femininities, commissioned by the Donaueschinger Musiktage to be performed by the Klangforum Wien in commemoration of the 100 years of the festival (1921-2021) and recently recorded by the Orquesta Nueva Filarmonía, was among the albums nominated for the 2024 Latin Grammy Awards for Classical Music. She recently obtained one of the Creation Grants awarded by the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Knowledge to compose her string quartet no. 6, Hex-agonías, in which the timbral correlation between the bowed string instruments of the classical tradition and those of artisan lutheria from Northern Cauca (Colombia) is explored.