Biography
Eduardo Caba Balsalia (1890–1953) was a Bolivian composer and pianist born in Potosí whose music occupies a distinctive place between early twentieth-century nationalism and Latin-American modernism.
After early piano study in Bolivia and work in banking, he studied with Felipe Boero and Eduardo Melgar in Buenos Aires and with Joaquín Turina and Pérez Casas in Madrid. His music was promoted internationally by performers including Ricardo Viñes, who premiered the fifth Aire Indio in Montevideo in January 1935.
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Caba's central achievement is the cycle of ten Aires Indios de Bolivia—ten, according to the current ABNB catalogue, rather than the nine or eighteen sometimes encountered in derivative sources. Their fusion of Andean rhythmic, modal and pentatonic materials with a modern concert-piano language has led scholars to describe Caba less as a folklorist than as a musical “stylizer.” His other surviving music includes Impresiones de Europa, the three-piece Serie Potosí, Cantares indios, Poema de la Quena and the lute-quartet ballet Kollana.
Caba returned to La Paz in 1943 to direct the National Conservatory and died there on 5 March 1953. Much of his manuscript estate is now preserved by the Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia after a major twenty-first-century recovery project. His piano music is unusually well served on record for an under-documented Latin-American modernist: Mariana Alandia Navajas has recorded the recovered complete piano corpus, while Walter Aparicio has separately recorded the Aires Indios.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.