Amaury Veray Torregrosa (1923-1995)

Musician, Writer, Composer and Critic
Date of birth: June 14, 1922
Place: Yauco, Puerto Rico
He died on October 30, 1995 in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico.

He is recognized for one of the most sublime compositions of Puerto Rican music, the “Villancico Yaucano”. However, his achievements in the field of music do not end there. Amaury Veray composed other works of great importance and his performance in other fields deserves to be appreciated.

Son of Dr. Francisco Veray Marín and Margarita Torregrosa, Amaury began his training in music with professor Olimpia Morel, daughter of the illustrious musician Juan Morel Campos. Later he continued his studies with Emilio Bacó Pasarell and that is when he created, at the age of 16, his first compositions “Canción de cradle” and “Estampa funebre”.

During that time he also dedicated himself to singing. His beginnings as a performer date back to the evenings held at the Nuestra Señora del Santísimo Rosario School in Yauco, in the novenaries and in the Christmas bonus masses. He was also a member of the Municipal Band.

When he turned 17 he moved to the city of San Juan. Upon his arrival, he soon became familiar with the concerts offered by the Cultural Activities Office of the University of Puerto Rico.

Months later he was named teacher of a music appreciation course for adults at the Labra School in Santurce. Meanwhile, he studied at the University of Puerto Rico where he completed his Bachelor of Arts with a specialty in languages in 1943.

With the recommendation of Professor Facundo Bueso, the then rector of the University of Puerto Rico, Don Jaime Benítez, granted him a scholarship to study music at the Longy School of Music in New England. But his desire to study was interrupted when he was called to serve in the United States Army. While in the Armed Forces, Amaury traveled to Panama and Hawaii, places where he organized choirs with his fellow soldiers.

After graduating from the United States Armed Forces, he was able to enter the New England Conservatory in 1946. Puerto Ricans Elías López Sobá and Roger Martínez also studied at the institution. Then Héctor Campos Parsi rejoined the group.

During his years of study at the Conservatory, Amaury Veray met the flutist George Laureant (who had been in Puerto Rico with Maestro Sanromá), the clarinetist Víctor Polatchek and the Brazilian conductor Eliazar de Carvalla. He also had the opportunity to meet and listen to Igor Stravinsky give lectures on the aesthetics of music.

At the Conservatory Faculty, Veray was a disciple of Carl Mackinley, professor of composition; Francis J. Cook master of form and analysis; Harold Schwalb in charge of harmony courses; Lois Lautnr, Arnold Schoenberg professor of counterpoint; Ivan Waldbauer, student of Béla Bartok and Zoltán Kodály, professor of music theory.

In 1949 Amaury Veray graduated from the Conservatory with honors, obtaining a specialty in Theory and Composition plus a subspecialty in Contemporary Music. At the urging of his father and some of his friends, Veray returned to Puerto Rico.

Backed by a solid education, he worked as a music teacher at the Ponce High School, was choir director at the Catholic University, and was an employee of the Community Education Division attached to the Department of Education.

At that institution he composed music for several of the films produced by the entity. One of them was “The Bridge”, a film that won an award at the Venice Festival and another was “The Miracle of the Mountain”, based on a story by the Puerto Rican writer René Marqués.

On December 5, 1950, Veray and his colleagues, Héctor Campos Parsi and Luis Antonio Ramírez, grouped together under the name “Musical Action” and signed a “Manifesto” whose commitment was to recognize and disseminate what was Puerto Rican. This initiative became known as “musical nationalism” in line with similar movements that emerged in Latin America and the United States.

Within the group his work focused on popular genres and simple forms. Simultaneously, he organized concerts and conferences on Puerto Rican music and its socio-historical significance. It should be noted that his efforts were inserted within the social reform program promoted by the Commonwealth.

The Puerto Rico Conservatory was another of the educational centers where Amaury Veray worked. The musician belonged to the first faculty of the Conservatory. There he taught music history, composition and all theoretical subjects. He was also the first president of the Music section of the Ateneo Puertorriqueño from 1953 to 1956.

In 1957, the Senate of Puerto Rico granted him the Pablo Casals Scholarship to go to Italy to study at the Santa Cecilia Academy and continue advanced studies in composition with maestro Ildebrando Pizzeti. Amaury Veray was the first Caribbean student to study at said Academy.

Thanks to his dedication and musical culture, Amaury became one of the honorary students of the aforementioned Italian school. This distinction allowed him to be the secretary of Professor Ildebrando Pizzetti. Under this responsibility, the Puerto Rican accompanied the composer to different cities in Europe where he presented his works.

In those years Italy enjoyed an effervescent cultural life. In that stimulating environment Amaury had the opportunity to meet Gian Francesco Malipiero, Paul Hindermith and Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco, who was Pizzetti's first student.

From 1956 to 1959 Veray was part of the last crop of Hildebrando Pizzetti's students at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, in Rome. Pizzetti's influence had a strong impact on the mystical and sophisticated character of his later work.

The musicologist Edgardo Díaz Díaz mentions, in a profile dedicated to Amaury Veray, that his years in Italy place him in a unique position in relation to the work of Héctor Campos Parsi, who chose, at the suggestion of his teachers Aarón Copland and Nadia Boulanger, for paying more attention to the formal aspect of music at the expense of popular heritage.

Within this scope, Amaury Veray has composed short pieces for piano in genres such as the funeral scene, the pastoral, the lullaby and the waltz. He also cultivated other genres such as the prelude, the fugue and the madrigal.

The specialist Edgardo Díaz also points out that for the composition of his music Amaury Veray used European structures to give his melodies a particular harmonic color. He also mentioned that his music evokes the Italian cantinela, the Spanish Renaissance, and the use of the melodic minor scale.

In his work as a music critic Amaury published the essays “The piano work” and “The pedagogical mission of José Enrique Pedreira (1960), “Presentation of José Ignacio Quintón” (1960), “Monsita Ferrer”, “Puerto Rican Sonatina for singing ” and “Esperanza” (1962) and Fernando Callejo Ferrer (1962).

In other of his academic works, he proclaimed Rafael Hernández as a distinguished creator of popular music. He gave the same treatment to the poet Julia de Burgos. On the other hand, he set texts by Liliane Pérez Marchand to music and highlighted the didactic mission of José Enrique Pedreira.

Among Amaury's most notable works are “Sonata for Violin and Piano,” “Sonata for Cello and Piano,” and “Song in Honor of the Assumption of the Virgin.” He also created two ballets. One of them was “La Encantada”, whose plot is inspired by a Yaucana legend. The other was “When the women…” based on Manuel Jiménez's plena. Both ballets were performed at the San Juan Fine Arts Center.

In another aspect of his work, he wrote incidental music for the theatrical pieces “La hija de Jorio”, “La cartreta”, “Cristal roto en el tiempo”, “De Tanto Camina” and “María Soledad”. For the work “Farsa de amor compradito” by Luis Rafael Sánchez he also wrote the music, transforming the piece into an operetta.

In its mission to preserve the work of Puerto Rican artists, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture recorded some of Veray's works for its collection of Puerto Rican music. Some of those pieces were “Canto a Filí-Melé”, aria for tenor with text from the poem by Luis Palés Matos titled “The Murderous Search”, “En casa de Tatá”, folkloric gloss for piano; “Rustic piano essay,” which uses the rustic rhythms of the mountainous region of Yauco; “When the women…” reduction to two planes of the original score of the ballet of the same name; “Recitation” song based on the poem by Julia de Burgos, “Oh slowness of the sea.”

As a human being, Amaury has been described as a totally detached person, a humanist par excellence. His students at the Conservatory can attest to this statement since he helped many of them find accommodation, books and introduced them to key people. But he always directed them to self-discipline and character formation, without exercising authoritarian positions.

While he worked as a professor at the Conservatory, he gave the opportunity to graduates so that they could perform in what they had studied. In the same way, he was one of those who fought to ensure that discrimination against Puerto Ricans disappeared when hiring our displaced musicians.

However, this did not stop him from experiencing marginalization firsthand. The use of new sounds in his music and his rejection of pro-American ideas meant that his music was not recognized for its merits and that it was rarely programmed in Symphony Orchestra concerts.

“Veray is perhaps the only one of today's great composers who has never seen a work of his performed at the Casals Festival, an annual event held in San Juan during the month of June. That is why little is known about the sounds and texts that Veray contributed to a rich and dynamic representation of our national identity,” said Edgardo Díaz Díaz in an article published in El Diario / La Prensa.

In 2001, it was 50 years since Amaury Veray composed the “Villancico yaucano” at a Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in 1951. It is said that in just an hour and a half the musician composed this carol. He himself has toured the world performed by the best voices in the world.

In the year in which he composed it, Amaury was a harmonist at the Yauco church and in the Library of his house he made the well-known Christmas carol, which was sung by Vivaldi's María Amelia Lugo in the early morning. About the famous Christmas carol the author once said: “The first part of the text is traditional Spanish, that is not mine. Where mine begins is “I am a poor Yaucano…” I spent work on my part, on the metric. “What I borrowed from anonymous Spanish folklore were the first two quatrains.” This valuable composition was included in the Christmas repertoire of the Children's Choir and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

Amaury Veray Torregrosa entered immortality on October 30, 1995 in Río Piedras. His remains were buried in the Old Municipal Cemetery of his native town of Yauco.

Enrique Feliciano Díaz
National Foundation for Popular Culture