Margarita Luna García, circa 19 .
Ana Margarita Luna García was born in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, on July 31, 1921. Her parents were José Luna Castellanos and Ana Celia García Vila. Margarita was born into a musical family: her maternal grandfather, José Ovidio García (1862-1919), was a prominent clarinetist, conductor, and music educator and advocate in Santiago. Her maternal uncles, José Ovidio (Josesito) García Vila (1888-1918) and Carlos Manuel García Vila (1893-1918), were accomplished performers and composers known nationally and abroad—a pianist and violinist, respectively.
Margarita started lessons in theory and solfège at ten years old with Dominican composer and multi-instrumentalist Juan Francisco (Pancho) García, who was a former student of her grandfather. She later continued with piano lessons. In 1937, she passed the Music Teacher certification exams administered by the Liceo Musical de Santo Domingo. Juan Francisco recommended to her parents that she be sent abroad to complete her studies in music and pursue a career as a performer, but due to family circumstances, she stayed in Santiago where she began teaching piano and solfège privately. Later, she started teaching solfège at Juan Francisco García’s music school.
In 1957, she continued her music studies with Dominican pianist, composer, and author Manuel Rueda, with whom she studied piano and pedagogy. She also studied organ with Spanish organist and composer Juan Urteaga, and harmony, counterpoint, and composition with Dominican composer Manuel Simó. She was part of the first class of graduates from the National Conservatory of Music in Santo Domingo to earn a degree in Music Composition, which she completed in 1969.
Luna García was an active performer and conductor. She occasionally served as organist at St. James the Apostle Cathedral (Catedral Santiago Apóstol) in Santiago from 1949 to 1963. She also directed the university choir of the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in Santiago from 1968 to 1970. From 1964 to 1967, she made four summer trips to New York City to study analysis, composition, and orchestration with American composer Hall Overton, who at the time was on the faculty at The Juilliard School. In 1967, she took a course in choral conducting with American conductor and organist Alfred Greenfield at Columbia University. In 1968 and 1971, she participated in two brief courses in orchestral conducting taught by Spanish conductor Enrique García Asensio in Santo Domingo.
Margarita had a distinguished career as a pedagogue and was an advocate for the expansion and modernization of arts education in the Dominican Republic. In 1949, she became the director of the Liceo Musical Juan Francisco García in Santiago, which was renamed in 1953 to Liceo Musical José Ovidio García, after Luna García’s grandfather. She held this position until 1963. During her tenure, she arranged for the teachers of the National Conservatory of Music in Santo Domingo to travel weekly to Santiago to teach at the school. In 1956, she served as the president of the board of Sociedad Pro-Arte in Santiago, an organization with a mission to increase access to cultural events in the city. She taught music history and analysis at the National Conservatory of Music in Santo Domingo from 1965 to 1975, an institution for which she also served as director from 1984 to 1986.
Luna García was part of a team chosen by the Dominican government to establish the Centro de la Cultura in Santiago in 1979, an institution created for the advancement of the arts in the city and that is active to this day. She served as its first director until 1983. In 1981, the institution hosted the 10th Latin-American Course on Contemporary Music with guests from Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, United States, Finland, and France, a groundbreaking event at the time. She also helped establish the schools for theater and folkloric and classical dance at Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design, an arts institution in La Romana (province) for which she served as cultural representative from 1982 to 1983. Chavón is now a global center of art and design education, serving students throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and the international art, fashion, film, and design community.
In an interview published on Listín Diario, she spoke of her work as a pedagogue and the process to found the Centro de la Cultura:
Later, during the happy years of adolescence, I learned at home the trios and quartets of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann, on recordings that my parents listened to frequently, and I ardently dreamed of being a member of a chamber group... However, I got to play the piano a lot and while [I was] still a student of maestro García, he got me started in teaching. At his school I began to teach solfège at the age of sixteen and I took a liking to it. Since then, with few interruptions, I have taught piano, solfège, harmony, history, and analysis.
“
Centro de la Cultura, Santiago. Present day.
Margarita Luna García, circa 19 .
…But the most intense season of work because it was a real challenge, was the creation of the Centro de la Cultura in Santiago. [It was] a passionate challenge because we were part of a team that was commissioned to create the basis for cultural action at the regional level... Training began in disciplines that, for the first time in Santiago, were taught by professional artists (wind instruments, theater, and dance) and an action network was organized through all the provinces of the region.
”
As a composer, Luna García wrote for a variety of mediums including orchestra, choir, voice, chamber ensemble, and solo piano. Her works predominantly employ an extended tonal language, often incorporating serial and twelve-tone techniques. Her music integrates modernist and avant-garde trends, utilizing tone clusters, aleatoric elements, folk material, graphic notation, and synthetic modes and scales. Influenced by Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, and Krzysztof Penderecki, her writing also draws heavily from the folk and popular music of the Dominican Republic. Some of her compositions are based on melodies and themes from popular songs, dance music, and Dominican work songs. Key characteristics of her musical language include rhythmic vitality, thematic brevity, a unique approach to twelve-tone writing, and explorations driven by timbre, extreme registers, and dynamics.
Her piece Cambiantes, written in 1969 as her final project before graduating from the National Conservatory, is known as the first twelve-tone piece premiered in the Dominican Republic. Her didactic work for piano, Miniaturas Quisqueyanas, synthesizes many of these elements. Written in 1984, this work comprises twenty-one short piano pieces designed to develop hand independence in piano students. In this work, Luna García references popular and folk melodies from different regions of the Dominican Republic, modeling the set after Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos.
Margarita Luna García at her desk. Circa 19.
Margarita Luna García at her desk. Circa 19.
Luna García was also a published author. In "Por el Mundo de la Orquesta," a pedagogical book published by Editora Cultural Dominicana in 1973, she outlined a brief history of the symphony orchestra and its instrumental families and included a section on Dominican music and native instruments. The book was used as a textbook for her classes at the National Conservatory of Music. She also translated into Spanish Aaron Copland’s "What to Listen for in Music" (1939) and Vincent Persichetti’s "Twentieth Century Harmony" (1961). She made these translations available to students at the Conservatory, but they were never published. She was a contributing author and director of the Dominican contributions for the "Diccionario de la Música Española e Hispanoamericana," a ten-volume dictionary on Spanish and Hispanic American music and musicians published in 1999. She was also the author of many public lectures and articles published by local newspapers.
Additionally, Margarita advocated for Dominican music and composers both in the Dominican Republic and abroad. She was the Dominican representative for the Forum of Caribbean Composers from 1988 to 1992, which were held in Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. Throughout her career, she exhibited an interest in the documentation and research of Dominican folk music. In 1977, she traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, to complete a course in Ethnomusicology taught by Argentine-Venezuelan researcher Isabel Aretz at the Interamerican Institute of Ethnomusicology and Folklore (INIDEF).
Luna García married Víctor Espaillat Mera, a prominent businessman in Santiago, and they had three children: Víctor Manuel, Carmen Margarita, and María del Pilar Espaillat Luna. She lived in Santiago but frequently traveled to Santo Domingo and other provinces for her pedagogical work. In the 1970s, she established herself in Santo Domingo. Starting in 1992, she divided her time between Canada, where her younger daughter resides, and the Dominican Republic.
She passed away on March 9, 2016, in Montreal, Canada.
Margarita Luna García at the Second Forum of Caribbean Composers. Costa Rica, 1989.
Excerpt from a lecture given in Caracas, Venezuela in
May of 1992 as part of the Fourth Forum of Caribbean Composers.
Learn more about Margarita’s publications here.