Opus for the hemisphere.

• Author: Dimmick, Ralph
• Position: Inter-American Music Festival founder Guillermo Espinosa

Friday evening, April 18, 1958. The lights went down in George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium and conductor Howard Mitchell strode on stage to begin a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C. An ordinary event in the musical life of the United States capital one might think, but such was hardly the case.

This was the opening night of the First Inter-American music Festival--a celebration of contemporary creative talent in the Western Hemisphere without precedent in its aim, scope or international repercussion. The three-day program consisted not of works by Beethoven, Debussy or Tschaikowsky, but of the Concerto for Orchestra of Antonio Estevez, the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra of Roberto Caamano, "New England Episodes' by Quincy Porter and the Symphony No. 2 or Roque Cordero--respectively citizens of Venezuela, Argentina, the United States and Panama. By the time the Festival closed, 15 composers representing eight North, Central and South American countries had given their world premiere.

The organizing institutions included the Organization of American States, the International House of New Orleans, the National Institue of Fine Arts of Mexico, the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation of the Library of Congress and the Washington Board of Trade.

The man who had conceived the idea for the Festival and who marshalled the forces required to bring it to fruition was Guillermo Espinosa. Writing two decades later, the critic Irving Lowens summed up the accomplishment thus: "Espinosa was a man with a dream--to establish the new music of the Americas on a parity with that of Europe. He was a brilliant organizer and planner, a rare example of the dreamer with enough imagination and executive ability to transform his dreams into reality."

Guillermo Espinosa was born in Cartagena de Indias on January 9, 1905, to Mateo Espinosa and Purificacion Grau. He received his elementary and secondary schooling at the Colegio San Pedro Claver, in whose imposing church his ashes now repose. His family was not a musical one, but his mother was an enthusiastic listener. She stimulated her son to become a performer, assuring that he received piano lessons and that he was later admitted to the Instituto de Musica of Cartagena.

He proved an apt pupil and, early in the 1920s, armed with a Prussian Government scholarship, he went to Europe to pursue his studies. Espinosa was enrolled for a time at the Royal Conservatory in Milan...