PROFILE / MIGUEL DEL AGUILA : Composer Harmonizes His Identity Through Music

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1957, pianist-turned-composer Miguel del Aguila has been a world traveler ever since his family fled their troubled homeland in 1978.

“When you live all over the world and you speak five languages and get used to many cultures, then you start feeling ‘what am I up to?’ ” del Aguila said during a recent interview. “Music made my identity stronger as an American. When you hear my music, you know I’m not European.”

He may not be European, but he did study in Vienna, where he made valuable contacts and began his belated emergence as a composer.

Now, Oxnard is where he hangs his hat and concocts his music, the latest of which took two years to complete and is a three-act opera entitled “Cuauhtemoc,” about the last Aztec emperor.

Having finished his opera, he has come up for air and is immersing himself in his immediate surroundings.

Local residents will benefit from his attentions when the Ventura County Symphony performs the composer’s small-but-potent 1988 orchestral work “Toccata” next Feb. 12.

Last winter, “Toccata” was released on the SONY-Austria CD entitled “East Meets West.” “Toccata” can be heard in a radically different, stripped-down form on Marinka Brecelj’s solo harpsichord CD on the Austrian KKM label. On “East Meets West,” del Aguila’s composition was performed by the Odessa Philharmonic, in the good American company of Bernstein, Copland, Sousa and others.

In a sense, by the ethnocentric standards in the United States, del Aguila represents the “other” America. But, for him, there is no distinction.

“I don’t feel like a South American as opposed to a North American,” he said. “I’m an American, and I feel that this is my country, but I don’t feel that there are two or three Americas.”

As heard on CD, “Tocatta” builds, feverishly, with a bustling pulse that seems to push the music forward, trainlike. Finally, the machinery flies off the tracks.

Del Aguila is not one to adhere to any school of musical thought, but you can hear in his music echoes of Stravinsky, Gershwin and even a touch of a minimalist drive train. And always, sonorities of the Americas--South and North--creep into the blend.

As for his melding of South American and European classical ideas, del Aguila suggested that “what happened to me, I think, happens to everybody who goes to a different culture.”

“If you go to study in Europe, on those horrible winter days when it’s 30 below zero, you feel homesick. What I did was go to a McDonald’s and have a hamburger, sit around and watch American people, and pretend I was at home.

“It’s on the same level, musically. In my mind, I started playing all that South American culture which I grew up with. It was filtered and idealized--only the good things came through. It was a subconscious process.”

The result was that, in 1991, del Aguila was represented with three pieces on a recording (on the Albany label) by American Music Ensemble of Vienna.

Del Aguila began his musical life not with pen in hand, but by studying various instruments. His father, a violinist, bequeathed his love of music to his son. After briefly studying clarinet and violin, he wound up on the piano, studying with the intention of being a concert pianist.

All the while, a composer within was struggling to be born.

“I always felt like a composer. I never felt like a pianist,” he said. “Even as a kid, I wanted to be like Chopin or Lizst. My distinction between a pianist and composer wasn’t very clear. Then I realized that the side of them that I wanted to imitate was the composer side.”

But he was out of synch with academic fashion, his impressionistic and romantic tendencies running counter to the serialist mind-set. “I always wrote music,” he explained, “but I grew up in the time of absolute tyranny of dodecaphony and experimental music.”

While in Vienna, del Aguila made “that important step to leave the piano. If you are trained as a pianist, that is difficult. I was practicing five or six hours every day, and the day I didn’t practice I would feel very guilty. To change studies is like deciding tomorrow that you’ll change your family and friends.”

By his accounting, del Aguila is not one to compose in a clean, craftsmanlike way. He plunges into a project intensely, to the point of denying the outside world.

He recalled being in Vienna in the dead of November’s winter, writing his opera for three days straight without leaving his apartment. Finally, he decided to go out and get some food.

“I was going out without a sweater, thinking ‘I won’t put it on because it’s supposed to start getting warmer,’ ” he said, confusing Vienna with Mexico, where summer commences in November. “I go down the stairs and suddenly thought ‘What am I saying? It’s not supposed to be getting warmer. It’s November. I will die. It’s 25 below zero.’ ”

At this point, del Aguila seems poised for a promising career, armed with a distinctive compositional voice and a passionate desire to pursue his art form.

“I’m not an analytical person,” he asserted. “I’m a very emotional person. That’s the way I write music. Sometimes I am writing music and I want the themes to go in one direction and they want to go in another direction. I really have to do what they say.

“To me, it’s more like an adventure, like getting into a dark room and you don’t know what you’re going to find. Then, little by little, parts of that house light up and you discover a passage and you end up somewhere. In the end, you discover this possibility that’s a work of music.

“If you plan it, what’s the fun of going through the whole thing?”