Alejandro Vera

Background

About Alejandro Vera

Alejandro Vera is an Associate Professor at the Music Institute of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He holds a Ph.D. in “History and Sciences of Music” from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) and a bachelor’s in music education from the University of Concepción (Chile). His field of research deals with musical life in Latin America and Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries. From this broad geographical and temporal framework, he has paid particular attention to the cases of Santiago de Chile, Madrid, and Lima, from a sociohistorical and musical perspective. His publications include articles, essays, and reviews in prestigious journals, such as Acta Musicologica, Anuario Musical, Early Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, Revista de Indias and Revista Musical Chilena. Among his books, the most significant due to its broad scope and simultaneous appearance in Spanish and English is The Sweet Penance of Music. Musical Life in Colonial Santiago de Chile (Oxford University Press, 2020); also published in Spanish as El dulce reato de la música. La vida musical en Santiago de Chile durante el período colonial (Casa de las Américas and Ediciones UC, 2020). Since 2013 he has been the chief editor of Resonancias. Under his administration, this open-access music journal increased its international visibility and was indexed by Scopus, ERIH PLUS, and the “Arts & Humanities Citation Index” of the Web of Science Among his various collaborations with other journals and editorial series, he is currently a member of the “Scholarly Editorial Board” of MGG Online, the digital version of the encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Bärenreiter and Springer (since July 2022) and of the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Music journal, published by Cambridge University Press (since February 2017). He has been the principal researcher of eight projects funded by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development of Chile (FONDECYT) from 2005 to the present. The last, recently granted, is entitled “Entre lo sagrado y lo profano: el villancico en Lima y Santiago de Chile (siglos XVII-XIX)” (project no. 1230736, April 2023 to March 2026). His most recent distinctions as a researcher are the Casa de las Américas Musicology Award in Cuba (2018), the “Lothar Siemens” Award from the Spanish Society of Musicology in Spain (2021, along with David Andrés Fernández), and the Robert Stevenson Award by the American Musicological Society in the USA (2022).