Gabriel Pareyon


Gabriel Pareyon is a polymathic Mexican composer and musicologist, who has published literature on topics of philosophy and linguistics.
He has a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Helsinki, where he studied with Eero Tarasti. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in composition at the Royal Conservatoire, The Hague, where he studied with Clarence Barlow. He also studied at the Composers’ Workshop of the National Conservatoire of Music, Mexico City, with Mario Lavista.

Composer

Pareyon's output is specially known by Xochicuicatl cuecuechtli, the first modern opera in the Americas that exclusively uses a Native American language as well as music instruments native to Mexico.
As young composer, several works written by Pareyon were selected for the Thailand International Saxophone Competition for Composers, the 2nd International Jurgenson Competition for young composers and the 3rd Andrzej Panufnik International Composition Competition. His earlier production includes works for common objects as well as for classical instruments and ensembles. He also experimented with Mexican traditional instruments, and metre and phonetics from Nahuatl and Hñähñu, also known as the Otomí language.
His music also combines wider aspects of linguistics and human speech, mathematical models, and models coming from bird vocalization and nonverbal communication.

Musicologist

As musicologist, publications of Pareyon contributed to recognize aspects of the new music from Mexico in his own country and abroad, e.g. in the explanation and extension of Julio Estrada's work. Accordingly, his work is quoted, as early as from 2000, by international compilations about the music of Mexico and specialised literature.
In the field of systematic musicology, Pareyon's book On Musical Self-Similarity predicts the role of analogy as one of the capital issues for future musicology and cognitive science, foreseeing conclusions of Hofstadter & Sander's Surfaces and Essences. According to Curtis Roads, On Musical Self-Similarity "is an intriguing treatise in which repetition is generalized to several modes of self-similarity that are ubiquitous in musical discourse.".

Writings