Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Experimental composition, sonic sculpture, instrument-building, performance, installation, graphic scores
Website: galindog.com
Guillermo Galindo was born in 1960 in Mexico City and has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area throughout his career as a composer and artist. He trained in musical composition at the Escuela Nacional de Música in Mexico City while completing a BA in graphic design, then attended Berklee College of Music (BA in film scoring and composition) and Mills College in Oakland (MA in composition and electronic music). He teaches as a senior adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and has held residencies and visiting positions at Stanford University (Mohr Visiting Artist, 2018), Vanderbilt University, and Rollins College (Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar, 2019).
His work has been covered by the BBC, NPR, NHK World, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Art in America, and Vice Magazine. His compositions have been performed at the CTM Festival (Berlin), the San Francisco Jazz Festival, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, and the Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt), among many other venues. His collaborators have included photographer Richard Misrach, poets Anne Carson and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, writer Michael McClure, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, and the Kronos Quartet.
Galindo works at the intersection of experimental composition, instrument-building, visual art, and social witness. Beginning in 2006 he developed his signature practice of constructing what he calls cyber-totemic sonic devices — handmade musical instruments and sculptural objects built from found materials — and composing original works for them, which he performs himself. His sources have ranged from objects abandoned along the US-Mexico border to belongings left behind by African and Middle Eastern refugees on the island of Lesbos. These instruments are simultaneously sculptures, scores, and vessels for the interior lives of the people whose traces they carry. Alongside his sonic sculpture practice, Galindo has composed orchestral and chamber works, two symphonies (for the OFUNAM orchestra in Mexico City and the Oakland Symphony), two operas with libretti by MacArthur Fellows Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Anne Carson, and an interactive string quartet commissioned by the Kronos Quartet for its Fifty for the Future series. His graphic scores — often displayed as visual works in their own right — further collapse the boundaries between music notation, drawing, and performance.
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