Vicente Emilio Sojo

Fairly little-known in THE UNITED STATES and in Europe, twentieth-century composer, conductor, and musicologist Vicente Emilio Sojo was sufficiently known in his native Venezuela to have his likeness featured using one from the country’s postage stamps in 1974. Sojo was created in Guatire, Venezuela, fourteen days before Xmas 1887. In 1910, he relocated to Caracas to review music in the Academia de Bellas Artes, and, 11 years later on, he became a member of the faculty from the Escuela Nacional de Música, also in the administrative centre town of Caracas. Out of this foundation, he wielded an excellent influence around the span of his country’s musical advancement through the twentieth hundred years. For four years, he trained theory and structure to its ever-increasing troupe of gifted youthful music artists; he founded the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra (or, even more correctly, the Orquesta Sinfónica Venezuala) and a choir known as the Orfeón Lamas. He also cataloged, transcribed, and organized a significant body of local folk tunes. Sojo passed away in Caracas in 1974. Like a composer, Sojo had not been specifically prolific and he recommended to remain generally inside the bounds of sacred choral music. He had written several public, motets, and a Requiem mass, which had been performed with the Orfeón Lamas. Body organ music, that ought to really certainly be a genre next to sacred choral music, also received some interest from him, and he authored a small number of pieces for single electric guitar and one string quartet.