The Círculo Colombiano de Música Contemporánea CCMC (Colombian Circle for Contemporary Music) is an organization that, since its creation in 2010, has worked to “encourage, develop, and promote academic contemporary music in Colombia” (CCMC, 2010). They have done so through the organization of academic/educational events, namely the annual Jornadas de Música Contemporánea (Contemporary Music Days), which includes workshops, conferences, and seminars, but also through the curation and organization of concert series in which pieces, ensembles, and performers, mostly from Latin America, are presented, and in which new pieces are commissioned and/or premiered. They also work on the dissemination of events and information related to contemporary academic music, produce radio shows on national public radio, support the production and publishing of recordings, and maintain a repository and archive of all the activity related to contemporary music in the country. An important aspect of the CCMC is that, unlike many similar organizations before it, it is not a composer collective; it seeks to group a variety of musicians and non-musicians alike, and some of its members are performers, composers, students, journalists, researchers, and audience members. For Rodolfo Acosta, it is “a space for all the people who might be interested in contemporary music to get together”, and he considers of particular importance the work of performers who “choose, often in an act of rebelliousness towards their training, to make the music of their time and, to a great extent, of their environment” (Banrepcultural, 2021).

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Most of the activity of the CCMC concentrates around the mentioned Jornadas de Música Contemporánea (JMC), which include a great variety of activities such workshops, conferences, seminars, and concerts, spread throughout two weeks. Since its first edition in 2011, each version of the JMC has a guest professor for the composition workshop, another for the instrumental workshop, an ensemble/performer in residence and a keynote speaker, and by the end of the two-week-process, the ensemble in residence plays the pieces that have been composed by the students of the composition workshop.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

​

Looking to avoid the concentration and limitation of all activities in two weeks of the year, the CCMC has also organized concert series dedicated to specific repertoire, such as the Ciclo de Música Electroacústica (Electroacoustic Music Series), or set in specific venues. Such is the case of the Libélula Sonora series that takes place in the Teatro Libélula Dorada theater, the Ciclo de Música de Cámara Contemporánea CCMC which is based in the Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo theater, and the Festival de Música Contemporánea En el Acto de Sonar, which reached its third version this year at the Teatro Acto Latino theater.

​

Since its appearance in 2010, the CCMC has enriched the contemporary and experimental music community of the country and has had a huge impact on a generation of musicians throughout the second decade of this century, particularly through the Jornadas de Música Contemporánea, in which the has been an astounding effort to group students and musicians from different academic institutions, cities and generations, many of which have grown to become themselves members and organizers of the CCMC. Such is the case of composer Melissa Vargas, who took part in the composition workshop during the first JMC and has since come to be at the forefront of the CCMC along with its founding members.

​

Some of these founding members of the CCMC have already been mentioned here, one of them being Rodolfo Acosta, who graduated from the music composition program at Universidad de Los Andes in the mid-1990s. After that, he spent some time in France studying with Swiss composer Klaus Huber, who after reviewing his compositions up to that moment, asked him why Latin American composers insisted on studying in Europe, having so many great composers and teachers in their continent. He then proceeded to associate the music of Acosta with that of Graciela Paraskevaidis, Coriún Aharonián, both from Uruguay, and Mariano Etkin, from Argentina. Acosta had no previous knowledge of their music (something which he now attributes to a problem with music education in Latin America, where we are not taught about the music and composers of the region) but was surprised to feel deeply identified with their work. He could not possibly be influenced by them, since he did not know their music, so something about their regional environment was influential for all of them. Acosta would later study with Aharonián and Paraskevaidis, both of which had great influence on that generation of composers in Latin America, not necessarily technical or aesthetical (although possibly yes), but rather ethical as Acosta himself admits (Banrepcultural, 2021). His work is extensive and varied, ranging from instrumental chamber music to electroacoustic pieces, and explores the relationship between sound, resonance and silence, an aspect of his music that he himself highlights as having particular importance.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Other founding members of the CCMC include the singer Beatriz Elena Martínez, who was also the first president of the association back in 2010, and the composers and improvisers Daniel Leguizamón and Juan Camilo Vásquez.