Oscar Enrique Munoz

I was born in Madrid in July 1960. I studied five years, 1977-1981, Economics Science at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1981, I studied composition with Luis de Pablo and theory with Felipe López Pérez. In 1983, I went to the fabulous Music Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I studied theory with John Clough, piano with Ivar Mikhashoff, and composition with Lejaren Hiller, with whom I shared a common interest for mathematical approaches to composition, and Morton Feldman, who taught me orchestration, and a sensibility for minimal harmonic movements which still accompanies to this very day. I graduated in 1985 with Feldman. I founded a contemporary music group, Fomalhaut, and made two recordings which cause the disapproval of De Pablo and the happiness of my American friends. In 1990, I obtained my Licenciado degree in Philosophy and decided to continue a Ph.D. program at UNED. I had to earn my living doing rather dull office work as analyst of systems in business, when in 1994 I obtained an acceptance with scholarship to Princeton University for a Ph.D. program in the Department of Romance Languages. I worked there as Assistant Instructor in language courses and literature at different levels for four years. During the summer of 1996 I read my dissertation at UNED in Madrid, a thesis on the philosophical concept of Mimesis. In 1998, I obtained my second Ph.D., this time at Princeton, the Romance Language Department, with Eduardo Subiráts as my tutor. I wrote about the poetics of el duende of Federico García Lorca, but tried to develop a personal aesthetic theory with my years of experience in music composition. For personal matters I had to return to Spain, where I have been living ever since, writing, lecturing and composing. My interests are in the field of Philosophical Anthropology, or should I say, the human being in an integrated perspective. The result of these last intense years of work trying to put together all the different areas of human experience in an encompassing representation is my Mythopoetics, a proposal for the understanding of the symbolical constructions of human identity.