Manuel Jose Benavente

Manuel Jose Benavente was born on 1 January 1899 in Sucre (Bolivia). He received his first piano lessons by his mother and later studied composition, harmony, piano (under Prudencio Bustillo) and music pedagogy (under Faria de Vasconcelos) in Sucre. Manuel Jose Benavente then moved to Paris (France) to complete his studies under Edouard Risler (piano). In 1921 Manuel Jose Benavente emigrated to Buenos Aires in Argentina where re remained for the rest of his life. There he mainly worked as a piano teacher. Today he is best remembered for gathering and arranging Inca folklore music, composing his own works inspired by Inca music and writing a treatise on Inca music. Manuel Jose Benavente died on 13 April 1987 in Buenos Aires (Argentina).

In my possession is an autograph manuscript by Manuel Jose Benavente. The manuscript came from a pile of documents that I bought at an Belgian auction house and which very likely all belonged to the Belgian pedagogue and painter Julien Ficher. The lot contained compositions by Julien Ficher, an autograph manuscript by Miguel Angel Valda inscribed to Julien Ficher, some unsigned manuscripts and this autograph by Manuel Jose Benavente.

This manuscript is a double-paged music paper that contains five compositions. The works have the titles "Canutito baile", "Kaluyo", "Huaynu" (two works) and "Baile". Due to the provenance of the manuscript as a part of documents from the estate of Julien Ficher who moved to Sucre (Bolivia) in 1914 and left in 1919, it is an educated guess that the works by Manuel Jose Benavente were composed around 1918.

I have no information if these compositions are somehow related to each other or could stand as individual pieces. Therefore I decided to present them in the way they are written down.