Carmen Helena Téllez

Carmen Helena Téllez (b. Caracas, Venezuela, 25 September 1955) is a Venezuelan-American music conductor. Reviewed as "a quiet force behind contemporary music in the United States today” (www.Sequenza21.com), she has concentrated her career on the exploration of the relationship of music with other arts through her performances of contemporary works for chorus, orchestra and new opera. She has conducted in the United States, Europe, Israel and Latin America. After her tenure as Music Director of the National Chorus of Spain, she joined the music faculty at Indiana University in 1992, as Director of the Latin American Music Center and the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. For these organizations, she has commissioned and recorded several new works, and has founded the Inter-American Composition Workshops. During the 2001-2002 period, she was the Resident Conductor of the pioneering Contemporary Chamber Players of Chicago and became the Music Director of the Pocket Opera Players in New York City.

She is known as a conductor of new music, even as she has continued to conduct canonic repertoire. She is the first woman on record to conduct Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts(Indiana University, 2000). In the year 2001, she conducted the American Midwest premiere of John Adams' El Niño, and in 2002 she conducted Stephen Hartke's Tituli and the second-ever performance of Ralph Shapey's oratorio "Praise". She has been responsible for several commissions and world premieres, including John Eaton's opera Inasmuch and his Mass for vocal-instrumental ensemble. She has also performed the Midwest premieres of many important compositions, including James MacMillan's Seven Last Words, Alfred Schnittke's Requiem and Lou Harrison's Orpheus. She conducted the world premiere of MacMillan's Sun-Dogs in July 2006, which she co-commissioned. In October 2007 she conducted the collegiate premiere of Osvaldo Golijov's opera Ainadamar. In August 2008 she produced and conducted the world premiere of Gabriela Ortiz's opera ¡Unicamente la verdad! In 2011 she also premiered a new interdisciplinary version of "Passion with Tropes" by Don Freund.

As a scholar and conductor, she has won many grants and awards from the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission, the United States Information Agency, and the Circle of Music and Theater Critics of Mexico. She is a respected consultant with international organizations on contemporary composers and on Latin American music, and has written several articles on these subjects for the New Grove Dictionary of Music. Indiana University awarded her the Tracy Sonneborn Award for the integration of creativity and teaching in 2010.

In 1996, she founded Aguavá New Music Studio, with composer Cary Boyce. With this organization, she has recorded two CDs. Her current research and performance interests involve the inter-disciplinary presentation of new music, in order to enhance the connection of composers with the concerns of present-day audiences and reassess the ritual role of art in our time.

In 2012 Carmen Helena Téllez joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame where she works on sacred music and interdisciplinary forms. She won a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop projects in sacred music drama.

Carmen Helena Téllez holds a Doctor of Music degree from Indiana University, and is the winner of the ACDA Julius Herford National Choral Dissertation Award (1991).

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