Enrique Iturriaga

Enrique Iturriaga Romero (April 3, 1918 – November 23, 2019) was a Peruvian composer and educator. Biography Enrique Iturriaga Romero was born in Lima, Peru, in 1918 and spent most of his childhood in Huacho, a small port city north of the Peruvian capital. As a child, Iturriaga did not receive any formal musical training, but music was always present in the Iturriaga family house. His grandmother and older cousins often played the piano during family gatherings, arousing Enrique’s interest in music from an early age, and was also encouraged by his father to play the piano. The young Iturriaga was naturally involved in music and enjoyed improvising on the piano; He also learned to play popular music like Peruvian waltz, marinera, tango, jazz, all by ear. Peruvian popular music not only played an important role in the development of Iturriaga’s childhood, but also later shaped his musical creativity. In the coastal regions of Peru where he grew up, the most common type of popular music during the first half of the twentieth century was música criolla. Although Iturriaga’s exposure to music in his early years was predominantly that of popular idioms, the family’s Victrola gramophone