![\"Hiroya](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2016\/12\/161103_Hiroya_Miura_0069_LR.jpg\")
<\/a>Hiroya Miura, associate professor of music st Bates, is shown in his Olin Arts Center office shortly before he attended a contemporary-music festival in Cuba. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n
It was a momentous time to visit the island. Miura flew to Havana just five days after the November elections that cast doubt upon, among other things, the thaw in U.S.\u2013Cuban relations that President Barack Obama helped bring about.<\/p>\n
“Then six days after I came back,” Miura says, “Fidel Castro died.”<\/p>\n
The occasion for Miura’s visit was the 29th annual Festival de M\u00fasica Contempor\u00e1nea de La Habana (Havana Contemporary Music Festival). He was one of four U.S.-based composers invited to the nine-day event as part of an artist delegation representing the American Composers Forum, an advocacy organization. It was just the second year that the ACF participated.<\/p>\n
Also in the delegation was the New York City quintet Third Sound, which performed a concert of music by the four composers \u2014 Lembit Beecher, Pierre Lambert, and Wang Lu, in addition to Miura, who is an associate professor of music at Bates and conductor of the college orchestra.<\/p>\n
<\/a>A street vendor in Havana. (Hiroya Miura)<\/p><\/div>\n
The festival was a performance tour de force, with dozens of musicians offering two, sometimes three, concerts a day. Also on the program were panels, including one in which the ACF composers and two other musical groups from the U.S. advised young Cuban musicians on making things happen.<\/p>\n
“Castro had very strict cultural policies, and for Cubans, contemporary music kind of stops around 1960\u201365,” Miura says. “So they are very eager to learn.<\/p>\n
“I brought my CDs and scores, and you could really see their eyes light up, seeing these new pieces by living composers from here. During one of the workshops, we heard a demonstration by a new improvisation ensemble of young Cuban composers, and their sincerity for the exploration of new sound was quite moving.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/a>Hiroya Miura consults with Third Sound pianist Orion Weiss as four members of the ensemble rehearse Miura’s “Open Passage” in Havana. Also shown are flutist Sooyun Kim and cellist Michael Nicolas; out of the frame is violinist Adda Kridler. (Courtesy of Hiroya Miura)<\/p><\/div>\n
The Miura work that Third Sound played at the festival’s Nov. 18 ACF concert was “Open Passage<\/a> \u2014 In memoriam Andrew Svoboda.” Written in 2005 for alto flute, violin, cello, and piano, the piece is a tribute to a lost friend.<\/p>\n “He was a very young talented composer, and he just died all of a sudden of cardiac arrest at the age of 26,” says Miura. “It was a very emotional piece for me.<\/p>\n “Considering that writing and hearing the piece was a way of remembering my friend, and his father was a political dissident from communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, hearing the piece 10 years later in Havana felt strangely fitting.”<\/p>\n Miura adds, “My friend\u2019s last name, Svoboda, means ‘freedom’ in Czech.\u201d<\/p>\n