A dedicated Gutiérrez Project website is coming soon!
Felipe Gutiérrez y Espinosa
1825-1899
Felipe Gutiérrez y Espinosa (1825–1899) was a central figure in nineteenth-century Puerto Rican musical life as a composer, conductor, educator, and cultural leader in San Juan. He served as Director of Music at the Cathedral of San Juan beginning in 1858, founded a free music academy for local students, and composed an extensive body of music encompassing folk songs, operas (among them the first Puerto Rican opera), numerous Mass settings, instrumental pieces, and various other sacred music compositions for use in liturgical settings. His training as a composer reached new heights when he traveled to Vienna and Paris in 1876 with his friend, Puerto Rican Impressionist Painter Francisco Oller, to study the music trends. Despite his prominence during his lifetime and the breadth of his output, Gutiérrez remains almost absent from modern performance and scholarship; only one of his compositions has been published, while the remainder survive as unpublished manuscripts held in archives and private collections.
Doctoral Student Receives Funding to Record Unpublished Gutiérrez Works
Maxwell Trombley, a Doctor of Musical Arts student in Choral Conducting at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, has been awarded the Presser Foundation's 2025-26 Graduate Music Award. The $10,000 award, given annually to one outstanding graduate music student nationwide, will support the next stage of Trombley's project to revive the music of Felipe Gutiérrez y Espinosa, the 19th-century composer who served for decades as music director at the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in San Juan.
Much of Gutiérrez's sacred music survives only in manuscript form and has not been performed in over a hundred years. In March 2025, Trombley traveled to San Juan for a research trip funded by a University of Miami Field Research Grant, working at the General Archive, the Puerto Rican Conservatory of Music, and the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. There he interviewed Dr. Nélida Muñoz de Frontera, whose scholarship has been central to current understanding of Gutiérrez's life and work, and examined the composer's autograph manuscripts, which he is now transcribing into modern performance editions.
With the Presser award, that transcription work will move toward performance and recording. A concert is planned in Cincinnati in spring 2027 featuring professional musicians from the region, part of an ongoing effort to bring Gutiérrez's music back into circulation and to elevate underrepresented voices in 19th-century Latin American sacred music.
