Julio Alberto Hernández Camejo was a Dominican composer, pianist and conductor. He worked for most of the twentieth century and built a body of concert music out of Dominican folk material, and he was among the musicians who founded the country’s orchestral life.

Santiago

He was born in Santiago de los Caballeros in 1900 and began studying music very young, taking solfège from Pedro Camejo, saxophone from Ramón Emilio Peralta and piano from José Ovidio. By fourteen he was playing saxophone in his town’s municipal band and was already drawing attention at the piano.

The accompanist

For years he was one of the most sought-after accompanying pianists in the country, and over a long career he shared the stage with singers and instrumentalists including Gabriel del Orbe and Carlos Piantini. In 1922 he formed an ensemble with Juan Francisco García on cornet and three other players, and they toured Dajabón, Montecristi and Cap-Haïtien.

Havana

In 1924 he left for Cuba with a touring variety company. In Havana he studied harmony and composition with the Spanish conductor Pedro San Juan, then at the head of the city’s philharmonic, and it was there that his training as a composer was completed.

The artistic circle

Back home he assembled a company that gathered several of the leading performers of the period, among them Eduardo Brito, Catalina Jaquez and Miguel Ángel Jiménez.

The symphony

When the Orquesta Sinfónica de Santo Domingo was founded in 1932 he was invited to take part. In December of the following year he conducted one of its first concerts, which is remembered as the first time a complete work was performed in the country: a cello concerto by Saint-Saëns, with a visiting Russian soloist.

The work

His catalogue is wide and deliberately small in scale. The musicographer Arístides Incháustegui described him as a miniaturist who used the roots of Dominican folklore to fix the country’s creole rhythms in written form, and that is the shape of the output: waltzes, criollas, merengues and pieces for two pianos.

He also worked at the base of musical life. He recorded albums of Dominican children’s songs and school hymns, made instrumental settings of the best-known national songs, and published a study of Dominican traditional music.

Recognition

The Dominican government awarded him the Order of Merit of Duarte, Sánchez and Mella at the rank of officer, and the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo named him an honorary professor of its faculty of humanities. He died in Santo Domingo in 1999, at ninety-eight.