Can You Imagine San Miguel de Allende Without Music?

Published July 16, 2022

By Luis Eduardo Quezada, Executive Director, Festival de Música de Cámara San Miguel de Allende A.C.

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One of the oldest festivals in Mexico celebrates 44 seasons next August 2022, the San Miguel de Allende Chamber Music Festival—formed by a board of illustrious characters, musicians, music lovers, philanthropists, expatriates and nationals whose mission is to bring chamber music and music education of the highest quality to San Miguel.

To learn about the history of this iconic festival we go back to the 1960s. In 1962, the National Institute of Fine Arts established its first headquarters outside Mexico City in the former convent of Las Monjas, by which time San Miguel could rightly boast of its two concert halls, a year-round cultural calendar that included symphony, chamber and recital concerts both classical and baroque, jazz and popular music concerts, dramatic theater and children’s theater productions, folkloric and modern dance recitals, as well as its already vibrant painting and sculpture community.

In the 1970s, San Miguel’s growing popularity as a cultural destination led several well-known American and Canadian music professionals to establish resorts locally.

It was the initiative of Leonard Brooks, Tom Sawyer, Carmen Masip, and volunteers Xavier Barbosa, Victor Sandoval, and Jules Roskin who formed an organizing committee and embarked on a musical adventure, arranged and presented on a small stage in a colonial town in central Mexico: the first San Miguel de Allende Chamber Music Festival held in June, 1979.

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