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Foto: Paola León
Marcela Hersch, mexican pianist and composer, whose father was an American citizen and her mother, a Mexican concert pianist Marcela Martínez Barranco was her first piano teacher at the age of four. She made her debut at the age of seven. Her piano teachers in México were Stella Contreras, Luz María Puente and Aurora Serratos. She graduated as a Concert Pianist from the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico and as Master’s of Music in Piano Performance from Indiana University. She graduated with honors in 2017 from Colegio de Morelos COLMOR with a transdisciplinary Phd dissertation in between philosophy, music and miniature painting from India. Some of her international teachers are Michel Block, Alfonso Montecinos (pupil of Claudio Arrau) and Edith Picht-Axenfeld (student of Wanda Landowska). She studied composition studies under the guidance of Juan Carlos Areán and Mariana Villanueva, as well as orchestration with Arturo Márquez. She has done research on Indian Classical Music with Paul Livingstone and Hollving Argáez among others. She has also studied pop music with Tony Bravo and Jazz with Juan José Calatayud.
She has eight recordings on compact discs, all of them as a performer and five of them with all of the music written by her. She has been an orchestra’s soloist since a child and has given concerts in México, United States of America, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, Cuba and India. In 2012 she made the premiere in India of her pieces for piano solo, and “Tiger’s Flower” and “So it is” for piano, sitar, tabla and tanpura with Shubhendra Rao (protegeé and best student of Ravi Shankar) at the sitar, and Zoheb Khan at the tabla. In 2014 she also played in Delhi with her music for piano, tabla, soprano, tanpura and electric guitar with some members of her own ensemble and Zuheb Khan at the tabla.
She began teaching piano at the age of fourteen, and since she was twenty four years old until now, she has taught and continues teaching piano uninterruptedly in private less as well as at the Centre for Musical Education Pauta-her own school of music. She was also a faculty member of the Centro Morelense de las Artes University in Cuernavaca, Morelos until 2020.