Manuel Simó Rojas, born in San Francisco de Macorís on 30 June 1916 and died in Santo Domingo on 14 September 1988, was a Dominican composer, conductor and music educator remembered as the first Dominican-born director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional (OSN) and one of the country’s most persistent advocates for twentieth-century music.

From a town band to the podium

His mother steered him toward the local Academia de Música in San Francisco de Macorís, where he studied under Rafael Pimentel and Oguis Negrette and played in the town’s Banda Municipal. In Santo Domingo he joined the army band under José Dolores Cerón, who first spotted his talent and introduced him to conducting; by the OSN’s founding in 1941 he was already a conducting student of its first director, Enrique Casal Chapí, while playing percussion and English horn in its ranks. A late-1940s government scholarship sent him to the Conservatorio Kolisher in Montevideo, where he continued studying under Casal Chapí, who had relocated there himself.

Director of the OSN

Back home, he succeeded Juan Francisco García as director of the Conservatorio Nacional de Música, where he also taught composition for years. He took over the OSN on an interim basis in 1952 after an accident sidelined its director, became sub-director shortly after, and was named titular director in 1959, a post he held until 1981, when he was made the orchestra’s Compositor Emérito.

An advocate for the new

As director he gave Dominican audiences their first hearings of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Britten and Satie, while championing fellow Dominican composers on the same programs. In 1969 he organized «Fluxus Música de Vanguardia», two concerts of Cage, Varèse, Berio and Schoenberg at the Palacio de Bellas Artes — an unusually bold gesture for the time, and one the historian Arístides Incháustegui later noted found little lasting traction with a public and press not yet ready for it.

Legacy

His own catalogue — symphonies, string quartets, violin sonatas, and a cantata for soloists, chorus and orchestra that won the Premio Nacional de Música at the 1944 centennial composition competition — remains, by most accounts, less known than the institution he spent three decades shaping.