Ana Mercedes Asuaje de Rugeles

Ana Mercedes Asuaje de Rugeles (8 August 1914 – 21 April 2012) was a Venezuelan composer and music educator. She produced programs for the National Radio of Venezuela and was a founding member of the Little Mavare Orchestra, the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela and the Venezuelan Association of Authors and Composers.

Career Rugeles was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela. She studied music at the Jose Angel Lamas Music School in Caracas; the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.; and in Buenos Aires, Geneva, Switzerland, and Paris. Her teachers included Jacobo Ficher, Franco Medina, Ascanio Negretti, and Vicente Emilio Sojo. She married Manuel Felipe Rugeles, a poet and Venezuelan diplomat, and they had a son, the conductor Alfredo Rugeles.

During the 1950s, Rugeles accompanied her husband to diplomatic postings in Argentina, the United States, and Venezuela. She was a teacher and the director of the Juan Olivares Music School from 1953 to 1975, and from 1953 to 1964 also produced radio programs for the National Radio of Venezuela. She was the academic director of the Simon Bolivar Venezuelan Youth Symphony Orchestra from 1978 to 1986.

Rugeles composed many songs based on texts by her husband Manuel Felipe Rugeles, as well as on texts by Alicia Alamo Bartolome and Regulo Burelli Rivas. Her music was included in anthologies, and published by the Schola Cantorum of Venezuela. Her works include:

Chamber

Serenata Barguisimenta (two woodwind quintets and piano)

Piano

Beatriz

Maria Carolina

Maria Celeste

Pequena Suite Infantil

Voice “Alma no me digas nada” (composed for soprano Fedora Aleman) La Tortuguita (for women’s choir; text by Manuel Felipe Rugeles; arranged by Irina Capriles) “Plenitude” “Woodpecker”