Oswaldo Antonio González Lizausaba, began his career as a composer in 1977 by adopting Schönberg's twelve-tone method of composition. He studied composition with Brian Kelly, John Lambert and Lawrence Casserley at the Royal College of Music in London.
In Paris in 1981, he meet Max Deutsch – who was student and later assistant of Arnold Schönberg – at the École Normale de Musique, (composition and analysis courses) this encounter was decisive for his technical, musical and ethical development. Max Deutsch defined González as ...a complete musician with a granite temperament and humor.
He started conducting with the premiere of his work Amor América that was premierd at the Aula Magna of the Central University of Venezuela in 1983. The professional contacts with composers such as: Taira, Boulez, Donatoni, Luis de Pablo, Dutilleux, Lutoslawski and Ferneyhough have been decisive in instrumental, artistic and productive life of Oswaldo Gonzalez.
Another decisive encounter for Gonzalez was with the composer and Venezuelan conductor Antonio Estévez. Estevez gave to him important advice in conducting, composition and orchestration.
He founded in 1986, the Research and Information Center for Contemporary Music CIIMC along with Vicky Estévez and Venezuelan musicologist and cellist Alberto Calzavara, institute dedicated to the dissemination of contemporary music in Venezuela.
González has been awarded a scholarship by the governments of Venezuela and France. National Composition Award in Venezuela. He was invited by Brian Ferneyhough to analyze details of his work Willows at the annual composers' meetings in Darmstadt, Germany in 1996.
He created a musical analysis method where the formal structures of musical works correspond to undulatory models capable to showing unprecedented morphological structures not previously revealed by traditional musical analysis systems. The undulatory analysis method is also a good tool that offers interesting perspectives for music composition.
Oswaldo Gonzalez is Doctor of Arts and Sciences of Art of the University of Paris 1 the Sorbonne. It is also Magister in musical composition of the Royal College of Music in London, Magister in Music and Musicology of the twentieth century of the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences in Paris in conjunction with the University of Paris 4, the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and IRCAM (France).
Gonzalez works are usually played in Europe and America. He also participates as a conductor, percussionist and lecturer in international contemporary music scene.
In January 2018 the European premiere of his work Calligrammes for piano trio was done. The work is based on six poems of the eponymous book of French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). This work was premiered in the David Josefowitz Hall of the Royal Academy of Music of London. Calligrammes, poems of peace and war, was written by Guillaume Apollinaire between 1913 and 1916.
Recently (2017-2021) Oswaldo González has developed an application 'The Escalador' by which all kinds of frequency spaces (scales) can be created. For more information, you can visit the website here.
