He was taught by his father, the composer
Francisco Salgado, a former student of the Italian composer
Domenico Brescia (who championed
nationalism in Chile and Ecuador before permanently settling down in the USA). During the 1920s, Salgado made a living as a pianist for silent films in Quito. He later he worked as a critic, teacher, and choir and orchestra conductor; he also was director of the National Conservatory of Music in Quito. In his essay
Música vernácula ecuatoriana (Microestudio), published in 1952 in
Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, he expresses his thoughts about the creation of a national form. For example, he replaced the classical symphonic pattern (Allegro - Larghetto - Allegretto Scherzo - Allegro Vivace) with a sequence of Ecuadorian folk dances: ::
Ecuadorian Symphony ::I
Sanjuanito ::II
Yaraví ::III
Danzante ::IV
Albazo,
Aire típico or
Alza Luis Humberto Salgado was the leading figure of his generation. His symphonic suite
Atahualpa (1933), his
Suite coreográfica (1946), the ballets
El amaño (1947), and
El Dios Tumbal (1952) and other works show strong nationalistic feeling. Salgado also wrote two operas,
Cumandá (1940, rev. 1954);
Eunice (1956-7) that were never produced. Salgado was not an exclusively nationalist composer, as the varied style of his eight symphonies shows. In his later years, he even relied on atonality and tried his hand at 12-note composition. – Béhague, Gerard. 2001. "Ecuador. Art Music" Though only two of his operas are mentioned in most music literature, he composed another two, together with nine symphonies, several concertos, several ballets. He was both a nationalist and a modernist composer. As early as 1944, he wrote
Sanjuanito Futurista for piano, using the rhythm of a traditional Ecuadorian dance within the
dodecaphonic writing style. He was in his early forties when he started experimenting with new techniques but was not acknowledged as a modernist until later in his life. ==Compositions==