Marco Antonio Ugalde, founder and conductor of Staccato, was born in Mexico City. He studied at the National University’s School of Music of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), specializing in Choir Conducting. He has founded and conducted, among others, the German School of Mexico City’s Children’s Choir, the “Ars Cantata” Vocal Ensemble, and Staccato, the National University’s resident student choral ensemble.

Ugalde has been a professor in a project designed to train new choral directors throughout Mexico, and has acted as director of several of the centers dedicated to this project in different Mexican cities. In the year 2000, he was invited to direct Mexican music at the World Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany. In 2003, he was a guest conductor of the “Centennial Choir” for a concert presented by Luciano Pavarotti in Mexico. In 2007, he offered a conference and directed a workshop devoted to Mexican music within the context of the “6th América Cantat International Festival”, held in Brazil. In 2009, he participated in an international Master-class for Choral Conductors which took place in the Marktoberdorf (Germany) Academy of Music. He has attended conventions, symposiums, and festivals in Germany, Denmark, France, Spain, Latvia, Russia, South Korea, Canada, the United States of America and Cuba. With Staccato, he has done four international tours, as well as having won important distinctions and awards in several international competitions. In 2016 he gave a lecture on Mexican music at the Ars Choralis Festival in Zagreb, Croatia. In 2017 he was invited as a member of the jury and to conduct a workshop on Mexican music at the Musical Impressions Festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland. From 2016 to 2018, he will be the recipient of a grant from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) which will enable him to carry out a project of research and promotion of the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially Mexican music. The project will also allow him to give workshops and conferences on Mexican and Latin American music and to give concerts with Staccato within Mexico and abroad.