José de Torres (c.1670-1738) - Batalla
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Composer: José de Torres (c.1670-1738)
Work: Batalla
Performers: Valentín Gascón Villa (organ)
Painting: Anoniem (17th Century) - Een ruitergevecht (c.1645)
Image in high resolution: https://flic.kr/p/2j7Mxwb
Further info: https://www.amazon.es/Libro-que-contiene-onze-partidos/dp/B00ZT0H4R8
Listen free: https://open.spotify.com/album/2lOm5YMfGJtn7pkAwV7rhd
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José (Joseph) de Torres y Martínez Bravo
(Madrid, c.1670 - Madrid, 3 June 1738)
Spanish composer, organist, theorist and publisher. He entered the royal chapel boys’ school in 1680, when he must have been between seven and ten years old. His training as an organist was almost certainly undertaken at the Daroca school by Pablo Bruna, and he was probably tutored in composition by the then master of the royal chapel, Cristóbal Galán. Torres was appointed organist of the royal chapel on 14 December 1686, and taught at the school there from 1689 to 1691. The forced exile of the maestro de capilla Sebastián Durón, because of his support for the Archduke of Austria in the War of the Spanish Succession, gave rise to a vacancy in the royal chapel which was filled temporarily by Torres from 1708 until his definitive appointment on 3 December 1718. A second chapel functioned from 1721 at La Granja, where the court had moved as a result of the king’s melancholy state of mind. It was dissolved in 1724, at the start of Felipe V’s second mandate, after the untimely death of his son Luis I, in whose favour he had abdicated. This resulted in the incorporation of the musicians of this chapel, and of their Italian director Felipe Falconi, into the royal chapel in Madrid, which was thereafter headed by two masters, Torres and Falconi, symbols of the musical aesthetics of the day which oscillated between the national style and the new italianizing tendencies. The fire of 1734 in the old Alcázar of Madrid forced Torres to become more active; along with Antonio Literes he was obliged to compose intensively in an effort to recover and replace the music archive, which had been destroyed. Falconi was not called upon to cooperate in this task. Torres’s first marriage was to Teresa de Eguiluz, with whom he had two sons, José and Manuel. He married his second wife, Agustina Enciso y Aguado, just four months before his own death. He was secretly buried in the convent of Carmen Calzado. Falconi had died the previous month. Torres founded his Imprenta de Música in Madrid, where he published many of the most important music treatises of the time and other earlier ones, such as El arte de canto llano y de órgano by Francisco de Montanos, first published in 1592. The first work, published in 1699, was Destino vencen finezas by Juan de Navas, and the first musical treatise, Pablo Nassarre’s Fragmentos músicos, was issued the following year. In 1702 he published his own important treatise Reglas generales de acompañar, en órgano, clavicordio y harpa – influenced by Lorenzo Penna’s Li primi albori musicali (Bologna, 1672) – in which figured bass was for the first time explained in Spanish. A second edition appeared in 1736 with an additional section dealing with the Italian style and introducing the acciaccatura as well as Italian musical terms. In this edition Torres announced his intention of publishing a Spanish translation of Brossard’s dictionary, but this he never completed, probably because of ill health. In 1705 he published the Canciones francesas de todos ayres, modifying the original so as to group the pieces by key; its main importance lay in the fact that it was the first work published in Spain with basso continuo. Over 30 works were published by the Imprenta de Música, by Sebastián Durón, Joaquín Martínez de la Roca (Los desagravios de Troya), Nassarre, Montanos, Antonio Martín y Coll, Diego Fernández de Huete, Pedro Ulloa, Jorge de Guzmán and others. Torres provided the means, within an exceedingly poor environment, for the regular publishing of musical works in Spain, while in previous centuries works had always been published abroad. The quality of his editions and his tireless work in the field of technical printing innovations won him an exemption from taxes and considerable royal privileges. The Imprenta de Música was sold at auction after his death and thereafter published non-musical works. #ClassicalMusic