Alfonso García de la Torre Rey

Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1964-2022

He is one of the most important Basque contemporary composers that our country has produced, especially in the field of electroacoustic music, in which he is nationally and internationally renowned.

His legacy as a composer has left us with a handful of works of great beauty and sensitivity, in which traditional instruments are transformed by live signal processing and blended with all kinds of synthetic and natural sounds. Collaborations with artists in other disciplines led him to produce shows in fusion with dance, video-mapping, painting and theatre. An important element of his creative work was in the field of free improvisation, creating the group "Sirius", with which he played in and produced many shows.

He studied piano with Luisa Rey and Ignacio López de Luzuriaga, composition with Carmelo Bernaola and Electronic Engineering at the University of the Basque Country. He perfected his studies in composition at GME (Cuenca), Phonos (Barcelona), the International Art and Communication Workshops (Valencia LIEM-CDMC), Complutense University (Madrid), Centre Acanthes (Avignon) and IRCAM (Paris), among others.

In 1985 he created the Electroacoustic Music Laboratory at the Jesús Guridi Conservatoire in Vitoria-Gasteiz, with the aim of incorporating new technologies into music teaching, which at the time was a pioneering initiative in our country.

His work as a cultural coordinator is impressive:

• 6 editions from 1994 to 2003 of the Contemporary Music Cycle,
• 13 editions from 2004 to 2017 of the Bernaola Zikloa Festival,
• 10 editions from 1988 to 2004 of the Electroacoustic Music Days,
• 8 editions from 2005 to 2012 of the Sinkro Festival,
• countless Sinkro Ensemble concerts all over the world with more than 250 commissioned and premièred works,
• 20 CDs released on Sinkro Records, and
• 20 musical scores published on Sinkro Scores.

As an artist associated with experimentation and the avant-garde, he contributed to magazines, publications and conferences such as Espacio Luke, Eufonía, Eusko Ikaskuntza, the International Society of Music Education and the International Computer Music Conference, etc.