Editorial de Música BOILEAU - Since 1913

GALEOTE, José

Barcelona 1978

Spanish composer and guitarist José Galeote studied at the Conservatorio Superior de Música del Liceo in Barcelona, with the composer and guitarist Jaume Torrent. As a concert artist his performances have taken him to a number of national and international concert series and festivals. As a guitarist, he has given world premieres of works by composers such as: Glória Villanueva, Jaume Torrent, Manel Ribera and Quim Perera, and has featured in a number of recording for both La Produktiva Récords and the Ars Harmónica record labels.

The premiere recording of a selection of his works, Poniente, was released by Ars Harmónica in 2018.

As a composer, he has received commissions from the Salzburg Guitar Trio, the Dúo Villa-Lobos (Colombia) and the Festival Internacional Art Llobet (Spain) as well as a number of diverse ensembles and choral groups in Catalonia. His works have been performed equally across regional, national and international festivals in Europe and Latin America.

His musical structure can be characterized as giving as much importance to horizontal as vertical themes. As such, his music gives equal relative importance to the meaning, the colour and the tonal function of each voice. This structure gives rise to a polyphonic style framed in an open key, but constantly searching for a tonal centre, a gravity that is somehow always present yet never fully reached. All of this contributes to the music’s flowing discourse and structural balance.

His musical output is extensive and varied and includes solo works, chamber and pedagogical music, as well as orchestral and choral music, with the guitar being at the creative core of his compositions. He has published works with Boileau and La Ma de Guido. His Cinc estudis evocants (Five Evocative Studies) have been included in the Professional Guitar Program at the Conservatorio Superior de Música del Liceo in Barcelona.

He has been invited several times to give talks on the “Symbiosis Between the Composer and Performer during the Creative Process” at the Escuela Superior de Música de Cataluña. In addition he was a member of the cultural project, Bacchanalia at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. He has been a guitar and chamber music professor for over 18 years and he is currently a guitar teacher at La Creu Alta, as well as being both the Head of the Guitar Department and a teacher of Chamber Music at the Escuela Pía in Sabadell.

His works have received very good reviews from important professionals, both guitarists and composers:

“Nice music, pleasant, well-conceived and written” Angelo Gilardino, guitarist, musicologist and composer.

“Inspired and intelligent” Manel Ribera, composer and teacher at the Escuela Superior de Música de Cataluña.

“In Poniente, which is the name given to this recording, we find an elegant and carefully composed repertoire, full of musicality, with a very beautiful sound and finely played.” Melòman magazine.

“Often, after a romantic and intimate passage, the speech becomes unsettling, interrogative, at times even obstinate, other times bleak, making use of a contemporary language. It is in these contrasts that lie the interest of his compositions, which are the result of contemplation and of a somewhat dreamlike reverie.” Simfonia Virtual magazine.