MANUEL MARTÍNEZ BURGOS is an award-winning composer who has received 20 international prizes, including the Jean Sibelius Prize in Finland, the Isang Yun Prize in South Korea, and the Osgood Memorial Prize from the University of Oxford. Jury members at these competitions, composers such as Lachenmann, Murail, or Saariaho have all praised his compositions as being universes of sound, full of expressive power and imagination. His music is performed worldwide by orchestras such as the Oxford Philharmonic, the Seoul Philharmonic, or the National Orchestra of Spain. Martínez Burgos holds a PhD in composition from the University of Oxford. He is professor in composition at the Higher Conservatory of the Principality of Asturias (Spain) and has taught composition at the University of Oxford. He has also been visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, Erasmus teacher at the CNSMD in Paris, and has lectured at the Chopin University, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and the Sibelius Academy.

Martinez Burgos’ music plays with tone colour, orchestration, and different sound parameters to create a musical expressiveness that appeals unpretentiously to the audience. His interest in the study of different languages has led him to research into the usage of prosody as a compositional resource. Prosody and communication are thus recurring themes in Manuel’s aesthetic universe. Most of his compositional interests have to do with music as an echo of emotions. In this way, humanism plays a central role in Martinez Burgos’ compositional approach. For example, one of his last orchestral scores, “Codex”, commissioned by the Oxford Philharmonic, is a reflection on Leonardo da Vinci’s passion for flight as showed in his “Codex on the Flight of Birds”. In our age of techno-science, Manuel puts forward purely human attributes —emotions, perception, or prosody— as the modeling factors of his artistic ideas.

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