Biography

Experienced in both popular and concert music, Alonso Torres is a very versatile musician capable of perform, arrange and compose in a wide range of music styles. His compositions have been performed and recorded by prestigious musicians of Costa Rica and Mexico, hence his work has been appreciated internationally at venues in Europe and Central, South and North America and Asia. He has recently composed and produced music for short films, theatre plays and Internet ads.

He obtained three music degrees from University of Costa Rica: Guitar Performing, Music Composition and Music Teaching. Besides, he took private lessons of jazz improvisation techniques and modern music composition. He has won twice the ACAM (Costa Rica's Music Composers and Authors Society) Prize: Best Incidental music (2014) and Best Instrumental Music (2012, shared with another composers whose music was recorded in the same CD). After teaching music theory and guitar at Universtity of Costa Rica he entered the Master in Multimedia of University of Porto, Portugal and is currently a PhD candidate in Music - Composition at University of Aveiro.

Ciência Vitae | ORCID

Many people associate Caribbean calypso music with tourist images of beaches, vacations and cocktails. But in its origins, the calypso constituted a profound manifestation of resistance, chronic and social denunciation, coming to be called at some point, the “poor people’s newspaper." In Costa Rica, a recent awakening of theinterest in calypso, as a result of different “revival” efforts, has contributed to the fact that this musical manifestation is nowregarded as an importantpart of the Costa Rican “cultural heritage”, which contributes to highlight the multi-culturality of this country (until recently,overlooked) but favors calypso to be contemplated as “folklore” which makes it “harmless” and “touristy”. This renewed interest in calypso has also raised different questions and response attempts regarding its continuity over time, given the difficulty of finding new cultists of this musical style.

This work, then, aspires to recreate the calypso of Costa Rica not only paying attention to its superficial musical elements, but by synthesizing a value system that includes its philosophy, its aesthetics, its social functions and its creative hybridization processes, which allow to articulate itwith other influences fromcontemporary Caribbean styles to concert music, trying to create a calypso that is music “of the present” and not “of the past”, committed to the political and social situations of the current global and Costa Rican reality and in dialogue with a wide range of contemporary musical influences.