Jesús Bal y Gay

Jesús Bal y Gay (23 June 1905 – 3 March 1993) was a Spanish composer, music critic, and musicologist. He was a member of Generation of '27 and the Group of Eight, the latter of which also included composers Julián Bautista, Ernesto Halffter and his brother Rodolfo, Juan José Mantecón, Fernando Remacha, Rosa García Ascot, Salvador Bacarisse and Gustavo Pittaluga. He married Ascot in 1933.

Career

Jesús Bal y Gay was born in Lugo, where he began his musical studies. There he established contact with the group from the magazine Ronsel in whose publication he published Hacia el ballet gallego (Towards the Galician ballet) (1924), an effort which represented his launch into professional literary life.

With the collaboration of Eduardo Martinez Torner, he embarked on a project that would see him taking many trips and much time, the Galician Songbook, which would not be completed until 1974. It was his most famous and celebrated work.

He moved to Santiago de Compostela to study medicine, but he left everything to go to Madrid, where, in 1924, he joined the Residencia de Estudiantes. He died in Torrelaguna.

Sources

• The University of Birmingham - Department of Hispanic Studies

External links

• online edition of Romances and sixteenth century Spanish carols arranged in a modern edition for voice and piano
• Bal y Gay, voice Galician 27, reporting Babelia journal supplement El Pais ( September 3, 2005)
• Silence, Bal and exposition on Jesus Gay in the Residencia de Estudiantes.