“[…] Israel David Martínez is a strong, original and free-thinking talent, from the onset of his career moved by the determination of his calling … one has to see in Israel David Martínez, a singular voice for the future of music, thanks to his persuasive ideas and his skilled, coherent style that employs precise syntax and prosody. The composer embraces a wide range of historic-artistic predecessors spanning from Bach to Ligeti, if we are able to recognize their individual personalities in his pentagrams…. His music has an expressionistic tone about it, though I prefer to describe it as high level, expressive structuralism”. Enrique Franco, El Pais, 27th of August, 2004.

Israel David Martínez was born in Barcelona in 1969. He began his musical training at the Liceu at the age of 16 combined, from the very start, with composition and instrumentation studies with Josep Soler. After just one course of musical language, and in just twenty days, he wrote his first work, Cuarteto de Cuerda Nº 1 (String Quartet no. 1), this composition was soon recorded in Paris by the Cuarteto Enesco and won the Spanish National Prize for best album of the year. At this point the Ministerio de Cultura awarded him a scholarship to further his composition studies with Cristobal Halffter, Tomás Marco and José Ramón Encinar.

The Badalona Conservatory conferred him the Honor Award for Composition and Instrumentation and he obtained his Higher Certificate in Harmony, Counterpoint, Fugue, Composition and Instrumentation. He finished his studies with an Orchestra Conducting course with Salvador Mas at the Higher Conservatory of Music in Barcelona, and following that he was awarded a scholarship by the Spanish Association of Interpreters and Performers to study at the Berkley School of Music in Boston.

He began to be a sought after composer, praised for his brilliant works, and frequently invited to premiere his new works at major venues in Spain. During an encounter with Yizhak Sadaï (composition professor at the University of Tel- Aviv), the eminent professor confessed that Israel David Martínez was the first man he had ever known to be a born composer.

In 1993, at the age of twenty-four, he won the prestigious Queen Sofía Composition Prize with his piece La jeune martyre for baritone and symphony orchestra set to texts by Rainer Maria Rilke. He wrote this piece in just three months and, to date, he is the youngest composer to have ever been awarded the prize.

He has won numerous national and international prizes for composition, on two occasions he was awarded the Joaquín Turina Musical Composition Prize, Salvador Espriu Music Prize, Iberoamericano Composition Competition, etc., which would boost his international career.

One of the most recent Composition prizes to be awarded him, for his Estudios para piano (Piano Studies), was the Manuél Valcarcel Prize, organized and created by the Marcelino Botín Foundation, and probably the world’s most important prize for new piano works. This award is a vital achievement in his career, as it has set up a strong bond of union to the city of Santander, with its International Festival, and with Luciano González Sarmineto, a person who will be at the composer’s side at all times.

He has given lectures at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, at the Miró Foundation in Barcelona, at the Casa de América in Madrid and at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, and he has been given numerous commissions, for example by the Centre for the Promotion of Contemporary Music at the Juan March Foundation, by the International Music Festival of Santander, by Yamaha, etc.

He was selected by the Spanish Embassy in New York and by Dr. David Noon, to represent Spanish Contemporary Music at the International Music Festival of New York, and to mark the occasion his Cuarteto de Cuerda Nº 3 (String Quartet No. 3) was performed for the first time, to the acclamation of public and critics alike.

A number of recordings of his works are available on CD released by Spanish National Radio, as well as by other recording companies.

His compositions have been performed in Spain, U.S.A., Slovenia, Germany, France and Italy, and premiered by the Cuarteto Enesco of Paris, The Elsner String Quartet, Cuarteto Parissi, Cuarteto Arcana, Música XXI, Trio Mompou, Trio Barcino, Trio Collage, Soloists of Ibercamera, Grupo Manon, Logos Ensemble, Spanish Radio Television Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Barcelona y Nacional de Cataluña, Real Orquesta Sinfónica of Seville, etc.

The Marcelino Botín Foundation sponsors the candidacy of Israel David Martínez for the world’s most prestigious music prize, the Grawemeyer Award, Louisville, Kentucky, considered the Nobel Prize of Music.

In his Estudios para piano (Piano Studies) and the Cuarteto de Cuerda Nº 4 (String Quartet No. 4), Israel David Martínez has begun to create a new language that he has called cosmodality. This new sonorous paradise combined with total creative freedom will allow him to explore more deeply the feelings, desires, weaknesses, fears, phobias and joys of human beings.

He is professor of Composition in the Conservatory of Liceu (Barcelona) and Illes Balears (Mallorca)