Eduardo Polonio

Eduardo Polonio García-Camba was born in Madrid on 5 January 1941 and is one of the Spanish composers associated with electroacoustic music from the late 1960s onwards. His career is useful for understanding how the Madrid avant-garde opened up to experimentation with electronic means and to collaboration with other artistic disciplines.

He studied at the Madrid Conservatory between 1958 and 1968. In parallel, he trained in orchestration with Günther Becker in Darmstadt. From 1967, the year he began working at the Laboratorio Alea, he took an active part in the Madrid avant-garde. Between 1970 and 1972 he was a member, alongside Luis de Pablo and Vaggione, of the group Alea Música Electrónica Libre. From 1976 he resumed his activity at the newly founded Laboratorio Phonos in Barcelona.

His career includes collaborations with video artists, actors and jazz musicians, as well as the organisation of the Seis Días de Arte Contemporáneo festival. He founded the Gabinete de Música Electroacústica in Cuenca and the Asociación de Música Electroacústica de España, whose first presidency he held from 1988 to 1994. In 1994 he received the Magisterium prize at the Bourges festival for his electroacoustic compositions.

From 1970 he devoted himself exclusively to electroacoustic music, setting traditional instruments aside. His style, marked by tenderness and irony, frequently opens onto dialogue with other arts. His output is distinguished by a carefully crafted orchestration of sound objects of varied origin, in which timbre and rhythm serve as the main axes.

His legacy rests on this integration of electroacoustic music with theatre, film, video and radio, as well as on his institutional work to promote this repertoire in Spain.