Román Alís

Román Alís (1931 – 2006) was a Spanish composer. He was born in Palma de Mallorca on August 24, 1931, and died in Madrid on 29 October 2006.

After moving to Seville in 1960, he obtained the following year the First Place Grand Prize for Composition in the Divonne-Les-Bains International Contest held in Paris. There he was honoured by the organization, the jury, the press and the French Radiotelevisión, and was able to meet personally with musicians such as Olivier Messiaen, René Leibowitz, Jean Rivier and Louis Aubert. A few months later he retired to Divonne-les-Bains, a town very close to Geneva (Switzerland), and launched the Symphonie de Chambre, Op 27 (1962) for chamber orchestra. Later, in his time as a professor at Contrapunto y Fuga del Conservatorio in Seville, he was recognized as an important figure in the Sevillian musical life where he debuted a large number of works.

Román Alís' interest in music emerged in Barcelona in 1947, encouraged by the cultural movement in that city, absent in other populations in which his life had developed earlier. While pursuing his musical studies at the Conservatorio Superior Municipal de Música in Barcelona, alongside instructors such as Luis Maria Millet, John Gibert Camins, John Pich Santasusana, Joachim Zamacois and Eduard Toldrá, popular music became very important in his early career. Performer, conductor, arranger, and composer worked for big bands, publishers, record labels, and radio. This certainly would not have been possible without his spontaneous ease of creation, which made him compose a large number of works from the start.