Guarionex Morales-Matos

Guarionex Morales-Matos is a Puerto Rican composer, as well as founder and co-director of Orfeón San Juan Bautista, a professional secular choral ensemble. He focuses primarily on the a cappella choral medium and has written art songs, choral-instrumental works, film music, a ballet and a symphonic piece.

Morales-Matos’s music has been performed in Spain, Italy, France, Poland, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Canada, the United States of America and Austria. In 2014, he wrote a sopranino duet for plastic artists Allora & Calzadilla as part of their performance-art piece Fault Lines, now part of New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) permanent collection. He also collaborated in the soundtrack to their short films Breaking into Trunks (2017) and The Night We Became People Again (2017). Other contributions include commissions or productions with the Vassar College Women’s Chorale (U.S.A.), Exaudi (Cuba), Seraphic Fire (U.S.A.), the Central University of Venezuela Chorus, the Elm City Girls’ Choir (U.S.A.), the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and lyric tenor Joel Prieto.

His academic writings include La influencia de la música popular en Ernesto Cordero, músico puertorriqueño, caribeñista y latinoamericanista: obras compuestas entre 1967 y 2015 (The influence of popular music in the work of Ernesto Cordero, a Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American musician: compositions between 1967 and 2015) a catalog that encompasses Cordero’s complete works alongside a historical and stylistic analysis of his pieces. In 2015, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture published Morales-Matos’s Música popular puertorriqueña: adaptaciones corales and Composiciones corales originales (1994-2014), an edition in two volumes that compiles fifty-nine choral arrangements and original pieces.

Morales-Matos is a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in Public Communications and a master’s degree in Cultural Administration and Management.