ABOUT JUAN GARCÍA CASTILLEJO

He was born in Motilla del Palancar (Cuenca), but as a child he moved to live in Valencia. He was passionate about electricity and sound, as well as an inveterate dreamer. In his book Telegrafía rápida y música eléctrica (1944), he himself explains almost all the details about the construction of the "electrocomposer", which was equipped with lamps, transformers, capacitors, resistors, a few dozen loudspeakers and with several motors. "He intended that the perforations of the telegraph tape would be automatically selected by different motors, which would reproduce different recorded sound tracks, so that each book on perforated tape would become a sound book.

His patents had to do with rapid telegraphy and it was from this technological knowledge that he began his proposals for electric music. García Castillejo was a perfect connoisseur of the electric instruments that had circulated in Europe in the immediately preceding decades, such as the teremin, the Martenot waves or the Trautonium. The date of publication of his treatise La telegrafía rápida, el triteclado y la música eléctrica (1944) is usually associated with the chronology of his inventions, but the truth is that these are sufficiently earlier not to underestimate the fact.

We know that in 1933 his main invention, called "musical electrocomposer" was available. It is curious to observe how the Valencian inventor maintains the tradition of secular secrecy of his guild by recognizing that, although the guest invited to the demonstration is a highly qualified person and that, therefore, "for him it would not have been a complicated secret how it worked" (of the "electric orchestra") "the patent procedure obliged us to be sparing in our statements". García Castillejo is careful to distinguish his invention from electric instruments, such as Makhonine's violin. The key is that a loudspeaker is excited by impulses whose origin is strictly electrical. He assures:

The Valencian priest was cautious and feared piracy. Between 1939 and 1943 he registered several patents that he talks about in the above-mentioned book, but without ever showing all the details. Unfortunately, his precautions were not so necessary. García Castillejo did not achieve money, recognition or prestige during his lifetime. "Apparently, when he saw that he was ignored, he put aside his inventions and did not take them up again until his death in the eighties. Frustrated and disappointed, he locked up his machine and never spoke of it again. He devoted himself to being an ordinary village priest." After his death, his own family emptied out all the strange contraptions kept at home by his peculiar uncle and sent them to the junkyard. "They must have been the most surprised when his story was discovered," Delgado says.

One of García Castillejo's main supporters is the prestigious sound art theorist and composer Llorenç Barber, who at the end of the seventies found by chance the manual of Telegrafía Rápida in a bookstore in Madrid. Fascinated by the intellectual and visionary audacity of the old priest, Barber began a process of recovery of his memory. Among other things, he created a "Cura Castillejo" Award to recognize each year the work of the most relevant figures in the field of sound art and experimental music in Spain. Among the academic works that have been interested in this precursor of electronic music, those conducted by the research group of the Intermedia Creations Laboratory of the UPV stand out. Especially the software created by Stefano Scarani to emulate the real functioning of the device. It is inevitable to wonder what face this singular priest would put on when discovering that his inventions have managed to astonish the society of the 21st century.