José de Torres has been played on NTS in shows including Tafelmusik w/ Francesco Fusaro, featured first on 30 October 2022. Songs played include "Al Clamor" Villancico De Misserere.

José de Torres Martínez Bravo (Madrid, c.1665–1670 – Madrid, 3 June 1738) was one of the central figures of the Spanish Baroque, a composer, organist, theorist and music printer whose career was bound up with the Real Capilla in Madrid and with the emergence of a more Italianate idiom in Iberian sacred music. Born in Madrid in the later 1660s (sources give slightly different dates, usually 1665 or 1670), he entered the Real Colegio de Niños Cantores of the Royal Chapel as a boy, where he received a thorough training in singing, organ and composition. Among his teachers were Cristóbal Galán in composition and members of the Xaraba–Bruna organist dynasty, and by his late teens he had already won, by competitive examination, the post of organist to the Capilla Real. He quickly distinguished himself not only as a performer but also as a pedagogue, taking on the musical direction of the choir school that had formed him.

At the turn of the century Torres found himself at the heart of the dynastic transition from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons. The accession of Philip V and the overhaul of court institutions disrupted the Royal Chapel, but once his political loyalty was clarified Torres was reinstated and increasingly entrusted with responsibility for the chapel’s day-to-day musical life, particularly after the exile of Sebastián Durón in 1706. During this period he composed both large-scale sacred works and stage music; the zarzuela El imposible mayor en amor le vence Amor belongs to this first phase of maturity and shows him negotiating between traditional Spanish theatre and newer stylistic currents. In 1716 he was promoted again to first organist, and by around 1718–1720 he had been formally appointed maestro de la Capilla Real and rector of the Real Colegio de Niños Cantores, consolidating his authority over both performance and training.

Parallel to his court career, Torres founded in 1699 the Imprenta de Música, the first specialised music press in Spain. Through this enterprise he published not only his own works but also theoretical treatises and compositions by other Spanish musicians, bringing into print repertories and pedagogical texts that had previously circulated only in manuscript or through foreign presses. His Reglas generales de acompañar became a key Iberian treatise on continuo practice and accompaniment, and later editions incorporated explicit guidance on the “Italian style” of accompanying, reflecting the changing tastes of the early eighteenth century. As a composer, his surviving works display a stylistic evolution: early pieces remain close to the dense polychoral and contrapuntal idiom of seventeenth-century Spain, while later psalms, masses and villancicos integrate Italian melodic profile, French instrumental colour and a greater reliance on orchestral writing. Contemporaries praised him as a consummate contrapuntist who nonetheless embraced modern procedures, and his music circulated well beyond Madrid, reaching Portugal, Italy and Britain. At his death in 1738 he left a reputation as the leading Spanish chapel master of his generation and as the architect of a distinctively “modern” yet recognisably Spanish sacred style.