Álvaro José Torrente Sánchez-Guisande is a professor of History of Music at the Complutense University of Madrid. He holds a Degree in Musicology from the University of Salamanca (1993), and a doctorate from the University of Cambridge (1997) thanks to a postgraduate scholarship from La Caixa Foundation. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London (1997-1998), which appointed him honorary fellow. He was also a professor of Musicology at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Salamanca (1998-2000). He has been a visiting scholar at New York University (1999) and Yale University (2009-2010), and between 2007 to 2017 he represented Spain in the Directorium of the International Musicological Society.

He attends regularly conferences organized by the International Musicological Society, the American Musicological Society or the Biennial Conference on Baroque Music, and has given lectures at universities such as Yale, Princeton, Harvard, UCLA, Toulouse, Cambridge or Bologna. His teaching activity revolves around theatrical music, Italian music, baroque music and musical thought.

The core of his research is the relationship between words and music, which is why he focuses almost exclusively on vocal genres. Specialized in the study of Italian opera, he has published with Emilio Casares La ópera en España e Hispanoamérica (ICCMU, 2002). He directs, with Ellen Rosand and Lorenzo Bianconi, the complete edition of Francesco Cavalli's operas for Bärenreiter Verlag and has published numerous articles on Italian opera. Concerned about the results of research reaching society, he collaborates closely with European theaters for the recovery of operas such as Cavalli's La Calisto and Ercole amante, Cesti's L'Orontea and Corselli's Achille in Sciro, for stage productions of the Bayerische Staatsoper (Munich), the Royal Opera House (London), the Nederlandse Opera (Amsterdam), the Theater Basel (Basel), the Oper Frankfurt and the Teatro Real (Madrid). He has also researched extensively on music in Spanish theater and the relationship between poetry and music, reconstructing the lost sound of sung dances of the Spanish Golden Age (jácaras, sarabandes, seguidillas and chaconnes) that have been performed in more than forty cities from a dozen countries and recorded on a CD by Raquel Andueza and La Galanía thanks to a Leonardo Grant from the BBVA Foundation. His research on the religious Christmas carol is included in numerous publications such as the Catálogo descriptivo de pliegos de Villancicos (Reichenberger, 2000-2015), the book Fiesta de Navidad en la Capilla Real de Felipe V (Fundación Caja Madrid, 2002) and the edition with Tess Knighton of Devotional Music in the Iberian World (Ashgate, 2007), which received the 2008 Robert M. Stevenson Award from the American Musicological Society. His latest book is the volume devoted to the 17th century of the Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2016).

Since 2014 he has been director of the Complutense Institute of Musical Sciences, where he directs the journal Cuadernos de música iberoamericana and the collection of music scores on Hispanic music, as well as the Master's Degree in Cultural Management of the UCM. He has directed various competitive research projects funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Community of Madrid, and since January 2019 he has directed the Didone project, funded by an ERC Advanced Grant, to investigate emotional expression in the European opera of the 17th century.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5830-183X