Josep Maria Ventura i Casas

Josep Maria Ventura i Casas (Alcalá la Real (Jaén), 1817 – Figueres (Catalonia), 1875), popularly known as Pep Ventura, was a Spanish musician and composer from Catalonia who consolidated the long sardana and reformed the cobla, adding instruments to give it its current formation. He is considered the father of the modern Sardana by the profound transformation that he printed to these compositions, based on giving it greater musical extension, in the inclusion of new instruments, especially the tenora (instrument creation of Andreu Turon) from 1849 and its arrangement in the cobla, which will imitate another musical formations of this type. His performance before the Queen Isabella II of Spain in the Monastery of Montserrat together with other artists of the Renaixença consecrated him as a figure in the Catalan cultural world. Life Ventura’s family came from the Catalan region of Empordà. He was born in Andalusia, where his father, a low-ranking military officer, was assigned to participate in the operations of repression of banditry that followed the War of Spanish Independence. At the age of two years, the family moved again to Catalonia, to the Gironan town of Roses in 1819, whe